u/philgooch

Hi all, great to find this sub. As well as Holmes, Im also a huge War of the Worlds fan, and I was thinking recently what Holmes and Watson would have made of the Martian invasion.

It could make a great story!

In the meantime, I’ve been working on a card game engine with a standard pack of cards, and the first two implementations of it have been fit WotW and the Holmes canon. But now I’m thinking of combining the two: Holmes vs the Martians. Maybe Holmes and Moriarty join forces to beat them.

Hi all, thanks for admitting me to this sub.

I've been tinkering with card game designs for about a year now, and after many false starts I'm starting to learn what works and what doesn't - at least for me and my group of play testers.

For me, rule simplicity and minimal components are paramount. I used to love big box games with beautiful components, but I hardly ever actually played them. My goal is to create something anyone can pick up and play.

My background is in software, where you typically have a three-tier architecture: the presentation layer (user interface), the application layer (business logic - the rules), and the data layer (storage - the substrate).

This also applies to videogames (being software), but how does it apply to physical games (card, board, RPG)? Does it even apply?

Certainly a mistake I was making over and over during the past year was mixing the presentation layer with the rules, and having both be determined by the substrate (physical construction). Ideally, you would have a completely modular design so that you could change one layer without affecting the others.

If we are thinking of games as narratives (so I'm explicitly excluding abstract games here, where these rules may not apply: for example, you can't really have Connect4 without the physicality, without the vertical grid where tokens fall under gravity), then you will have, at a minimum, nouns and verbs.

What I found is that your rules are the verbs, and the presentation layer ideally contains only the nouns. So you could have a completely different set of nouns, but keep the same verbs, and you have the same core game but reskinned with different characters, situations, theme etc.

And for a game that is quick/easy to learn, you should have relatively few verbs, and the types of verbs can determine whether the game is competitive, co-operative, solo, or a combination of these.

And ideally it should be possible to change the substrate (physical format) without dramatically changing the verbs or the nouns. So ideally it should be possible to recast a card game into a pen-and-paper game, or a board game, or an interactive book, with minimal changes.

So far I've come up with an engine that I've been able to apply to several narratives/themes, and it seems to work well. I'm still play-testing, but feedback has been positive so far.

Hi all. It seems to me there is no shortage of card games that are fun to play as a group. And new games are being published every day. But, we don't always have a group, and sometimes we want a bit of quiet, introspection time.

So my question is: is there a need for more solo card games? Are existing solo card games fun, or is there a gap? Is it harder to design a solo game? And is there a need for more abstract, solo games, or more thematic ones?

My personal lean is that I want to see more thematic card games that are more like reading a short story or piece of interactive fiction, but played out as a card game.

I'd welcome your thoughts!

As Calligrapher-Bureaucrat of the Academy of Letters, your loyalty and your calligraphy skills will be tested in order to survive in the Eternal City of the Ang-Shyu-hal Dynasty, in its final days.

Based on the award-winning story by Dom Wright.

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone else uses simulation to playtest their games to ensure they are 'solvable' or use decision-making policies to sweep parameter to see which settings produce a game that’s completable but still challenging?

I'm finding this really useful to try out ideas and test out rule changes.