Roll Some Dice

So hey, this happened: My Game Chef entry, The Eleventh Hour , is a Finalist . Pretty cool! I was more than a little surprised to discover that, to be honest -- not because I'm not proud of my work, but because seriously, there were 96 other entries this time around. And 15 of them were in Italian! How'm I gonna compete with that? Apparently, the answer is "Somehow." The bell pepper symbolizes games. Anyway, I'm pretty psyched about this turn of events, because it means I've made the Finals three years in a row now, which certainly feels like a feat. I kinda don't really count 2010's Action City , which may be unfair, but the Finals for that year didn't even involve any peer review or any real critical process. Still, I did get positive feedback about it, so I'm not dismissing it altogether. I do not expect to win, nor do I care one way or the other about winning (honestly!). There were a ton of really interesting, innovative entries t...

A number of readers wrote in about Game Chef , and both of them asked, "Hey, when does the next Game Chef start?" The answer: Last week! Next question: When's the submission deadline? Answer: About 90 minutes ago! Yeah, sorry I didn't mention anything about it until now. Honestly, I've just been busy with stuff, including my own Game Chef entry, and ended up not getting around to posting about it in time. So... I hope you found out about it on your own and submitted something, because I was useless in that regard. Anyway, the theme was "Last Chance," in honor of the imminent demise of The Forge . I'm sure it'll produce a lot of lighthearted, fun little games. Like my game. This is a game about four cultists working in the shadows to bring about the end of the world. The Grand Convergence – an alignment of heavenly bodies that only occurs once a millennium – approaches, and with it a rare opportunity to call forth an otherworldly e...

Man, this is exactly the kind of awesome design contest for which I absolutely do not have the time. The Game Crafter  is pleased to announce the RPG Challenge! We want you to design a role-playing game in the form of a board or card game. It doesn’t matter whether you build a dungeon crawler like Descent, or more of a story telling game like Betrayal at House on the Hill, or a funny little card game like Munchkin; all that matters is that it takes the form of a role-playing game. It also doesn’t matter whether your game requires a game master, or if the adventure is random, or if there are predefined adventures.  I've used The Game Crafter in the past for Honeymoon: The Game , a little something I made for my wife to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. (It turns our New Zealand honeymoon into a game, using our honeymoon photos as cards.) But I've always wanted to take advantage of what the site has to offer on a grander scale -- a full-on boardgame or card game or ...

Jonathan Walton finally (and I say "finally" with all due respect) got around to the last batch of Stage One entries and had nothing but good things to say about Half of Everything Is Luck . Things like: "This game is straight-up terrific." "Mike knocked this one out of the park." "[One particular thing in the game] is hilarious." "[Smells like Pierce Brosnan.]" Anyway, modesty forbids me from any more self-aggrandizement, but you can read the whole thing here .  Upshot is, Half of Everything Is Luck "definitely gets an invitation" (oops, one more nugget of self-aggrandizement!), so yay me, yay the game, and so on. Thanks Jonathan!

I have to say I'm pretty blown away by the response to Half of Everything Is Luck . My last post on it had a whopping six viewers . That's the equivalent of everyone who follows this blog reading it once! It's pretty gratifying when you can reach 100% of your audience. Anyway, I've made a couple post-deadline improvements to the game based on feedback from one person, and I figured I'd post 'em here for anyone who's interested. And really, even if only half of the people who read that last post are interested, that's still three people -- enough to play a multiplayer game of Goldeneye ! The mind reels. So here they are. Ammo Instead of spending Rounds and tracking Ammo Reserves, every weapon has a row of check boxes and a set of coins (pennies, nickels, or dimes). The boxes represent its Clip. Every time you roll a 1 on a Shoot die (regardless of whether it's “kept,” if Aiming), check a box. When the last box is checked, the Clip is empty, an...

After doing some grueling research tonight -- plugging the N64 back in and playing Goldeneye 007 to refresh my memory -- my entry for Stage One, Half of Everything Is Luck , is done. I agonized for some time over the name, and nearly settled on one of several really bad puns, but playing the Facility reminded me of the dialogue at the end between Bond and Trevelyan (which the movie ripped off word for word, BTW). "Half of everything is luck" seems like a pretty accurate summation of this game. I've seen people posting about the layout they've done for their entries, and my reaction has been, "Man, layout ? For reals? I'm just trying to squeeze everything on the page here." So it's not pretty, and it's not fancy, and it's probably wordier and crunchier than most submissions, but I'm willing to bet it's one of the only one-person games made for this thing, so that's something, anyway. Honestly, it never even occurred to me to m...

