entirely safe and fun

On Wednesday night, Sarah, John, Chris and I playtested Jason Morningstar’s beta game Fiasco, which he describes as being about “big ambition and poor impulse control.” It’s a state-of-the-art, GM-less game where the players build situations where crisis is just around the corner: think Fargo, Burn After Reading, Blood Simple, Double Indemnity. Then they wind up this tragedy engine and let it go, playing characters in an improv drama whose situation they’ve just specified. There’s usually going a simple plan, and then some complications, some backstabbing and betrayal, probably some murder. Characters often will ruefully remember that at one time, whatever they did seemed like a good idea, often as a guy with a sniffle and an extravagant collection of facial tattoos force-feeds them Ex-Lax after chaining their ankles to either side of a well-used concrete trough. Happy endings are rare.

Our game never quite got that dire — just a little pâté of murder in a tart betrayal aspic. I started up a discussion at Story Games, where there’s a summary. But I also wrote a detailed, scene-by-scene report and figured that this would be a better place for that. So, check after the jump for a story of armed foolishness on the Gulf Coast, a story of unknown paternity, unexpected tenderness, greed, revenge, and running over a guy in a wheelchair who had already been gut-shot and had his fingers broken. Fun times!

Continue reading ‘Fiasco!’ »

“Yoker” because it’s… wait for it… draft poker. Yeah, I know, you see what I did there.

You’ll need 4-7 players and a standard poker deck, probably with the jokers removed (subject to playtesting, see below). Dealer deals seven cards, face down, to each player, and sets aside the rest of the deck face-down; it does not figure into further play of the hand. Each player picks up his hand, selects one card from that hand, and puts it face down in front of himself. He then passes the remaining six cards to his left face-down, taking a hand of six from his right-hand opponent, also face-down. He picks up his new hand, selects one of the six cards in it, puts it face-down in front of him along with the first card he chose, and then passes his hand to the left.

Before players pick up their hands of five cards, there is a round of betting (not for real money, of course) that starts with the dealer, using whatever ante and limit rules make sense to your table. Any player that folds leaves the game until the next hand; they shuffle whatever cards were in their hand, plus any that were in the face-down pile in front of them, back into the deck, without revealing them. Once the betting is resolved, players pick up their hands of five, draft a card into their face-down piles, pass the four remaining cards left face-down, and continue in this way until all cards are drafted. There is a round of betting before drafting the third, sixth, and seventh card; also, a final round of betting occurs after the seventh card is selected. All players still in the game after this last round then reveal their seven face-down cards, and then score the best five-card hand they can make from their seven face-down cards, using the standard poker hand order. The winner takes the pot (tied co-winners splitting it evenly).

Why this may be more fun than other poker games: Both the “public cards” information and the variance are spread out very differently among the players. In Hold ‘Em, everyone knows about the same cards that are in their opponents’ hands; in yoker, each player knows what he passed, can guess which downstream opponents took those cards, and may be able to infer things about his upstream opponents’ hands based on what they’ve passed him. Variance is spread out too, in that I can know that I passed A♠ to my left-hand opponent (probably improving his hand) so I could take the 9♥ that gave me a three-of-a-kind.

Possible changes:

• Some rule about when you can look at your face-down cards is necessary. I’m leaning toward “any time” but maybe the right answer is “only during betting rounds” or maybe even “only at the showdown” to keep the game moving along.
• It’s possible that the game works better if the dealer button gets passed to the right after each round of betting concludes, rather than just between rounds.
• Perhaps there should be more round(s) of betting? Not sure how that would be handled yet without clashing with people’s poker intuitions too much.
• Adding one or both jokers as wild cards might or might not be fun — I am leaning toward “not”.
• The game could be expanded to eight players either by shuffling two decks together (more variance, not recommended) or drafting six cards (not as much scope for skill, æsthetickally displeasing as poker usually has five- or seven-card hands).
• Seating order matters more than usual in other poker games. Maybe there should be a rule for re-seating the players from time to time? Or switching the pass direction?
• For two- or three-player games, replace the drafting mechanism with something like Winston Draft, q.v. I think that having just two players left in the game after the third pick, when two or more have folded out, still leaves enough hidden information to have a fun game, even though those two players are just passing packs back and forth.
• Oh yeah, one other thing that would potentially be awesome: hi-lo hand scoring.

