itch.io

I should save the rest of the art for the full release, but here's a preview because I can't help myself - the full page for the Playbooks illustration.

How silly! I'll update tonight.

Update: File replaced! Thank you for letting me know.

I appreciate the kind words! If you do end up drawing, I would love to see what you put to the page. Art creating art is a special thing.

Hi J! With the jam ended, we're building the bundle. Can you jump over to this link and approve Moon for inclusion into the bundle? There should be a purple bar at the top!

Hey Templar! With the jam ended, we're building the bundle. Can you jump over to this link and approve Merchant Quest Starter for inclusion into the bundle? There should be a purple bar at the top.

Great work!

Hi folks!

Time is WILD, isn't it? But here we are, in the last leg of the jam. How's it going? Drop a comment here, or jump on the Discord server and share your progress towards the finish line. 

If you see that moon falling and don't know if you have time to pull it together, consider...

• Scaling down by cutting out a few ideas or mechanisms.
• Pivoting to an existing system instead of something completely new.
• Using community resources for formatting: templates, free art assets, zine makers, helpful friends.
• Publishing a beta version that you'll keep tweaking after the jam (or not! the world is unfinished; why should your art have to be?).
  

If you're finished up or jammed out, maybe leave a nice comment on one of the clever, cool submissions that our community has already sent out into the world.

See you all in -7 days-,
Kurt

Hey folks! If you're interested in seeing this played live, my friends and I recorded an actual play that you can see here.

Teeny tiny review: great prompts, excellent use of the art piece that inspired the game, and a nice compact package. But I'm a total sucker for fairies!! A perfect fit for us.

Jackson Tegu makes the best games, and this is no exception. I've spent several evenings covering my table in far, far too many swords.

wow excuse me! It's the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen??

Positively! Haha. Playbooks, hacks, adventures or whatever; all in the spirit of creation. 

I'm building out  a GM-less system that I'll probably call The Hourglass Sings. Players take turns either describing activity in a community or advancing the protagonist's actions. Looping time structure, healing as a theme. Going really on the nose if I can.

The only mechanic I'm 100% sure on right now is that when time resets, all players hum together in a small ritual.

My friends and I did a live playthrough of Broken Cities last night! If anyone wants a peek at what the game looks like when played, we had so much fun with it -- I'll link the full stream here.

Thanks to Côme for making such a cool game! (Also, hi Côme!)

Totally fair. The curious thing about Wanderhome is that almost the whole game is driven by the internal struggles of the characters, which means that play can look a little opaque from the outside.  If I revisit this piece I might include a rumour table or something else to stir some intrigue and plant some plot seeds.

Thanks for reading, Paul. :)

A beautiful, subtle game that gets quickly to the heart of the places that inspired it.

Merrilee's agenda is to quietly turn all games into the larpiest versions of themselves.

Wanted to share a quick thanks to the devs. It was lovely getting to revisit the world of Celeste, and seeing it reimagined as a 3D platformer was a delight. Big grin on my face when the Sunshine-style a capella came in.

Really above and beyond for an anniversary celebration. Thanks folks.

You know what would be really unnecessary? An online playsheet for this game in the style of vintage bowling scorecards to track your bowlers' scores and write down their names and descriptions.

But uh, whoops, it exists now. Instructions on how to use this sheet are in the top-right corner. (Note that it automatically tallies your total scores, so you only need the one to two boxes for the frames.)

IT'S LIKE YOU WERE THERE FOR PLAYTESTING. (He was not, folks.)

To claim that this can be played with Magic cards, I needed to try it out. I reached out to my brother-in-law and was like, hey, do you have any Magic: the Gathering cards we can playtest this with? And he was like, sure friend.

I have never played Magic. When he came over with a "black mana deck," I didn't know what it meant until every card was named "flesh eater" or "rotting corpse". 

Of course our magical girl ended up being at a school for young necromancers. It actually ruled. So go live out your gnarly necromantic magical girl dreams.

