abandoned buildings by palm tree before hill

Conlanging on 15 Minutes a Day: Muna Lingi

During the summer of 2016 I read the great book, Pacific Languages: An Introduction, by John Lynch, with the intent of creating a Polynesian artlang. In November that year, I named the language Gana fa Folua, and I collated 37 roots for pronouns, from Pacific proto-languages. And then I did nothing more with it. Then, the last Sunday in August, 2021, my son and I played the board game Kahuna, which has islands with invented names (in alphabetical order). The island names were so badly designed (for instance, ‘c’ is […]
woman with sword before fallen tree

FAQ: The Right Fantasy PbtA for You

The family of roleplaying games that emerged in the 1970s grew out of wargames and focused on the mechanics of combat and exploration. Fantasy PbtA games put the fiction first, the mechanics second. As a result, players have much less work to do – their primary job is to envision the situation their character is in and decide how they would react. Rather than a character sheet that lists stats common to every player, PbtA games have playbooks, which offer unique information depending on the type of character (wizard, fighter, […]
radar ping circle

Threat Maps as Campaign Prep

One of the great bits of tech from Apocalypse World 2e is the threat map, which provides a concise summary of campaign prep. You can adapt it for other systems as well, if your play centers on a holding or home base. Here’s an example from last year for my Stonetop campaign: D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker describe the process of using threat maps as follows: List the players’ characters in the center circle. As you name NPCs, place them on the map around the PCs, according to what […]

1973 Implementation of Wordle was Published by DEC

While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 and later in Creative Computing’s bestseller BASIC Computer Games, which went on to sell over a million copies. Unlike the 1955 boardgame Jotto, where players are told only how many letters are in the mystery word, WORD plays like Wordle, but with a text interface, providing information about what letters are in the mystery word and, of those, […]
Axis & Allies 1941 game board in play

WW2 1941 ABC

When my youngest had a random Friday off from school last October, and my wife was on holiday with our sister-in-law, I asked him how he wanted to spend the long weekend. “Playing Axis & Allies!” he said. We started with the 1984 Revised Edition of the Milton-Bradley game and played that each day. I kept winning, so I suggested we get one of the newer editions, for which I’d be less familiar with the strategies. (I played the 1984 edition a ton in high school and college.) Given the […]

Character Moves When the Player is Absent

I love Rob Donoghue’s idea for having a move for each PC when their player is absent: I want to write up a set of moves, one per player, that can be used once per session to represent the influence of absent characters. So “Jack knows a guy” may allow the current game to hook up with a useful NPC when Jack isn’t at the table. I doubt this is something that many games need, but for my rotating cast, I think it’ll be a nice way to keep it […]

What Other Implementations of Wordle Can Teach Us

I recently download a dozen iOS games in the Lingo/Wordle genre. As I played each, my appreciation for the original Wordle grew. Here’s a look at the design decisions of the different implementations, and what we can learn from them. The lexicon of words that can be guessed needs to be the right size, containing common words. With WhatWord there are too few words; within a few days of playing the application, I’m seeing repeats. With PuzzWord, there are too many rare words; I’ve had three mystery words in a […]

Agile Development for Card Games

This is the introduction from my ebook, How to Design Card Games. Designing a card game is messy. You will have what you think are good ideas that, when you play them, you find don’t work that well. With that in mind, start with a simple game and add complexity over time, as you play. Here are 7 steps to follow: The key to agile development is to apply feedback and iterate. The breakthrough realization of the software industry was that people can’t anticipate all user requirements in advance but […]
3 figures in melee combat

Tactical Moves in PbtA Games

TLDR: Compendium of Tactical Moves for PbtA Games Some complain that PbtA games lack tactical moves and so combat has much less mechanical support than in traditional roleplaying games. This shouldn’t be a surprise since D&D grew out of wargames with miniatures and so naturally emphasized combat. Yet I personally find fights in a PbtA fantasy game to be much more exciting, dynamic, and cinematic than fights in 5e, for instance. But there are times I want additional mechanical support from the game for tactics. One area where I don’t […]

FVTALK: Runes from the Roman Alphabet

My fantasy gamebook Under the Blood-Red Mountain differs from a Choose Your Own Adventure® book in that your player has basic stats (strength, dexterity, wisdom, hit points) and inventory. Choosing which stats to use was easy, developing a combat system more of a challenge, but creating the inventory system stymied me. I wanted the player to have a simple way of tracking inventory throughout the game, but the system needed to be obscure but easy to use, so that if you were directed to turn to a specific page based […]
salamander

Table Comparing Dungeon World to 5 Hacks

Some of the most common questions over on the Dungeon World Reddit are how to choose between the different hacks. To better answer that question, with help from the Dungeon World+ Discord, I’ve developed this side-by-side comparison. (All errors and wrong opinions my own!) Dungeon World Chasing Adventure Freebooters on the Frontier Homebrew World Uncommon World Unlimited Dungeons Pitch PbtA + D&D DW – D&D PbtA + OD&D Stonetop – Stonetop DW 1.5 +3rd-party playbooks &c. DW 2.0 Requires DW – No No No No Yes # stats 6 5 (removes […]

Damage Rolls with the Main Roll

Nothing can be more anticlimactic than to have your RPG character succeed in an attack against a difficult-to-hit opponent, only to then roll 1 for damage. Jeremy Strandberg makes the case that low damage rolls should at least prompt a fictional change in the opponent’s positioning: “Even when one side rolls low damage (or no damage), look for a way to make the situation change.” An example he gives: “She rolls only a 1 for damage (vs. this guy’s 6 HP), so I say that she smacks the knife out […]
Hamurabi type-in

BASIC in Your Browser, Its History, and Games

The most popular pages on the site last year were two different ways of running BASIC in your browser: My personal project during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns was reading old manuals for BASIC and related languages and then drafting articles and portions of articles to add to Wikipedia: My own BASIC games: Recent posts: Updated 2024-04-04 with more recent posts.