On the main page of the Luchacabra site:
“Games are released on a schedule roughly analagous to a TV season with new games posted weekly for 8- to 10-week periods interrupted by a mid-season hiatus so my brain can recuperate.”
A game a week. I know Invisible City does a game a month.
Would anyone be willing to team up and do a weekly or bi-weekley collaborative game-making adventure? I think with the proper motivation, and all the minds that converge here, we could come up with some pretty nifty things.

Via Daniel Solis of ¡Luchacabra Games! comes John Carpenter’s The Thing: The Party Game, which takes the paranoia Mafiaward the way Josh anticipated.

It’s interesting to note that Solis’s version makes Trust explicit, using the common design pattern of investing it in tokens, whereas our version deliberately keeps it implicit or even nonexistent. I think this is what people are calling (stop reading if allergic to theory!) the fruitful void–something that should be included in a good board or party game, but left out of an RPG.

Further connections: you may notice people in the fruitful void discussion talking about The Mountain Witch, a samurai game that does have explicit Trust points, but never mentions the word “honor” in its entire text.

Substitute the Drama-Fortune-Karma mechanic for the coin in John Harper’s Flip and you’ve practically got RPG Nomic.

What’s the smallest interesting, nonfreeform RPG you can make?

Man, it’s busy around here all of a sudden!

Most of you have probably already seen this in Kevan’s pseudoblog: the Experimental Game Project postmortem, talking mostly about the methods that produced the best results in their quest to create a game a week for one semester. I wish I’d done that in grad school. Instead I mostly scribbled notes for Ninja Golf and pouted.

This was a computer game project, of course, but there’s a lot of interesting fodder about group creativity, notably in the sections about constraints (my personal fetish) and brainstorming. The participants found that brainstorming was useless for coming up with new ideas, but powerful as a tool for enhancing and streamlining an existing idea. I think that’s a model we’ve followed intuitively here, and I think it explains why the game seed posts have been more successful than the lonely mechanics. (But lonely mechanics are still fun to play with, so no need to refrain there.)

Hey guys, I know I don’t post here often, but I came up with this game a few days ago at three in the morning and I thought you might like to check it out. I call it ‘Chess Re-Rolled’. I was going to call it Dice Chess, but that already exists and is different.

Equipment:
A chess board
2 tokens
16d6 for each player, different colors

(yes, I know that it is a rediculous amount of dice. I caniballized my Stack set to make it work. Several sets of Yahtzee or another dice game would as well)

Set Up:
Each player sets up their dice in the standard chess configuration, with the numbers on top standing for each type of piece:
1 - pawn
2 - rook
3 - knight
4 - bishop
5 - queen
6 - king
Each player also gets one token.

Play:
Play is as standard chess, with the following additions:
Instead of moving one of your pieces on your turn, you may give your token to the other player to re-roll one of your pieces. The piece remains in its space, but it is changed to a different type of piece depending on the number (as above). You may not re-roll kings, and you may not re-roll if you do not have a token.

Winning:
There are two ways to win.
If ANY of your opponents kings are in checkmate at the end of their turn, you win.
If ALL of your pieces are kings and none of them are in check, you win.

Comments:
I played this several times and enjoyed it very much. Once you memorize the numbers, play is very smooth. I like it because it takes care of everything I don’t like about chess. Perhaps I’m bad at chess, but when I play it seems like it takes forever to get the good pieces out, and once you do they’re captured so quickly that you run out and all you have left are pawns, so you try to get them to the other side of the board and get them promoted, but that hardly ever happens. In Chess Re-Rolled, you can promote those useless pawns immediately (if randomly) and, look at that! They’re already on the front line. If you lose all your rooks, try to roll for some more!
There are a couple of mechanics I find very elegant. The tokens are a simple way to make sure neither player re-rolls too often. Also, there is always a slight risk in re-rolling that you will get a new king and he will be in danger. But, this is offset by the alternate win rule, for those players who wish to ’shoot the moon’, as it were. Since you can’t re-roll kings, as the game progresses you slowly accumulate them, and it is not uncommon to end the game with three kings on both sides.

Let me know what you think.

See Kevan’s two comments on Yahtzee-slots for the kind of excellent mechanics that are only obvious in hindsight. Of COURSE traits and weapons are represented by limited-use combo-slots! I would have taken a year to come up with that on my own.

I guess this is the point where we need to start actually coming up with the characters and allotting them slots. I think everyone should get a couple of “sum your 2s” slots free, for minor traits, and “small straight” for a more powerful trait (”small straight” means 1-2-3-4, 2-3-4-5, or 3-4-5-6; it’s worth 20 points plus the remaining die). As Kevan suggested, you can only use those if you can work them into narration (”persuasive wheedle” is not going to help in a fistfight, nor is “former boxer” going to help your negotiation skills).

I posted five of eight names for characters on the wiki–we need three more, preferably two gals and a guy (Kit and Iseul are gals, incidentally). I also wrote up David Lin as a quick example sketch.

I’m getting rid of this game instead of moving it with me. I bought it because it sounded really cool. I mean, look at this set of pieces, not counting the game board which contains two embedded sub-boards:

• 54 Virtue Cards
• 9 Flag/Conch Cards
• 18 Wrath Cards
• 40 Karma-Destiny Cards
• 22 Prowess Cards
• 16 Warriors
• 24 Blessing Cards
• 108 Coins
• 6 Game Pieces
• 2 Dice

The Virtue cards are all different: “gratefulness”, “maturity”, “equality” (?), “wideness” (??), etc. The “Karma” cards are like Chance in Monopoly. A lot of thought went into this game.

I would say that too much thought went into the game, actually. It’s only slightly less complicated than the Mahabharata itself. Some of this is unavoidable since one of the points of the game is to teach the characters and plot of the Mahabharata, but there’s got to be a better way to do it. The game is full of one-off mechanics and keys that only fit one lock. There must be a simpler game that achieves the same goals; maybe an RPG (the manual reads like an old AD&D manual, down to the tables) or even a real-time strategy game. Failing that, there must be a simpler game that uses these cool Wrath Cards and Virtue Cards.

The game isn’t on BoardGameGeek. I found it in a co-op supermarket in Lawrence, Kansas. You can get it from Lotus Press, or you can take my copy off my hands if you live near San Francisco.