You're cleaning out your notes app when you find a note from 3 months ago consisting of a single bold line "Solo Journalling Wargame??". The three of you are 6 hours into a 10 hour road trip and you're convinced you've cracked legible time travel mechanics for tabletop roleplaying games. You wake up slightly bleary eyed after a night out, only to check your DMs to see an 117 message long conversation between yourself and your friend on the topic of a "word association based initiative system" containing everything but the key details of what that actually means. 

Everyone has their own trail of discarded ideas and unfinished projects. Concepts that you were so excited about at the time but now have no idea what you were even talking about or what you ever thought was workable about them in the first place. Well, it's time to figure that out.

The New Year, Old Ideas jam is a month long game jam hosted by amber autumn faebrooke and Violet Henderson focused on honoring all those crazy half-baked ideas that you've abandoned over the years. What counts as crazy and half baked or what counts as 'abandoned' is up to you, but we really encourage you to work on something you really didn't think you'd ever look at again.

Requirements

The idea could be one you spent days agonizing over until you decided it wasn't working, or it could be a single line you scribbled down before falling asleep. It might be a joke you ended up taking seriously or it might be a serious idea that was just too ambitious for where you were as a designer at the time. The important things are:

• it's a game
• made by you
• within the time period of the jam
• based on an old idea you abandoned

Other than that, go wild!

Awards

We won't be giving out physical prizes for this game jam, but we will be awarding a series of award winners at the end of the jam. You can put it on your resume. Rather than judging the 'best' games, we want to encourage the spirit of experimentation and blue skies thinking. Instead, we have five different awards your game can be eligible for:

• Most left-field idea
• Most original combination of ideas
• Most affective core system
• Best writing
• Best visual design

These categories will be judged by the two game jam cohosts. We have (mostly) non-overlapping social circles, so in order to reduce bias, when someone one of us knows submits a game, the other one of us will be the one to evaluate that game. We will try to announce the winners within a week of the game jam closing, but it may depend how many submissions we get!

Note that in order to be eligible for an award, we need access to a free copy of your game, either through the page itself or through our emails. If you don't want to give away free copies of your game, understandably, we are happy to delete the files you send after judgement is complete, or you're welcome to submit a game to the jam without making it eligible to win an award. 

Community 

We lack the resources to effectively moderate a discord, but we intend to monitor the community posts actively. We encourage you to use the tag #newyearoldideasjam when posting about your game! we'll be checking in on that tag on twitter, bluesky, and tumblr.

For any questions, you can reach us at ambs@hamzardo.com or violethhenderson@gmail.com.