Well, hello blog! Yikes, it's been over a month. I hate when that happens. Anyway, Jonathan Walton -- Master Chef of  Game Chef for the past few years -- has a game design contest going right now that's captured my attention and imagination. The challenge: Make an "analog" version of the first stage or level of a video game. The whole thing has to fit on one sheet of paper, front and back, and the deadline's this Sunday, the 6th. The first thing I thought of was Goldeneye N64 , because some part of my brain is constantly thinking about Goldeneye , so that's what I'm doing. Goldeneye 's first "level" -- or map, anyway -- is Arkhangelsk Dam , a rather straight-up Point-A-to-Point-B mission, which makes it pretty well-suited for this kind of thing. Don't just stand there! I'm representing the map itself with three sheets of college-ruled notebook paper, corresponding to the Drop Point , the Tunnel , and the Dam itself. Thes...

Wow! Has it been well over a month since I posted something here? That's crazy. Sorry about that, folks. Ironically, I've been doing plenty -- I just haven't been talking about it. Have to change that. So last Friday, Ryan Macklin  announced a "flash" game design challenge, in the style of Chuck Wendig 's regular flash fiction challenges on Terrible Minds . Write a playable game in 500 words or less! I like it. The deadline's tomorrow (Friday the 23rd). I immediately had the impulse to do something for it, but I had no idea what and didn't really end up giving it much thought until yesterday. See, earlier this week, UC Irvine reclaimed the Guinness world record title of Largest Dodgeball Game , with 4,488 players. (I'm a UCI alum, so you can suck it, previous record-holder  Rochester Institute of Technology . You don't even get a link!) I was out at dinner last night and saw a UCI student wearing a T-shirt from the event, and something c...

Congratulations to the winners of this year's Game Chef ! They are: All's Well That Ends As You Like It , by Jennifer Hardy and Matthew Mazurek Forsooth! , by Sam Liberty and Kevin Spak ("Sam Liberty" is pretty obviously a superhero's mundane secret identity, right?) Master Chef Jonathan Walton and Professor Walton had some great feedback on Globe Records -- much appreciated! Looking forward to next year, and somehow having more time to do it.

Hey, Globe Records made the finals for Game Chef 2011! And there are only six of us (out of 66), which is kinda crazy. The other five finalists are: Daughters of Exile  by Steve Darlington Your Father wishes you to marry. You wish to decide for yourself. Cut a path between duty, love and rebellion. All’s Well That Ends as You Like It by Jennifer Hardy & Matthew Mazurek Dueling, wooing, vows kept or forsworn, drunkenness, thievery, costumes, identical twins, rightful rulers, virtuous innocents, ghosts, and much more. Forsooth!  by Sam Liberty & Kevin Spak Players each control a small cast of characters to improvise a play of Shakespearean scope without a GM or storyteller. A Midsummer Night’s Scheme by Nat Barmore (woodelf) w/ Caitlin Doran Exiled faeries compete to prank mortals they care for, in order to regain favor at the Summer Court. The Lost Years  by Matthew Nielsen A Game of Shakespeare and time travel. Characters cast out of the Bard’s plays...

So! Part of Game Chef this year is a peer-review process, which I like. Everyone's assigned four games to read and comment on, and then recommend one of them to advance on to the next stage, which I believe is just straight-up judging, judged by judges. I'm going to do my peer reviewing here so I can have it all in one place and not worry about being long-winded, in case it goes that way. I'm also going to try to segment my reviews in terms of how well each game addresses the theme (Shakespeare) and makes use of the ingredients (Daughter, Forsworn, Exile, Nature), as well as things I like and things about which I am not sure . Wish me luck in sticking to this plan! There will be many parentheticals, apparently! A Midsummer Night's Scheme Nat Barmore (with help from Caitlin Doran, whose idea it was in the first place) What do I like? I like that this seems to be (or could be) a secondary side play happening concurrently with Midsummer Night's Dream . Nat...

All right. For those who want to check out Globe Records , it's available online . Oh -- I want to stress again that I am not a graphic artist. Please excuse the... graphic art.

Thanks to an hour or so of downtime in the Sails Pavilion at Comic-Con yesterday, I was able to finish Globe Records this morning. I think. I'm not going to post it just yet. The Game Chef deadline isn't until tomorrow morning, so I'm going to let it sit for the day and take a look at it sometime tonight. We'll see if it still seems "finished" then. I'm pretty pleased with it, though, plus I have about 500 words to spare, so that's pretty good. I guess I can consider that buffer to be filled by the words on the character sheets, though, just to be fair. Somehow, I managed to make those 2,500 words 15 pages long. Incidentally, I wrote this game using LibreOffice , which is by no means a viable replacement for Microsoft Word . LibreOffice isn't so much a word processor as a word platformer. Just about everything I did in it felt like a challenge. Boo. Anyway. Back to Comic-Con for one last day!

