The Swordsmith

Daniel Smith, a master swordsmith, ready to sell weapons and equipment to the Character Party, there to add some flavour to the mechanical tasks of upgrading equipment, to act as a plot feed, and to be a possible adventure hook.

Superheroes Cards available

I’ve completed the first draft of my Superheroes Cards, and they are available to download, along with the draft rules. I’ll need to get some playtesting done on them, so expect some changes. Feedback is always welcome, let me know what you think so far. The cards are currently only available in .XLS format, I’m going to convert them to something more accessible  over the weekend.

The Drug Pusher

Sammie, a Drug Pusher, with a new drug, Float, to sell to the PCs. Will they try it out? Will they go for the source, and will they be looking to destroy it, or to muscle in on the action?

Roman Numeral Bingo

Want to remind yourself how to read Roman Numerals? You can learn them quickly and easily using my new Roman Numeral Bingo game. It’s something that I developed over a couple of days, because I had an idea that this might make a good game that combines fun and learning. It covers all numbers between 1 and 100, which should be enough to get you going and understanding the basic principles.

Lookout for more soon on Superheroes, I’m working on writing up drafts of the cards, and I should have the first draft completed by the end of next week.

Superheroes

I’ve been working on a new game, Superheroes. I’ve been influenced by the recent release of Spiderman 3, and the upcoming release of various other films. Seeing as I’d never be able to get official permission for anything based on a Superhero franchise, all of my work is based on suitably generic superheroes and superpowers, I’m looking at creating interesting game-play, working within the Superhero genre.

Thus far, you can see a draft copy of the rules, and I’m working on typing up a draft set of cards. Expect this to change quite rapidly and significantly over time.

Uniqueness

I wrote before on how it can be hard to design an original card game using a standard deck of cards. There are two type of originality to consider here, original games and original game mechanics.

I believe it is easier to create an original game, built of from existing simple mechanics. This can simply be a variant (such as poker where straights can wrap around, JQKA2 would be valid) or a new game (such as a trick taking bidding game where one suit is trumps and certain cards have special effects).

It is harder to create new mechanics to build your games around. It is possible, just looking through the list of invented games at Pagat should be enough to show you that, but it is harder.

I am not convinced that it is at all necessary to generate brand new mechanics to create a worthy new game. I think it is possible to create games that are perfectly fun to play that are just simple variants of existing games. I think that it will be very rare to see variant games achieving as much popularity as the original, but new games based on existing mechanics can do well (such as King of the Castle).

New games with new and exciting mechanics may do well amongst hardcore gamers, but I think they will struggle to find acceptance among more casual players, because new mechanics will require extra effort to learn and explain, especially when compared to common and well known game mechanics.