Fair Play
Posted by Jason on July 21st, 2008 — in Design, Medical Hospital
Medical Hospital is all about the index cards - you make character, situation, and associated stuff on cards that interrelate in play. There are a few places where having a reference will come in handy, and it’s never a lot of stuff, so I made a handout of index-card sized cheat sheets. They can be double-sided, too.
There’s a card for stress actions, two cards for perks (gaining and spending), a card for cardiac arrests, two for surgical complications, and a list of jargon for the anaesthesiologist to shout when a procedure gets out of control.
My hope is that people will have a stack of index cards they can carry around,with characters and situations they can mix and match and the references obviating the need for hauling the actual rules.
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Posted by Jason on July 20th, 2008 — in Design, Medical Hospital
I more or less doubled the word count of Medical Hospital this weekend, which feels great. A lot of assumptions and hand-wavings got articulated and a lot of useful material got added. Maybe more important than that, I found the game’s voice, which is a little irreverent and conversational.
Expect to see me flacking playtests of this and Business Solutions at Gen Con! I’m going to write a bunch of examples and then shop it around for external playtesting. If you are interested, please get in touch.
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Posted by Jason on July 17th, 2008 — in Check this out dude, Grey Ranks
It’s no Radio Lightning, but Polish Radio’s External Service interviewed me this morning about Grey Ranks. And I found out we’ve been added to the bibliography page at a really good Warsaw Rising site. We sent the Warsaw Rising Museum (which Frederik Jensen just visited - he says it’s excellent) a copy and they are looking it over, which I’m pretty excited about. I’m hoping for a laundry list of errors and a lot of enthusiasm, but we’ll see!
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Posted by Jason on July 15th, 2008 — in Design
There’s a thread over at Story-Games asking designers why they make games right now. It’s full of great reasons to make games, some of them perceptive, some of them funny, some of them sort of poetic.
I’ve always made games, as far as I can recall. In first grade I upgraded a pretty boring game into the magnificent and unplayable “Jesus tic-tac-toe” (you needed ten across!). After spending a feverish weekend playing Wumpus Hunt on my uncle’s brand new Kaypro II, I reverse engineered it for tabletop play. Another time I drew page after page of elaborate combinations of choose-your-own adventure and side-scrolling analog video game.
I’ve always loved to play, and to create new things, and to puzzle out conundrums, and to express myself with words and art and performance. My love for making games is a little obsessive and weird. I’m OK with that. I think play is important – I think it is a survival trait just as valuable as thumbs. I love to play and I love the clever, strange, kind-hearted and passionate people I get to meet and play with. I love the fact that I can make things with skill and pride that return some small measure of good to the world.
There’s so much goodness – my own joy in creation, my delight in play, my deep satisfaction in seeing others similarly delighted in my work, a profound sense of camaraderie and mutual support, and the rewards both material and emotional. Making games brings me all this and I’m very grateful for it.
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Posted by Jason on July 13th, 2008 — in Conventions, Medical Hospital, Playtest
Yesterday was Collective Con, which turned out to be a very chill house-con in the back of a game store and was roundly great. As it turns out, I got to run playtests of Medical Hospital and Dulse (a first!), hang out with some of my favorite people old and new, and then run some Dogs in the Vineyard.
I learned a ton watching Rafael Chandler chew the scenery in Medical Hospital (it was so priceless to see his arrogant surgeon start to cut a trauma victim’s abdomen open and then launch into a sanctimonious soliloquy about his golf handicap, punctuated by barked orders for sutures and clamps). Then Dulse, which is surprisingly solid. I need to take out one unnecessary rule and think about information design a bit, but it plays very well. Dogs is always fun, and I got to run an old town for three guys new to the game, including one who hadn’t played anything in six years. He liked it!
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