Only One Way

A common feature in many tabletop games is that of fractional numbers.  Commonly these come in halves, but they can also frequently be thirds.  There are even games that ask you to use square roots in some situations, so you can really end up with just about any rational non-whole number.

Non-whole numbers aren't convenient to work with in games, so players are most often asked to round these numbers.  Typically, games will have a consistent method of "Up" or "Down" but I remember one 90s era game that had three different rounding methods requested within the character creation process alone:  "Up", "Down", and "To the nearest whole number".

I was never sure if the designers felt strongly about how to arrive at the desired whole number, or if they were just having a laugh.

Die Drop Automata is Knitting

I've always had a bit of a love for die-drop tables. You can do a lot of clever things with them, as they give you several dimensions of data at once and also leave room for interpretation.

When the dice fall on a chart, you have spacial information about where they have fallen, their position relative to each other, various axis of scalar values that might be the size, colour, and face-value of each die.

Art of Fading Light

 As one of my few OMGAM microgames that actually has art, I wanted to give a little attention to it.

The game is about an interstellar starship that follows most of the constraints of our current understanding of physics, though it doesn't necessarily spell all of that out in the text.

The design of the ship its self is a kugelblitz or "black hole starship" design, first imagined by Arthur C. Clarke.  Hawking Radiation from a Kerr-Newman black hole is somehow harnessed and used to propel a rather mind-bogglingly massive ship between the stars at rather immodest speeds.

Tri-fold Map to the Stars

My April 2019 micro-game submission for OMGAM also did triple-duty as a submission to the itch.io Pamphlet Dungeon Jam and Mapemounde.

This means that it is triple-packed with some rather clever things, but it also suffers quite a bit in the compromises it had to make to satisfy the criteria of length, format, and content.  Which is a bit of a shame, as I think there are some kernels of really great ideas in here.  I will probably provide an updated version in the near future, to add some traditional A4 sized PDF instruction sheets.

The basic premise of the game was inspired by Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, and by the seminal sci-fi RPG Diaspora by VSCA.  The player is in control of a tramp space craft, traveling the stars at near-light speed by virtue of some sort of unspecified exotic engine.

Art of Paper Birds

In a previous post, I said that I wouldn't unpack the specific details of the art choices that went into Paper Birds.

It has been on my mind a bit since then, so I'm giving it a bit of a treatment today.

This was for the Emotional Mecha Jam, so I wanted the art to be both martial and sad.  This was also heavily influenced (as previously mentioned) by the 1965 Nuclear War board game, so some of that Strangelove style dark satire worked its way in, too.