Surely it has happened to you: you’re out somewhere and need a random number, or a whole bunch of them. For me, this mostly happens at restaurants, when I would like to consult an Infallible Oracle as to which of N tasty possibilities is right for me on a given day. But maybe you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons in free-fall (this makes conventional dice less than useful). Perhaps you have found yourself diceless and kidnapped by a capricious yet mathematically sophisticated evil overlord, who will not free you until you have completed a Monte Carlo simulation by hand. I would like to help you, and if you’re that last guy I mentioned, buy you a drink.

Text “rolldice somestuff” to 41411, where somestuff is either a number or a D&D-style specification of how many dice to roll, and how many sides each die has. If you say just one number, you’ll get a reply with a random number between 1 and your number, inclusive, so sending “rolldice 6″ is like rolling a single, ordinary six-sided die; “rolldice 3″ will help you decide among the apple-glazed pork chop, the mahi-mahi on pan-fried noodles, and the five-spice steak. To use a D&D-style dice specification, put a “d” between the number of dice and the number of sides, so you would say “rolldice 3d10″ to get three random numbers between 1 and 10 (”three ten-sided dice”), or “rolldice 3d6″ to roll up your character’s stats old-school in that aforementioned free-fall role-playing scenario.

The way this was done is fairly cool, by the way: I used the free, ad-supported web service TextMarks to handle all the SMS-gateway logic, and then threw together a simple cgi script to handle the dice-rolling logic. Setting aside the time I spent figuring out that my newly-installed FTP client was set up wrong and mangling my script, the whole exercise took less than half an hour, which is nothing short of amazing – TextMarks 41411 is a marvel of simplicity.

What thing is this, pausing before a cyclopean door?

Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
- H P Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu

Available now on Etsy, courtesy of our friend Jenn — an awesome knit finger-idol of Cthulhu, sure to provide hours of sanity-ripping fun! Buy it and make regular sacrifices, and you might even be eaten last!

Previous installments in this series, taking on the Great Designer Search are here, here, here and here. Card designs are after the jump.

This week, the Great Designer Search challenged us to design a rare splashy enough to be the prerelease card for a set – and also to design the entire common run in one color for that set. They’ve definitely turned the difficulty up a notch for the final test! As a bit of background, I’ve worked with my friend John to design the first set in a block (that is, a linked super-set of three sets) where we’re trying to break out of the flavor ruts of each color. In this block, Blue, traditionally a scholarly color with lots of wizardry and scholarship, is instead a color full of magical beasts, which interact with magic not like a mage might, but rather as a moth interacts with a candle. One of the themes, basically, is that Blue is dumb. Other themes of this kind: White is evil and manipulative; Green is wise and encyclopedic; Red warriors are generals as well as berserkers; Black can cooperate and nurture, in its fashion. The first set saw a Red-centered coalition of beasts, zombies, and hound-men holding fast against a magically gifted army of powerful White-aligned soldiers and mages, while drakes and leviathans annoyed both sides by constantly being wherever magic was happening. In the second set, the mana-tide that empowered the White faction has exploded and unleashed (Blue-aligned) Lovecraftian monstrosities that will force the warring parties to re-evaluate the value of their political struggle, as they face an ontological one. Most of the really nasty Blue stuff is going to be rare, but the pre-release card, The Unnamable (with a tip o’ the hat to HPL), should give a taste. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 5’ »

Previous installments in this series, taking on the Great Designer Search are here, here and here. Card designs are after the jump.