Colossal has a lot to say about how we seek meaning from the symbols and images of our daily lives, and it does so with a magic so subtle that you might not see it at first read.

I played Colossal with a friend over lunch using a standard deck of 52 cards, and you would be shocked how much can be pulled out of even that. Our story felt important, and the community was full of life and character.

The game itself is very nice to look at, and the instructions are both evocative and clear. Would recommend it to anyone.

The official Big Dog, Big Volcano playlist link to The Littlest Hobo theme song.

Two things:

1. If anyone is looking to play this game online, I've developed a spreadsheet you can use for your friend group. You can find it and make a copy here. (Shared with permission from Sasha.)

2. A  friend I played this with said: "[W]e've played a lot of games, that I love -- I think this might be the best designed 3 player game that we've played." Reader, this friend has played my 3 player exclusive game. And they're completely right. Kenzie's project kicks ass.

Hey folks! If anyone is looking for a way to play this game online, please feel free to use this character keeper I made for Google Sheets.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UV0fcGJw-ZuWCLKOfrSJMKKWsbJZ3SUFA5NSzd8Y...

If anyone would like to play this online, feel free to use this character keeper I made. It has a tab for each character that auto-populates their stats, and a GM page for notes, NPCs, etc.

(Shared with Josh's blessing.) 

Deftly woven art.

It takes a delicate hand to create an epistolary game with an overarching plot structure, and that's doubly true when you concoct as many pathways as Kay has in Your Friend in Witchcraft. With three (different!) playbooks for each player to choose from, Kay has created an asymmetric game that gives all characters opportunities to be interesting, vulnerable, and fallible.

I can heartily recommend Your Friend in Witchcraft to anyone who likes quiet connections, emotionally intelligent stories, and a little bit of magic.

If anyone needs a character keeper, feel free to save a copy of this one I made for some friends:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K8awIVKQ-8xx9qG6Snh8kqu2no-90-twn0nLGW6i...

As simple as it is intuitive, this improv-inspired "oracle" would be a great addition to pretty much any game. Clean, smart, evocative.

A quiet larp, an inside joke, a lyric game, an invitation. Beautiful in construction and concept.

I am handing you a pamphlet.

What a cute game! I like that this could feasibly provide legitimately tasty drinks, in addition to just being a party game lampooning elaborate coffee orders. 

As someone who also worked at a place serving coffee, I 100% understand the urge to start messing with the add-ins when you get bored. :) Welcome to itch! Good job!!

It's beautiful, it's raw, it's driven, it's niche, it's open, it's relatable, it's distant. It's also going to get whatever I can give it for the algorithm to boost it for your eyeballs, so please forgive my unasked for comment.

Ian has written a collection of poems that are sometimes about games and sometimes games themselves. The whole chapbook is fresh, candid and just cool as hell. If you like writing and games, I feel like you pretty much have to read this one.

What is there to say about Fiasco that hasn't already been said? It's the definitive game of self-inflicted catastrophe. It's the king of drama, the queen of failure, and the jester watching it all burn down. If you haven't had the chance to try this landmark game of narrative storytelling, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. There are literal years of content for the classic game, waiting for you to explore it.

I could talk about Fiasco all day -- and I have -- but the bottom line is that Fiasco stands the test of time as a thrilling celebration of storytelling.

This is great. I love the way you've mashed the genres together into a big campy romp -- definitely leans into the pulpy vibe of L&F in the best way.

Favourite details: The names are fantastic, for starters. "Billy Oblivion" and "Elijah Moon" are both pretty incredible. I also love that everyone has a "loyal mechanical steed," and that the goals are a great mix of western and romance. Honestly, all the little details are great -- "Bessie the laser cow" is particularly campy and delightful.

Maybe next time: The body text is just a liiiittle tricky for me to read. It might just be me though! I really dig the aesthetic you pulled together, and I can see why you went with the style you did; it does feel like a great midpoint of western and spacey. It might also be nice to have a little passage about player consent if there's PC-PC romance situations? You don't have a lot of space to work with, but it would be a nice nod to safety tools!

