Core Fault, Board Games, and Package Design
Hi folks! It's been a minute, but I didn't want to clutter your inbox unless I had something cool to talk about. And now I do!
Core Fault
I'm here with a quick teaser for the project I've been working on with SquidGod, who has a really fun YouTube channel. If you've got a Playdate, definitely check out his Itch as well!
The game is called Core Fault, it's a little Vampire Survivors style game about controlling a droid to mine resources deep in an alien planet while fending off hostile fauna. It was supposed to be a little jam project but is turning out surprisingly polished! I'll let you know when we finish it up. If you can't wait to learn more, I've been posting about it for Patreon supporters.
Board Games
I recently learned about a series of abstract board games called the GIPF Project. They all have nonsense names and hexagonal boards and it is so extremely My Shit that I can't believe I'd never heard of them before. I'm especially interested in trying YINSH. Just look at it!
I stayed up reading the rules of the GIPF Project games, and while some of them seem really elegant and cool, a lot of them seem a bit overwrought for me, but it's got me thinking about board game design now. I think it would be a good excuse to try and learn how to code a multiplayer game if I designed a minimalist abstract digital board game. I did just take on a whole lot of contract work (all of which I'm very excited about but is very secret) so I have no idea when I'll have time to do that, but still.
A tabletop game I played and enjoyed recently is Skull, a very elegant card-based bluffing game. It's dead simple, which I really appreciate because teaching people convoluted game rules at a casual get-together is the WORST, and there's a lot of fun real human interaction as you bluff and increase the stakes. Plus, it comes in a very small package, which is great for keeping my apartment not full of giant board games.
Ok, one last thing (I'm on a bit of a tabletop kick right now I guess), is Dustbiters, a card game about Mad Max style car gangs fighting while being consumed by a giant dust storm. The game advertises itself as being "quick," which is sort of true! The broad strokes are simple but the interactions of all the individual card powers are so complex that I've found individual turns can drag on with players considering and reconsidering their multitude of options. The game keeps the number of turns relatively low so a game doesn't take too long, but it's not as fast paced as it could be, I think.
It's still very fun and gives you a lot to chew on in play. It's supposed to be 2 player, but we had a lot of fun doing 2 teams of 2 at the IKEA cafeteria the other day, which was nice because you have someone to strategize with and then someone to chat with while the other team decides what they're doing.
Books
I'm kinda trying to read more books? It turns out they're good and you can get 'em free at the library! What a concept.
Ursula K. Le Guin is my go-to for sci-fi that's well written and always gives me something to think about. I'm kind of obsessed with The Dispossessed and I hope that if you read it too, you will also kinda want to live in an anarchist utopia on the moon with me.
I recently read Le Guin's book The Word for World is Forest, which deals with what happens when a completely nonviolent society is under threat from a violent colonizing force, how they have to respond to survive, and how it changes them. Pretty heavy stuff! But it paired surprisingly well with the new big blue alien movie Avatar 2, which was significantly less thoughtful but fun if you're into bombastic billion dollar movies.
Also I learned the German title for the book is Das Wort für Welt ist Wald which is just about the best thing I've ever heard.
Package Design
Josie Brechner teased this in her newsletter so I think I can repost it without causing any trouble, but look at the thing I helped with!
I'm sure there will be more info on that later.
That's all for now, thanks and take care!