Checking In

You ever check the date and realise that more than a month has slipped by and you didn't even notice?

Well, in the last month I've mostly been plugging away at Kickstarters old and new. For the most part I've been doing layout and last minute design changes to Golf Quest, our upcoming dexterity based comedic golf RPG. It's been a learning experience for sure and I think the biggest lesson I've learned is that I need to hire layout artists for some projects!

Apart from that, I've been playtesting some of the games in the Death & Pottery Collection (which my partner says is a terrible name but naming things is hard so nyeh!) and having a great time with them!

Our Once Proud House continues to split my sides whenever we play it and in a dozen playtests all that's needed changed are a few card effects. Most recently we played a duo game of it where we played as the awful sons of the emperor in Dune. Trouble was, I've never read or seen Dune and my friend had only seen the original film once when he was a kid so it was more Dune-ish and involved being gross-nasty and making mathematically perfect slurs for orphans.

I also got the chance to playtest Mistorical Museum which is an improv party game where you grab items from around the house or place you're playing in and act like they're historical artefacts whose origin and purpose you roll dice to determine. The goal of the game is to have the other players vote for your object as the Main Exhibit and interestingly enough, this absolutely ruined the experience.

I'd designed Mistorical Museum like that because I was trying to capture the feeling of games like Funemployed or Superfight which are competitive and have a winner but in doing so I'd poisoned players against doing good improv. There was no incentive for players to "yes, and" each other, no reason for them to give the pitching player something to build off of or to help them out. When it came time to ask questions, the other player(s) would be encouraged by the mere presence of a winner or loser to try and downplay the comedy of the pitching player's object.

For the second round, we completely scrapped the winner and loser mentality from the game and focused more on working as a team. We had to decide together which exhibits would go where and this subtle change made the game actually really fun. Suddenly we were all contributing to the artefacts' stories. A fancy leather bound journal supposedly owned by Da Vinci? Did it contain anything unusual? Becomes Da Vinci's fanfiction about himself and a number of other Renaissance painters and sculptors fighting crime and getting into some AO3 territory.

This was an amazing feeling and it's why playtesting is so important. On paper, Mistorical Museum worked and I'm sure many people would still have enjoyed it but seeing it in action and feeling the effects of the rules myself gave me the chance to turn it into the sort of game I want to play.

On top of that, I've finally returned to circus school and kung fu! It's been 2 months since my accident and I can finally take ⭐moderate⭐impact and I can't stress enough how much being able to move around and go for walks again has helped my mood and my creativity.

So, yeah, sort of a ramble but I wanted to write something seeing as it's been more than a month! I should have Golf Quest and maybe some other goodies for you lovely lot later this month :)

Thanks again for all your support!

~ Anna