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There are emotions your five-year-old self still remembers of the joy of scribbling with purpose. Let this game bring those emotions back to you.

Thank you, Xoe, for this reflection on safety -- our experience of it, and our power to provide it for others. My mind wandered to the cicadas we explode on our windshields as they attempt to cross our highways, the signs I now see in rest stops along those highways for people who are being trafficked.

Thank you for taking a look! If you're interested in learning more about lyric games, take a listen to Lyrical Ludology: https://redcircle.com/shows/lyrical-ludology

Play this game however you like! Personally I try to imagine whether I'm the one receiving the text and trying to get to blush, or if I'm sending the text and getting someone (who?) to blush.

Please let me know how it goes and if this game is helpful! Personally I enjoyed testing the boundaries of what's "normal" and being not diametrically opposite but awkwardly "almost normal"." Don't forget to treat your kid as the GM and keep asking questions like, "so what do I see/hear/smell" and help them out if needed with questions like "so how does the teacher react when I let out a noxious cloud of gas?"

Oh gosh Heather, I hope you are OK and didn't go to a bad place with this experience. Do you feel I need more content or trigger warnings?

Oh! Well first of all thanks for taking a look; it warms my heart. And second -- how did you feel after? Do you feel I need more content warning?

Thanks for the playthrough and review, Steph! I know a lot of parents are mystified by what happens at school or just want more connection with their kids, and I hope this game can provide a peek into the everyday life of our children!

Wow, thanks so much! It's only one example of what could be possible; I hope to build it out more!

I rolled a 5 (never heard of Vin Diesel) but here's the thing, crit this game and you could be playing this game WITH VIN DIESEL I kid you not.

(Love the concept and immaculate design!)

Thanks, I really appreciate the support and feedback! I will certainly keep adding to this whenever I have the spoons. Your positivity helps :)

Oh that would be awesome! Wanna run another jam?!

I hear Judge d6 is fair but unpredictable.

I do very  much like the idea of some eldritch horror being dragged into court and being made to apologize. Like, sure, Lu-Kthu can devour worlds, but it's still gotta respond to a summons for civil torts. (Surely saving said worlds from being devoured, off-stage)

Open-ended and evocative. It's like an 8-sided tarot card!

I can't help but imagine Dana refusing to Believe, however - that's Fox's job.

This is a brilliant use of physical dice to do more than just roll up tables. Defining space using the dice's landing location is just so clever. This mechanic begs for tons and tons of examples to illustrate the creative results you can generate!

Remember the time that Future Hiro Nakamura showed up to warn Present Hiro Nakamura about Biff becoming President, but then 2016 happened? Yeah. That's this card. Use it at everyone's risk.

This is so evocative that I'm thirsting for more. Moar? Which I guess is the whole point of this card! Nicely done!

As a child of the 80s, I found this instantly relatable. The logo has me super nervous about what happens if the tape unwinds, but luckily it looks like these cassettes are magically foolproof.

Just crossing out "Second Chance" conveys a novel's worth of feels. Beautiful little touches like that abound; this is just great.

I'm enjoying imagining the shenanigans using this card, like Jester using Sending (sorry for the 5e reference) except by raven!

Since these should be used per session, I could see a whole sticky note product where you write the message down, tuck it somewhere, and pull it out next session!

Love it, interviewing intern candidates feels like a whole plot hook on its own!

Thank you! Yes, there's a lot of potential, and a lot of writing and even more editing to do to create a "full" set.

I love the idea of players choosing multiple cards -- after all, no person is ever just one thing or another.

Typically when I've seen Ask Left/Right questions in chargen you choose out of a list. I cut it down to two because (a) I was short on time, and (b) the card format restricted the amount of text. I mean, sure, I could trade design elements for more text, and maybe I'll rebalance on next iteration.

I'm always open to collaboration if anyone wants to make more of these!

Thank you! I'm not sure if any of this is original but maybe putting it all together on a playing card is the tiny tweak that makes it a little more usable.

Simple, elegant, brutal.
All the vibes of a subway wizard who shoots electricity into the rails to summon trains.

This is a brilliant way to make "safety tools" consensual, thoughtful, but most of all, FUN! As safety tools become standard, blending them into games should be the norm, and this MOSAIC Strict approach shows the way.

I am watching this with interest - what a beautiful concept backed by real playtesting!

