Tag archives for game design - Page 5
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Inspiration
Image via Wikipedia Today has been an unusually inspiring day, I had two separate ideas for games both of which I reckon could be pulled off in the space of a couple of days basic research and writing briefings etc. Tracy & I both woke up early and we got a couple of hours to do things before Alexander surfaced at the rather late (for him) 9am. In that time I unusually got to watch some TV of my own choice. The first idea came from a programme on the freeview channel 'Yesterday' about the Glencoe Massacre (or more accurately the events leading up to it and the aftermath. This is the follow on to the two games I've done about the revolution in 1689-90 in Scotland. There was a meeting between Albany and the Highland Chiefs where two secret…
Preparing For War – Onside Report
British evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I had a design session titled 'Preparing for War' at the CLWG November meeting. Preparing for War was about training an infantry company in the UK after Dunkirk. Rather than a conversational design session I decided to try and do something that was playable. I'd been somewhat frustrated at the conference with discussions of games that looked like they could have been played. I'd felt that perhaps by playing it we could have tested whether or not the perceived problems were actually real. Preparing for War I ran a sort of role-playing game about re-constructing an infantry company after the evacuation from Dunkirk. John Rutherford was the first person to arrive (after me). So I cast him as the first officer to report to the village in Devon I'd decided to put the company in. Chosen only because the OS map…
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CLWG Games Weekend 2007 Reports
Siege of Yendor Tryout Jim put on a session to try out the mechanisms for the upcoming megagame. We spent some time trying to bring down a section of wall, and also seeing whether or not it was possible to directly assault the wall without first undermining or demolishing it. Jim's Breeding Idea This was a design session rather than a game, but we gave it a good go none the less. Jim had come away from the Light of the Trees megagame with an idea that it ought to be possible to do a sub-component of a game about breeding heroes using some real genetics theory. The main aim was that, like in real life, the players managing the breeding programme wouldn't actually know what the actual genetic make up of their characters were. Over time those players that were keeping an eye on things…
Hot Blood & Cold Steel – onside Report
This was a design session on how to do a WW1 skirmish game, focusing mainly delivering a participation game for Jerry Elsmore’s 50th Birthday con. I’d already done a first darft of the rules but wanted to talk through some of the principles about what I wanted to achieve. I found the discussion particularly useful in clarifying my methods for running a participation game at a show. Gone is the idea of having all the action in a static circle of squares that represented all that could be seen (I may do this at CLWG sometime as I still like the idea, although it would be too time-consuming for being run at a show). I did get some ideas for making changes to the terrain though so that it would only become clear when figures entered the square in question.…
Revolutionary Warfare – onside report
When I played Andy Grainger’s A Month in Country I immediately thought of some of the parallels with my Revolutionary Warfare game. I have run this at CLWG couple of times, although with only a few players. I would particularly like to re-do the Palestine game as one player in particular couldn’t cope with the concept of the role that they were given. (I won’t name names, but those that were there know who I am talking about – the British Governor wanted a PR power sharing assembly between the Palestinians and the Jews). Revolutionary Warfare The concept I was playing with was similar to Andy’s but on a slightly larger scale. At the time of design I was considering producing ‘Lion Comes Home’ as a megagame. So the Revolutionary Warfare module had to work very smoothly. It is essentially one sided. A small group of…