Tag: card game

You Reap What You Sow

January 1, 2022

I’m so glad to bring you You Reap What You Sow, a new narrative one-shot RPG that explores the uneasy alliance of three undead beings all descended from one human life. How did you die, why did you get separated, and how can you come to some kind of closure before the Reapers put you back in your grave(s)? Grab a deck of cards and 2 friends to find out!

This premise started off as a bit of a joke: if your soul got reincarnated but your body was raised by a necromancer, which one is the real you? And if your mind was harvested into a Frankenstein’s-Creature-type promethean, do we trust the soul, the body, or the brain? A real Corpse of Theseus situation. The longer I thought about it, the less it was a joke. I was already developing what would become Boneyard, a domino-based game about Reapers & Omens guarding the line between life and death and guiding lost souls into a final rest they do not fully understand, and thought that a game exploring this undead life-triangle trying to solve their potential murder before the Reapers get them could be a great way to explore that world. Marry it to a Descended from the Queen framework of cards and prompts with enough additional game added on with the Demise, Connection, and Reaper countdown clocks and voila! You Reap What You Sow came down from the ceiling slab while I shouted “It’s (technically) alive!”

This version is still in development but is 100% playable. I’ve run it with some of my people and incorporated their feedback, and we’re looking at the final game perhaps being a hybrid of book and custom card deck or exclusively custom-card-based. I always like to include the option of playing with poker cards whenever possible, as I understand both international shipping and keeping track of yet another custom deck can be a pain, but let me know if you have strong feelings one way or another regarding the future format of the game. Thanks for taking a look and may you have as many days as you want between now and when you meet the Reapers.

Midwest GameFest 2018, Pt. 4 (The Quiet Year)

November 8, 2018

This game was a first for me, a GM-less experience without specific PCs that functions as a world building exercise as well as an rpg experience.

The Quiet Year by Avery Alder follows a community after things have collapsed, in a lull between their conflict with a group known as The Jackals and before the arrival of the mysterious Frost Shepherds which ends the game on a random card during the winter. The game is available for download and can be run as a print-and-play or by buying the printed copy which has you looking fewer things up. Either way, you’ll need some paper and writing implements to plan your community. Hopefully, your community fares better than ours did…  more “Midwest GameFest 2018, Pt. 4 (The Quiet Year)” …

Heist Playtests (KantCon and Others)

August 1, 2018

I’ve had the highest number of games in the shortest amount of time recently, averaging a game of Heist every two days for a couple weeks. I’m about due for a new printing of this one, so I imagine it’s time to discuss what I’ve learned. I’ll start with a heartfelt thanks to my playtesters at KantCon, my household game nights, and visitors staying with us. I promise there’s a plan in development to make it easier to play a game if you are further than a short drive away from Kansas City.

The game itself is a card game about team and resource management where you take on the role of an international criminal competing with rivals to steal the most interesting things in the shortest amount of time. You hire a crew, buy gear, and play event cards from your hand (all of which are resource cards and can be spent as money) to make it easier to attempt one of the jobs face-up in the middle of the table. Each job has a number of complications which add to the difficulty, but can also add to the reward if completed successfully. The items themselves are a collection of (mostly real) objects stolen throughout the modern age, including famous works of art, classic cars, national icons, rare collectibles, and some local jobs like corner stores and small banks. By matching your crew’s skills to the jobs, you can avoid taking heat, which is the attention of the authorities. Gain too much heat on your crew and someone is going to jail. The player with the most prestige at the end of the game wins, but rivals don’t know if you are hiding extra prestige cards in with your resource cards. Victory is not a foregone conclusion just by having a lot of points showing. more “Heist Playtests (KantCon and Others)” …

Writing Heist

February 11, 2018

I pushed through and wrote a new card game in about a week (ignoring years of pondering the idea and sketching out some earlier builds that are lost to time). Rulebook one day, and then about a third of the cards each over the next few days. It helps that I sit on this stuff for a while, because it means I’ve already sorted out the flow of the game in advance. This one, however, had some help that previous ones did not: It came to me in a dream.

Literally. I hadn’t pondered doing a faux-70s Ocean’s 11 heist card game until I woke up one morning and jotted down some notes from a vivid dream where I was in a friend’s garage and we were playtesting my new game. There was a card table covered in cards and a Twister-style vinyl playmat where we had just finished a getaway driver minigame after one of us completed a heist where other players were the pursuing cops and we had escaped successfully. We debated the merits of the getaway sequence, whether it added to the overall game or brought the pace down, how it interacted with the existing heat mechanic for drawing attention to your crew… It was very specific and my dream friends had a lot of good thoughts on what worked and what didn’t. By the end of the dream I was confirming my hunch that the getaway sequence was either a separate game or better served as an optional expansion or add-on than being integrated with the base experience of managing your criminal network.

I still fight a bit with myself as to where or how this game fits into my existing worlds, which doesn’t exactly feature a Batman: The Animated Series-meets-Archer sort of faux historical look at crime and the international masterminds who commit it. I considered moving it forward to fit with Cabal’s dystopian cyberpunkness, but it got real techy and didn’t fit well enough. I considered shifting it backward to competing steampunk air pirates in Steelheart Skies, but that felt even more forced. Ultimately, it seems to have settled somewhere in the orbit of my Captain Excelsior golden-era comic book setting (created for a murder mystery, complete with professional comic book art) and that works for me. We’ll see next week how it plays and if dream-logic translates to game logic. Who knows, there might even be an Incredibles-influenced supers vs. criminals playset next.