Thank you for sharing your game!

First off -- this game made me finally look up the titular video, and it's so much worse than I expected. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, hahaha. So, the game:

Favourite details: I like the extra steps you took to establish a few things, my favourite of which being that diversity of body type and gender are welcome on the team. I also like that you explained the GM's role! You would be surprised how many folks leave it to the reader to puzzle out. The Play section is also a great overview of how to do narrative roleplay! I feel like the tips out outlined could apply to (and enhance) a lot of games, and you did it with very little space.

Maybe next time: For me, it feels a little counter-intuitive that success is rolling under the stat, but a critical success is the highest possible roll! I imagine this wouldn't be a problem for a lot of folks, but I can see myself getting my wires crossed in-play.

Thank you for sharing your work!

Thank you! It's been great getting a chance to explore all the ideas people have brought forward; so many interesting games. 

And you're bang on with the feedback - - a printer friendly version is high on my priority list for this post-jam, and early drafts mapped out fae prompts. The former I'll definitely do; the latter I'm mulling over. People have created much more interesting fae in playtesting than I could have imagined, haha. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my piece and provide such a thoughtful response! 

Gotcha. Joke went right over my head, haha. 

I'm impressed that this jam managed to conjure up multiple office sim games! Hahaha.

Favourite details: The semi-cooperative game state is an interesting twist to put in. Because like, why would devils help each other? Haha. So the Scheming rule makes a lot of sense. I dig the Hot Couture table for character building, and the 666 rule is a nice touch.

Would be nice to have: A liiiittle more of an idea what conflict looks like in the game! I think in another setting you'd be good to go, but it would take a lot of spice for me to convince people to play a game that looks like their workday -- haha. So a few more hellish details about what you might encounter would be a welcome addition.

Thanks for sharing your work!

Super cool! I like that the same bones of Pocket Adventure are on display here, but with a fully-integrated theme surrounding it. The use of REDACTED here is just delicious. And just generally speaking, the document is beautifully formatted and put together.

What a fun idea. :)

Favourite details: I like that, contrasting the Jenga system of resolution, this tower is expected to fall regularly. I also like that players have agency over how ambitious to be! A little strategy and risk management on top of pure stacking makes for a much more well-rounded system than there would be otherwise.

Would be nice to have: Some clarification on d4s would be great! How could anything be stacked on a d4?! Hahaha. Maybe I'm just not very talented, lol.

I really like this! The card-driven and horror combo makes me think of Murderous Ghosts, which is good company for a game to be in.

Favourite details: Well, the title is great, first off. Really gives off the gothic kind of vibe that suits the story well. Shout-out as well to the beautiful job you've done with the formatting and public domain art assets; the game is clean and well put together. Mechanically, I really dig the possible Joker draw (you must betray the party) -- what a fun wrench to throw in, especially given the low chance it will happen. The resolution system makes sense to me too! The way you've parceled it out into different card groups seems like a good way to resolve skills and abilities.

Would be nice to have: I dig the Act 1 / 2 / 3 thematic formatting, but it did throw me off a little. Read as written, it kind of implies that setting and character creation take a full two thirds of the game! And like, maybe that's the case, but I would guess that's not what you had in mind.

Anyway -- again, really solid work here. It's been fun exploring your submissions to the jam, and I'll be sad to not see more of them in the ocean of games I have yet to wade through! Haha.

Nice to see a solo submission to the jam!

Favourite details: The two roll resolution is nice! I like that the player has the choice to gamble and improve their chances, and I like that the Bear table has mechanically distinct challenges. I don't envy you for the true story element of this, haha.

Would be nice to have: I feel like it would be cool for there to be tangible progress towards escape, even if you fail the helicopter roll -- maybe the target number lowering after a failed attempt? Just a thought -- it works as it is, and if the uncertainty of rescue is part of the thematic experience, I can dig that.

Thank you for sharing your work!