How do you feel about Time loops, dear reader? Does the monotony of the same day over and over and over bore you to tears? Or does the hope to fix your mistakes blind you to the truth that the loop is whispering?
START AGAIN: a prologue has multiple endings, and is based on a series of short comics.
Providing a swift kick in the chest and eyes full of tears, you follow Siffrin in this story in the second person, and meet friends to help you on your quest.
Defeat monsters as you learn about the loop that has trapped you in it’s claws!
With an art style taken straight out of middle-aged engravings, this game is a fun twist on the recipe-style order games that litter both the mobile market and early 2000’s PC games.
In it you can create your own recipes, help the town, and interact with the customers going through your shop.
The game offers customization of your shop and an art style that immerses you entirely in your role as town alchemist.
There are a few ways to create the ultimate evil for your DnD (or other media) game!
The Standard
Choose from the prototypes of any popular mass media for the skeleton to build your villain off of!
The common tropes in media range from Evil boss to Mass-murdering maniac. The general tropes for a simple villain include a sad backstory, a tendency for murder, and a longing to take over the world by violent means.
The way to impart your generic villain’s actions is to really expand on the scope of their evil deeds. Don’t just mention the widespread destruction, but show it and its aftereffects. Have the village that your players were going to head to be torn apart, have the most trusted villagers mention their hatred of the Big Bad, and how the villain affected them and their livelihoods.
The Foil
Examine your player characters and their motivations. Pick what drives them, and craft a villain that wants something similar, but does it in a completely different way than your player characters.
You can craft a foil from characters the player(s) already know, and they don’t even have to start as antagonists. With the foil, you can also grow their powers/abilities/fear-factor along with the players, to help with scaling their end-game “badness” level.
Worldly type
This is a villain built out of the world you have created. What would mess up the world you have created? What ideology would cause the collapse of the society you have? What is the worst case magical/supernatural/scientific scenario?
Say your world has a heavy dependency on a particular resource: the villain can hoard it, or they could seek to destroy all of it.
Hypnotizing with it’s elegant minimalism, the spray of numbers and times across the screen a soothing balm to the organized mind. It’s the base form of a puzzle game, meant to challenge you and engage you, driving you to do better than yourself, to improve times, and techniques, and flourish in one of the most classic forms of transportation: the Train on the Rail Road.
The Game engages with that base videogame urge to watch numbers go up, to streamline your new ability to the best of your power.
Upgrade your trains and railways, solve the puzzles given, and even build your own Railways. Edit and Automate your maps to create the smoothest ride anyone’s ever seen in Rail Route: Train Dispatcher Simulator.
Basic World building: Major locations and the breadcrumbs that will lead your players there.
Some starter quest for your players to introduce them to the world or situations you want them to face. This will also serve as a way to help your players figure out the beginnings of where they want to take their characters.
Your Players
Ready by session One:
Character sheets– These can be done as a group (as a “session 0”), or individually with the DM
Backstory– Informed by the world, they can intersect with those of other characters. It might be good to remind your players that the backstory is essentially a “Prologue” to the campaign.
Your Vibes
Ready by session One:
Prospective playlist for encounters: the specifics of which will be up to you. Some DMs like background music, others prefer the actual sounds that could feasibly be on the journey. For music, Video game OSTs can provide what you need. For Sounds, there are YouTube videos with things like 10 hours of ship noises, or failing that, you can look at customizable ambience sites.
Playlists helps your crew get in the mood, and can help with immersion in the story, depending on how you play it.
A free-to-play spin on the classic Robin Hood tale, Sherwood merges it with what any love about modern PvP games.
Building on the aesthetics of Middle Ages Europe, Sherwood is rendered in stylized polygons, with a wide range of customization for your player character.
Sherwood has abilities unique to Co-op, and maps in environments ranging from seaside pirate ships to nighttime forests.
I Love the way they have the tutorial text integrated into the game’s background scenery. It both blends really well while still catching the eye of the player.
