Fair Play
Posted by Jason on February 25th, 2008 — in Fair Play
I got a chance to playtest Business Solutions on Saturday with my friends Joel (the original Tom Cougar – Unpleasant Creep / Lust from an earlier game, who made it into the examples of play) and Tom (who I’d never met in person but now have). It went OK. We played using the Melodramatic flavor, which is the first time that’s been tried out, and it has huge potential. I think we just skirted the edges of how fun it could be – Joel played Mysterious Heir / Admiration and I played Seductive Outsider / Lust, which has a hysterical combo. He’d “died” in a sailboat accident but was back – to wrest Business Solutions from his father! Tom’s guy (Dangerous Old Timer / Deceit) knew, of course, but I got it out of him, and my urge to expose the prodigal son turned into a different sort of urge as I fell head over heels for the big lug. All while we were fixing broken PCB photogates and blurry copies. There’s still an important piece that doesn’t work right – the way players earn a bonus – but it’s fixable. Otherwise I’m really happy with the drastically pared-down card handling.
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Posted by Jason on February 20th, 2008 — in Fair Play
The Roach Returns is getting the glossy perfect bound treatment but it’s slow going due to the weird pulp/flip-it-over format. People have asked and we want to get this out there.
Patrick’s got the Business Solutions draft (revision #60 if you are counting) for some initial kicking around. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with in terms of layout and graphic design. It’s out with playtesters and I’m waiting for some feedback before I get too crazy with revisions. It feels close to done, though. I really like it and want to play it some more!
Night Witches hasn’t moved in a week or so – I’ve been playing around instead of designing. And reading Dancing With Death. I’m not sure what will happen with this one once the game is playable. It’s insanely narrow in scope. It’s so narrow I think it represents a stylistic end point for that avenue of inquiry. I’m thinking about how nice it would be to do something open-ended. I’ve got a really interesting idea in that direction that I am mulling over.
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Posted by Jason on February 17th, 2008 — in Fair Play
I should have known … Patrick took one look at that cover and was sold.
And while he was at it, since we’re going global…
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Posted by Jason on February 14th, 2008 — in Fair Play
I went digging in the big library today and found a couple of Russian aviation books. These are all written in Cyrillic characters and I don’t know what they are all about, but one is clearly focused on female aviators of the great patriotic War and the other has a boss cover and graphic design.:
Both are the real deal, printed on mouldering Soviet toilet-paper paper. The Soviet Union lionized the female flight crews, so there are plenty of staged propaganda photos to work with:
As well as tons and tons of headshots and personal photographs:
All this stuff is in the public domain and I need to figure out a way to use it. I think I need a Photo manipulation genius to help out because the original illos are a little low contrast and dodgy.
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Posted by Jason on February 12th, 2008 — in Fair Play
So I’ve finally licked my last card handling problems, which means it is time for external playtesting. To celebrate I finished the icons I want to use. To celebrate that I made a little poster:
You can click on that to see the larger version. Each of those icons is related, in some way, to game play. Including the goat. If you are interested in playtesting please let me know.
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