Augustcola
My Wish List
by Mark
When we send out the newsletter, we often take a retrospective look at what's happened over the past month. If you've been following along with the show, you'll know summer has been a little hectic for us. August always brings a lot of changes to routines. Summer break ends, we prepare for the upcoming school year, and we start with a new cohort of students. Transitions require a different kind of time commitment, energy, and planning. While the transition demands a lot from us, it also presents an opportunity to lay out a plan and implement changes we’d like to see. I've taken the liberty of sharing some of my show planning and design wish-list items for The Misplay.
Jason and I tend to plan one show at a time. This type of planning has its advantages. It allows us to be flexible from episode to episode and requires less time for a single planning session. However, it has been a dream of mine to plan more than one episode at a time. The first advantage would be guiding our independent tasks between recording sessions. The second advantage would be giving us a clearer narrative to tell as we document the twists, turns, hiccups, and surprises of designing a board game. Jason is much more of a self-starter than I am, so this idea is a bit self-serving. It would also create more concrete tasks that would aid in preparing for episodes.
Another item on the wishlist, which we teased a little bit on the last show, is something I'd like to get back to: widening the scope of what we are working on. Peter has been working on and revising aspects of Star Crossed Realms. I've loved the different iterations and small playtests we've had the chance to run together. I know he's working on some other projects behind the scenes that we haven’t talked about yet. When Jason and I get back from Gen Con and publish the “live show,” we'll turn our attention to a new experiment. Peter, Jason, and I are all going to independently create an early build of "Nightmare Smashers," pitch our versions, and compare notes on what we made. See what I did there? We've got our next two shows lined up and we haven’t even prepped the Gen Con show. We're ahead of our curve!
Jason and the guiding crew are just getting to Gen Con tonight. I'm already late! Gen Con is going to be great and then I’m off to Mexico before school starts. I’m going to need a vacation from all this vacationing.
Notes
by Jason
Mark talked about our plans to revisit Nightmare Smashers in a future episode. Unbeknownst to him, I had been brainstorming it on my flights to Gen Con. I am going to share my unfiltered notes. We've talked a lot about showing "the process" to building a game. This a direct copy and paste from Apple Notes:
Flip a nightmare. Each player has to get out of it.
During the day, you’re collecting resources and tools to escape the nightmare.
Hexes. Can only pull one that is Free. Free is has two open sides. Hexes are random places face down. Reveal happens when two open sides appear and hex is flipped.
You’re looking for answers to the potential nightmare. There can even be one to one correlation. Ex. "Monsters under Bed" needs Flashlight or Light hex. There could be alternative ways to defeat a Monster under Bed and a generic way (ie. three of any hexes).
There could be asynchronous characters who are immune to Monster under Bed.
Hexes go face down and form a dreamcatcher on the table? There’s a template and you play them around it.
Alternative to hexes, is a deck builder. If Monster under Bed comes up. You play your deck and you need to get a certain "light" value or score.
If lower, you're trapped and could be eliminated. You could get a Fear counter. Counters make it harder to get new cards. You start game with no fear and can buy anything.
Don't want to eliminate people from game and don’t want it to be impossible to catch up.
Like Mark’s initial "spinner" vision. Monsters could be on spinner. Meh. Think I prefer cards. Could make boards in front of characters look like different bedrooms. Maybe that's their character—with their asynchronous ability.
Or spinners could be used to dial in other elements (ie. how intense the dream is). Some dreams are easy to wake from and others are not. It’s actually a really cool moment I think when you know you're in the dream and can wake or continue and "play along".
Needs WOW factor. Needs "this is unique and cool". Hey Siri, are there other dream games?
- Dreams:
- Being unprepared
- Monster under Bed
- Running
- Numbers
- Night Terror (on theme: can’t escape)
- Flying
- Can't Speak
Meaningful decisions. If I randomly get the flashlight and Monster under Bed comes up it doesn’t make me feel I am playing well.
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