Everything is very visible, but not in a way that’s jarring or takes out of the gameplay. The 3-d word effects for headshots or explosives add a fun, cartoony element. Leaderboards also appear as physical objects in the game, which make the standing feel more solid.
Overall, it’s a fun simple game, that lovers of Fortnite and Apex will enjoy, especially with friends that might be new for this genre.
Trapped on our own islands of loneliness, we seek a way out. In this game, you can sate that desperation by escaping the clutches of wilderness. I first heard about Robinson Crusoe the board game from my friend’s history professor. He, like many others, was looking for games to play at home.
One of the several draws of this board game is the ability to play by yourself. Robinson Crusoe has a Single Player option and a Multiplayer one, up to 4 players total. The Game is Published by Portal Games, and is available here.
The Game is based off of the classic book Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719.
Resource-gathering game that included cards, dice and tokens. There are many different paths to victory, which allows for replayability, especially if you have a dislike for repetitive games.
Decide on a theme, idea or concept that you want to explore.
Step 2
Decide on a Game end goal/ how one wins the game.
This is where counters come in. How many does one need to win? Are they part of winning, or do you use them to retrieve other cards?
Counter examples: Health points in Pokemon, a way to get assets in Netrunner, A way to count round victories (and bets in general) in Mahjong.
For the game I’m creating as an example, A certain number of each kind of token (Division and Romance) is needed to win the game.
Step 3
Balance in these kinds of games can be tricky.
I suggest using existing proportions from other things as a guide. For example, using the way currency is divided as a basis for card-to-token ratios. Nickels to Dimes to Quarters (20:10:4), as token type 1: token type 2: total cards, if you don’t mind having numbered tokens (or just a whole pile of them). For the Example, to figure out how much of each type of card I wanted, I played off of the average number of fic tags on any one work, and decided that balancing between 7 and 12 might do me good. Again, there’s no need to worry; play time with the game will help figure out the kinks, or even talking about the design with other potential players.
Step 4
Design the cards.
The key to games that require reading is to make sure your font is legible for all your players. Using Dyslexic-friendly fonts, and making sure that the text is at a good size, especially if your players are on the older side.
Color-coding your cards can help distinguish them. Since tokens are involved, it can help to add any symbols on the tokens to the corresponding cards.
I used excel to help me with this step!
A sampling of card names + some descriptions-in-progress
While researching Magic the Gathering (I had heard it was a fun play), I came across something else that piqued my interest: an extinct game by the name of Android: Netrunner.
At the Brain-dead hour of 4 am, the fast-paced commentary on the Netrunner U.S. Nationals 2019 The Cut was a pleasant listen. From what I’ve gathered on a brain full of sleep soup (probably better known as melatonin), I’ve gathered that it’s a combination of Magic the Gathering and Poker.
The game runs as follows: You and another player oppose eachother; one plays a corporation, and the other plays a hacker. Each team has to get 7 “agenda points”. Hackers gain them from taking the cards from the corporation, and the corporation from completing agenda card requirements.
Entertaining, or at the very least, compelling!
This game involves Resource management, and much like our own monetary system, there is some complexity. The game involves 6 kinds of tokens, most of which are double-sided to signify different things.
The Artwork is lovely as well!
For those who want a true cyberpunk experience, this is the game for you.
Since it was cancelled in 2017, there’s no chance of getting new cards, but there is an online deckbuilder/play site here.
Musicals and Music video, fan animations and artwork…. for a fantasy baseball browser game?
It’s indeed the case!
Blaseball is an absurdist online baseball game that was split into “seasons” (a la Apex Legends) with a rulebook with chunks that are redacted for the player. There’s a shop with in-game items purchased with in-game money won by backing teams, similar to various irl fantasy leagues.
The trick with this game is the unusual stats, the ability for you (as a player) to vote on actions of the teams or rules of the game, and “blessings” (random powerups) get randomly assigned to the blaseball players on the teams, like “performance enhancing demons” and “bloodlust”.
The trick is both in choice making, and knowing the players enough to decide which teams to bet on.
For fans, the joy is in the story telling, the characters, the competition, and the eagerness of waiting for your team to win.