One of the other participants in the game jam I joined produced a Game Boy adventure called OuttaTime. You can try it yourself in your browser here: https://jhample.itch.io/outta-time. It’s a short game—only two levels—but given the jam was only a month long, that’s still quite an accomplishment. I finally completed the second level and this the game this morning: The story line is that the Time Crystal has been shattered into six fragments, which you must reunite. Each level is split into two half levels, one half a dinosaur-infested past and the other a high-tech future. A simple pres ..read more

In the Star Fleet Battles facebook group there's a guy named Larry who has been using a laser cutter to make pretty decent looking flat minis. Dig it: The hexagons are custom bases, presumably the two will be connected by some sort of dowel rod. Jim Stevenson's Starship Schematics Database ought to be chock full of image files that could be used for this sort of thing. And of course you could do flat upright D&D figures this way, rotating the view to the front or side rather than top. You'd just need good black and white art ..read more

..read more

So the other day I stumbled across a paper in arXive called "Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete." I don't know enough about either MtG or computer science to get more than 11% of the gist of the piece, but some of you might be interested in the cards needed to turn a game of Magic into a Turing Machine: Of course, if you can use MtG as a Turing Machine, that leads me to ask the obvious question: Can you run Doom on it ..read more

There are plenty of times when transparent mechanics are good for roleplaying games. For example, I generally like to give the dice chances for any escapade not encompassed by the rules. I also usually prefer single die throws over bunches of dice for a lot of resolutions mechanics because there are plenty of players who find it difficult and/or tiresome to estimate their chances of rolling a 14 or lower on 4d8 or whatever. Mechanical transparency is one of the key virtues of many universal resolution systems. (But not all such systems. James Bond 007 from Victory Games has a pretty robust uni ..read more

There's a newly-formed gaming/education group at work and they recently hosted a game jam on itch.io. Although the organizers of the jam were mostly interested in video games, board games were also accepted. So I made a science fiction strategy boardgame thingy for 6-16 players and a referee.  Assuming it works as intended, it ought to make a decent convention game for cons with 4 or 5 hour slots. You can download the board, components, and rules here ..read more

So Daniel Kast's Starmada has a new, 30th anniversary edition out. You can get the pdf from WargameVault (the wargame store of the DriveThru people) or print, print-with-map-and-counters, or pdf from publisher Majestic Twelve Games.  This is my favorite spaceship combat wargame. If you like hexed-based space combat with just enough complexity that running multiple ships is challenging but not overwhelming, then give it a shot. Maybe the best part of the game is the ship construction system, which is a tad more complex than BattleTech* or Car Wars, but still easy enough that when I bought ..read more

..read more

  ..read more

If you've ever wondered why I don't update much anymore, or why I don't run an open game anymore, or why I mostly hang out at the LotFP facebook group, or why Zak is still my friend even though a lot of folks seem super keen on shunning him: https://medium.com/@DrWeisman/the-worst-people-you-have-never-met-or-what-i-learned-during-a-four-year-academic-study-of-online-7da8b9065643 ..read more