(Woah, I started writing this 3 weeks ago and never finished, sorry!) Thank you, Chris, and thank you especially for putting the Tiny Keepsakes Jam together. It clearly inspired me to create things I never had the motivation or courage to do before. I wish my topics were more... pleasant... and I feel this particular folding technique could be adapted to a much more heartwarming narrative. I just needed to start where I was, for better or worse.

Again, thanks for the inspiration. I am deeply grateful to you.

Hi Beth, sorry that it's been a minute since you commented and I haven't had the action points to reply. I really appreciate your sharing your story; so many people have or know someone with serious mental illness, and yet we literally overlook it for all sorts of reasons. I have tried my best not to be reductive nor try to claim that what I've seen reflects all experiences of schizophrenia, and yet still try to say that this is one experience, and through that build some empathy.

I do wish well for your friend and am glad they are medicated, as sadly my mom is not.

Thanks again for taking a look! I always appreciate your enthusiasm for this medium.

I am going for "shock empathy," but I hope it was more empathy than shock, and I've since put up a content warning. Thanks for being open to the experience. It's... it's a lot.

Taken literally, this game asks you to create four one-sided narratives, letters dropped into an abandoned postbox that never receive a reply. The writers are shouting into a void, though in each case it is a very specific and personal void -- the object of unrequited love, for example.

It's a clever way to capture the very nature of a solo journaling game: after all, if you play with yourself, you can never leave the boundaries of your own imagination. You are the characters articulated by the game's rules: a writer with no audience.

But there's a way you can see this experience as distilling the antisocial side of "social" media. Every day people send million of posts, tweets, and photos into the ghostbox cloud. Even this review is going God-knows-where in the hopes that someone might read it.

Caveat: I have read but not fully played the game.

Wonderful, thoughtful concept that challenges the "Tomb Raider" approach to adventure games. If you try using this in a standard dungeon delving game, stick with the original premise and introduce only one object at a time to preserve that uncertainty and discovery core to the premise, perhaps by putting each relic in a separate chamber where players are forced to pause or perhaps even wrestle (mentally, or literally I guess!) with the artifact.

Thank you so much, Chris, for the Tiny Keepsakes Jam as inspiration to create this game.  I don't think this was at all the game I intended to submit, but it's one I simply needed to create.

Thank you -- i certainly wanted the first impression to be that. I should probably put a content warning in about what happens next.

Thank you so, so much, Angela! Your comment means so much to me. If you get a chance to play it, I'd love any feedback. I know the instructions still need work.

Oh hey thanks Beth! Doodling on stickers is the core concept for my game, StickerDoodle Town. (It'll also be expensive as heck to make a physical card like this.)

OK, here's the crazy version of this where stickers are on the obverse and the quest-y stuff is on the reverse.

It's not my ideal because I'd love for the stickers to be on-brand for the card. Like, your logo or whatever. In which case, getting it to fit the back may be off-brand. Like, are you the monster?

But, just wanted to put this out there as a concept iteration

I'm not an artist but am happy to mock some stuff up.

This breaks the premise of the "it only takes 5 minutes" but if every card had an "outbound" object (like the pail of water) and an "inbound" slot (like the fire), that could work.

The other suggestion I have is more about the connection points, like, just put a prompt (your visual suggestion is better but harder than plain text) so there's a reason to connect cards to each other. Like, "More serious" or "Similar style" etc.

Just spitballing some more "game" elements. If this is done digitally it'd be quite different than IRL stickers. Also something that would play well on social media would be extra gud?

Supplement sheet, or (expensive) have stickers on the cards themselves, maybe the front?

The stickers is the lesser of the two ideas, though; the prompt that connects two paths is something I think would give all cards more "oomph." Maybe. I'm just kicking around something that give people a reason to connect cards to each other?

Alternatively, as we discussed on Twitter, an "overworld map" where you can slot your cards. This could literally be nothing more than an 8.5x11 sheet with a little design and spots that say things like "play with my kids" or "fun to read" or "great art!" or whatever.

OK, so this isn't so much an entry as an idea for making card connect to each other. What if the connectors on each card had a prompt to connect to some other card? I was thinking of ways that the card backs could help people who are trying to organize their cards in some meaningful way, so playing the game would actually be useful to people. Ex:

The idea that you can use stickers to connect cards would be extra -- it's basically a way to create non-tabbed puzzle pieces. Stickers could be in fiction (e.g., a cavern collapse) or meta (e.g., various game symbols like meeples, dice, etc.).

Of course this concept is related to StickerDoodle, but you can take the sticker part out and keep just the prompts for connecting paths to each other.

Thoughts?