FUN & GAMES

Finally having the Stanky Creek book done, I had time to tinker with another project that I’ve wanted to fiddle with for a while.  It’s the Game that springs from the Book.

My friend Brian plays games- not like chess or checkers, though I don’t doubt that he’s pretty adept at those too- but the kind of Role Playing Games and Board Games that are so elaborate that you actually have to read the instructions to play them.  In my family, we usually only play games that the rules can easily be argued and agreed upon without reading a darn thing.

After seeing Brian and his cadre of game-playing hotshots at the last two MidSouthCons, I finally asked him if he’d mind helping me work on a game based on The Great Stanky Creek Snake Oil Outdoorfest.  And he agreed to.

So a few months ago, on a Saturday evening that would possibly have been better spent trying to get your books completed, I went over to Brian’s house with a stack of index cards, and a lot of different color pens.  Oh, and notes!  I had make a couple of pages of notes here and there.  We batted things around a while, Brian improvised a neat dice trick to generate some randomized numbers, and a couple of hours later, we had enough info for me to go away and prepare to make this stuff:

These are the bits we used for Stanky Creek Game Beta Test #2.  It went okay. There’s probably a better term than Beta Test.  What’s the earlier stage before that? Anyhow…  We played a round with four Events, got a sense of the pace, found out I’d miscalculated some basic gameplay statistics, and figured that we need one more great big new element for the game to work better.  Fun, right?

So, maybe two more beta test rounds, and then contact Brian’s crack team of Gamers for the acid test.

Then… well, then, hopefully we pitch it to a game company that wants to manufacture these things to sell, ’cause if you guys wanna play, you’d have to come here otherwise- it takes forever to build just one set, lemme tell ya!

By the way- the next piece that I need to make before we can test again?  A Board. Yep, It’s gonna be a board game with cards now instead of a card game without a board.  The layout’s done, but I gotta fill in the daffy stuff that players are required to do, and maybe draw some art for it.  No reason for the Beta Tests to be totally ugly, right?