Troy Press

I researched a lot of PbtA and FitD science-fiction games before selecting Impulse Drive. For my group, the game provides the Firefly/Expanse-style heroics we were looking for, with enough of a framework to encourage the narrative without so much complexity that it bogs down play. Our group just shifted from playing every other week to playing every week, because they couldn’t get enough! When I first started reading Impulse Drive, I searched the web for something like the Dungeon World Syllabus, a collection of invaluable links for GMs. Not finding […]

After our Microscope worldbuilding, and before our first actual session of Impulse Drive, I ran a Session Zero based primarily on Stonetop’s Introductions procedure. Stonetop is a hearth fantasy PbtA by Jeremy Strandberg (you can back it here, for a limited time). Each playbook has two customized sets of questions: one set for the player to answer about NPCs and one set for the player as PC to pose to the other PCs. Here’s the process for the Ranger— Stonetop is about adventuring for the sake of protecting and growing […]

TL;DR: Microscope, by Ben Robbins, Lame Mage Productions, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐, an innovative RPG for collaborative world building, and a great way to start any campaign with a Big Bang. Having heard great things about using the Microscope RPG for collaborative world-building, I knew that I wanted to kick-off our new science-fiction PbtA campaign with a Microscope session. Heck, our planned setting is literally the first scenario listed on the website: “Humanity spreads to the stars and forges a galactic civilization”! (Fantasy RPG players, the next two are “Fledgling nations arise from […]

Suddenly an Ogre is a short gamebook using the Dungeon World system. Most choices that you make correspond to Basic Moves of the game. This gives you an opportunity to experience a bit of gameplay without a GM. The title is an homage to the essay “Suddenly Ogres: What to do on Spout Lore and Discern Realities misses” by Vasiliy Shapovalov. Published using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. You are encouraged to adapt this for your game system of choice. Comments and suggestions welcome, directly […]

​Melee in the Mines is a print-and-play microgame that pits two players against one another. The dwarves’ silver mine has cut into the tunnels of a monster lair, and now a band of adventurers is fighting for their lives in the narrow confines of the mine against a band of monsters. Each player starts with 7 of 18 characters (18 Monsters or 18 Adventurers). The winner is the party that drives the other from the mine! Only the first character in each party can use hand-to-hand combat. Other party members can […]

Axis & Allies, Diplomacy, Robo Rally, and Squad Leader will be moving from Avalon Hill to Renegade Game Studios, which will also be developing “new versions of Risk themed around fan-favorite Hasbro brands G.I. JOE, Transformers, and Power Rangers.” In addition, “fans will also see new printings of staples for the line as well as the return of some long out-of-print editions.” In a survey of U.S. adults who have ever played board games, four times as many had played Risk as had played Axis & Allies (42% to 11%). […]

Castle Conquests is a one-page print-and-play game where 2 to 4 players try to besiege and capture castles worth the most victory points. Players start by drawing roads between castles and adding symbols to castles to give each a special effect. After all the castles are connected in one road network, players take turns laying siege to roads. When all the roads around are a city are besieged, the player with the most roads claims the castle for its gold (points) and special effect. Acknowledgements: This game was inspired by Eric B. […]

“I played it two times, once I died and once I ended the game in Blackhill, living happily ever after. I had great fun both times. I really liked the adventures you told.” – Aleksandar Saranac Winner of Best Dungeon Crawl in the 2018 Solitaire Print-and-Play Contest. A modern alternative to the great gamebooks of the 1980s, Hero’s Arc: Under the Blood-Red Mountain is a 99-section, 16,000-word gamebook. You pick the path, and your decisions shape the story. Unlike many classic gamebooks, Hero’s Arc has story arcs, so losing a […]

According to many surveys I’ve conducted over the years, Uno is the most popular card game in America. For instance, in our recent Nation of Gamers survey, 23% of U.S. adults who had played a card game said the last card game they had played was Uno, outpacing even games that can be played with a standard deck of cards (e.g., Spades, 12%; Solitaire, 9%). I think one overlooked aspect of Uno’s popularity is that it plays well with larger groups, with the publisher saying that it is good for […]

This afternoon we played Dialect, by Thorny Games, a game about coining words as part of telling the story of a community. The game comes with four types of isolated communities, including a Mars colony, but we picked a 1980s cult, because of course we did. (And there are many third-party frameworks for different types of communities as well.) Unlike role playing games, storytelling games such as Dialect typically involve more player negotiation about directions of the story. This is akin to the collaborative worldbuilding at the start of some […]

In my book Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, I have a chapter on creating a naming language. Namelangs are small languages intended primarily for naming people and places in an imagined world. As such, you don’t need to create a grammar or extensive vocabulary, just a short dictionary. Heck, you don’t even have to be formal about what sounds are included in the language and how they are combined (phonotactics). Now much conlanging is for fun and private amusement, but I ran into a problem with Denju, my naming language that I […]

I concluded my post Printouts as Games with “Next time, we’ll look at the primitive visualization tools that were packaged as ‘games’.” That was five years ago! So past time to write this. However, it turned out there were fewer visualization programs than I realized: Bounce, Life, Sine Wave, and 3D Plot. Bounce was a physics simulator that plotted the course of a red rubber ball. For Life, a user enters an initial pattern, which the system then iterates on repeatedly, emulating a changing population, without further input. The Wikipedia […]