This week’s challenge was to follow up on some designs deemed promising in previous challenges; the judges were trying to gauge applicants’ ability to build on existing work. We were given eight cards, and eight sets of designer notes (check out the article for the details) indicating the direction that a hypothetical development team would provide for additional cards. I’ll present my work in the order that the challenge asks for, and add my comments to each card in green. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 4’ »

Previous installments in this series, taking on the Great Designer Search are here and here. Card designs are after the jump.

This week, in the Great Designer Search, we’ve been challenged to create cards for the Un- sets — sets of humorous non-tournament-playable cards, traditionally in silver borders rather than the usual black or white, with fun, silly effects not usually available in regular Magic. They were to be multicolor rares, five of them, all with different color combinations but representing all five colors. Asking us to design non-regular cards is kind of like cheating. This is much harder than last week, certainly, and I don’t think I’ve succeeded on as many of my designs. That said, I’m very happy with a couple — Look! A Monkey! is a card I’ve wanted for years, and Edibility is my comment on the increasingly verbose nature of rules text for simple, intuitive operations (Un- sets are usually pretty meta, so this would be the place). I like the idea of the Border Patrol and of pink-bordered cards, but if it hadn’t been for the multicolor restriction placed on the designs, I’d totally have cracked open the “sixth color of Magic” design space for Pink, with bunnies and ducks and ponies and maybe elephants. There’s a little of that flavor in the pink-bordered Duckbunny, which is about the tenth swing I took at the problem of expressing Pinkness, but I’m still not really satisfied. The rules this week called for printable names, rather than development names, and art descriptions. The latter will be following each card’s text… Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 3’ »

The first installment of this series, in which I play along at home with the Great Designer Search, is here. Card designs are after the jump.

In this installment of the Great Designer Search, contestants were challenged to create ten cards to fill ten very specific holes in a set design. Furthermore, those designs had to work with art that had already been completed for the killed cards. The rules did permit designers to shuffle the art around among the cards. Fitting the designs to art was really hard, and I’m not sure that I did very well on it. To see each card with the art I selected, click the card’s name. I’ve saved my defense of some of my choices for the 150-word statement allowed the designers. In advance, I’d like to say that the Forms are my favorite two designs, and could be the seeds of a megacycle with old favorite Form of the Dragon. Form of the Child, in particular, is the result of a question I’ve been thinking about for a long time: how little mana can be charged for the effect “You win the game,” and how easy can the the concomitant requirements be? It is meant to be an ultimate high-wire act of deck design, and an homage to two great cards in Magic history, Form of the Dragon and Little Girl. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 2’ »

(card designs after the jump)

It’s National Novel Writing Month, and while I’d love to participate, I have this job, which takes up about half of my day each day, yadda yadda. It’s not like I have a novel that’s bursting out of me at this point. And anyway, what I admire most about NaNoWriMo isn’t the torrent of mostly cruddy books that result – it’s the expansion of the do-it-yourself ethos to media of which we normally consider ourselves mere consumers. As an old punk, I can hardly stand against the DIY tide as it rises to its annual peak. My outlet: The Great Designer Search, being held by the Wizards of the Coast, makers of Magic: The Gathering. In brief: The most ingenious feature of Magic is that new cards are released about three times a year, guaranteeing Wizards a generous stream of income and satisfying players by giving them effectively a new game to play every few months. Designing so many new cards that are fun is very difficult, and a position on the Magic design team is widely regarded among those who follow games as wildly desirable, a pinnacle of the profession. So, it’s not a Tom Sawyer fence-painting thing if they offer a design job as a prize in a contest. They’ve done so, and fifteen people are in the finals. The competition among them is playing out on the Web for our enjoyment, with a new design task being assigned to the candidates every week or two. Given the level of passion many players develop for the game, and given the high number of smart people who follow it, the Great Designer Search has attracted a large number of people who are playing along at home in a sort of National Card Design Month. I’m in! By the way, if you’ve given this a shot and want to put your results up somewhere, and they won’t fit into a comment, let me know (in a comment); I’ll host anything reasonable. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo’ »