Seriously, this is the worst game-designing time of the year. Even with nothing else hanging over my head, Comic-Con always takes it out of me. Then there's FATE Kerberos demanding my attention, along with a few other non-game-related commitments. Look, I realize these are first-world geek problems, but still. Bear with me. Anyway, one good thing about Comic-Con colliding with Game Chef is that standing in line for panels gives me a chance to take notes (by hand, with a pencil, on paper -- barbaric!) on this here game of mine. I'm pretty confident I can get it put together tomorrow and sent out Sunday night sometime. The mechanics have been tightened up, streamlined, and re-focused on creating good stories. In my early enthusiasm for a game in progress, I find I often have a hard time separating "fun and meaningful mechanics" from just "fun and random mechanics," but today the distinctions became clearer, and I think it shows in the design. Maybe there...

Hey, I think I might actually finish this thing. It's essentially done: All the characters have all their bits (with, like, one or two exceptions), the un-playtested rules look solid and fun, I have 12 soap-opera storylines broken down into their three stages of development... it's surprising how far it's come. But one thing I've noticed is that even with six characters, it feels a little sparsely populated for a soap. These are all primary cast; they need some supporting cast, too. So each character now has three Supporting Cast. One's already filled in, but the other two are left blank for the player to define during play. You don't even have to fill them both in if you don't want to. I'm not entirely sure what mechanical purpose they'd serve, but I'm inclined to treat them just like Vows, Natures, and Modes. Each starts rated at 1, and etc. Instead of picking one Vow, one Nature, and one Mode, you'd pick one entry from each category. S...

So! My idea for this year's Game Chef is a bunch of characters from Shakespeare's plays thrown together in the milieu of a hip record label ( Globe Records ) in the early '90s. Here are some of my notes (posted earlier on The Forge , in case you saw them there). We have: Rick , head of the label: A schemer to the core, Rick didn’t get where he is today without pissing a few people off. His office is at the top of the label’s towering office building in LA. He has a wife (name pending), but is having an affair with Lady MC, the label’s biggest recording artist and Othello’s sister. Lady MC , talent: A hip-hop star having an affair with Rick and, by extension, manipulating Globe Records. Specifically, she’s trying to ensure that she isn’t shown up by Juliet. But she doesn’t want the label to drop her altogether -- as long as she’s with Globe, Lady can control her career. Juliet , talent: A rising star on her second marriage. She married her first husband (Othello’s bro...

Game Chef 2011 starts July 15th! Stay alert! Trust no one! Keep your dice handy! The timing on this is awesome, because it ends the Monday after Comic-Con .   So there'll be a good chance I won't finish on time, but at least it'll give me something to talk about at Gam3rCon .

Over at Gamish Designer , Jonathan Lavallee's hosting a game design contest that's caught my eye. The challenge is to essentially make an role-playing, card, or board game out of a Winter Olympics sport in the style of Blood Bowl . And sure, maybe I'm taking the easy way out with Die-Athlon , but I think I have a solid concept, so I'm running with it. It's basically a three-man team biathlon, but instead of shooting at targets, you're shooting at die-athletes on the other teams. Ultimately, the goal is to be the first team to have someone cover a certain distance -- say, 20 km -- but wounding an enemy die-athlete slows them down, and killing them... well, that really slows them down. Every round, you have a choice between Skiing and Shooting; one earns you meters, while the other is shooting guys. Anyway, it's obviously in a rough state so far, and I may go with something else entirely -- who wouldn't love a blood-soaked version of curling ? -- but...

Here's a different kind of RPG design contest from  Emily Care Boss : Starting January 1, 2011, you are invited to to make a role playing game for one person to play on their own. There are several challenges that you can choose among to guide the direction for your game. Each game submitted will get overall feedback, as well as input from the judge who created the challenge. More info  on her blog .

A while ago, I exhorted you, dear reader, to help me almost win Game Chef 2010. And with your tireless support, I'm pleased to announced that Action City! did, indeed, almost win. Second place! The most almost-winningest place there is! If you playtested Action City! , thanks for making it happen. You kept the dream of alive and brought us to the very brink of victory. The top five entries, in order of playtest sessions: "Never to Die" by James Mullen "Action City!" by Mike Olson "Chronicles of Skin" by Sebastian Hickey "Long Shot" by Nick Wendig "Deserting Paradise" by Joe Mcdaldno Congrats to James Mullen and everyone else involved. I'm going to continue to work on Action City! just as soon as March rolls around.