I want to play a game called Fix. I don’t know what it’s about! I don’t know how you play it! I know that I have a need and you have a need. I know I can’t get what I need, but I can get what you need. You can get what I need, and so can she. I don’t know if we play with cards or chips or dice or M&Ms. I don’t know whether we play at a table or covertly at a boring party, with speech or text messages or secret signals.

How do you play Fix?

Okay, another idea! This one retains some of the competition of the EGP, while incorporating Royce’s “season” and Leonard’s “slow cooked” concepts.

We could work like the writing pool on a TV show–one season, multiple writers in a rolling sequence. At last count there were, what, five or six humans interested? I imagine something like this:

1. We assign random a keyword to each of the writers, then wait two weeks. First game submitted after those weeks are elapsed becomes the season premiere.
2. After that, games are released once a week, in the same order in which the initial assignment is submitted. If there are six writers, you’ll have six weeks between the time your first game is released to the time your next game is due. (If such a long gap causes interest to wane, maybe we can cut it to a semiweekly schedule.)
3. I try to come up with some way to reward playtest reports. A free fancy-HTML design for the game of your choice? $1 Amazon gift certificates?

So if Alice, Balice, Calice, Dalice and Zebulon are the writers, and they submit their first games in alphabetical order on Sunday, March 5, the season would look like this:

March 5: Alice
March 13: Balice
March 20: Calice
March 27: Dalice
April 2: Zebulon
April 9: Alice
April 16: Balice

And so on until there were twenty-something games, a decent number of episodes for a season.

Pros? Cons?

Instead of working on my book, like I should be doing, today I wrote a game called Shoot The Messenger. My goal is a game based on paranoia and miscommunication, where part of the game is figuring out whether the current round is cooperative or competitive. It’s also the first game I know of that incorporates online translation services. I think it still has a couple loose ends, so let me know how you think it can be improved.

Here’s one way I can think of doing it. Somebody announces the week’s theme via a blog post on Sunday; we can set up a rotation for this. We also announce at that time any changes to the games’ material limitations–I assume we’ll be restricting ourselves to commonly available gamer paraphernalia (6d12 is okay, a roulette wheel probably isn’t) and any paper you can print out. Regular participants should post in the comments whether they’ll be designing that week, and new people are welcome to stand up and be counted too.

I’d like to be able to hold at least one midweek meeting online, but with players from literally around the world, that will likely be difficult to coordinate. Maybe we can set up a wiki talk page and require that everybody post a status report on Wednesday. People should also start sketching their games in the wiki at this point, if they haven’t already.

Games are due by midnight in your local time zone on Saturday night; they should be posted in the wiki under that week’s heading. We can take Sunday to write up some commentary on each game’s talk page, and whoever’s next in the rotation can announce the next week’s theme.

Things for consideration: should we bother with a voting system for Game of the Week or whatever? I have a feeling that would be more discouraging to nonwinners than it would be encouraging to winners; it’d be more helpful to require everybody to post some kind of commentary on every game, whether it’s just “this is good” or “you need to change mechanic x because of y…”

Also considering making it a requirement that for your game to be officially listed under that week’s entries, you must have playtested a previous entry during the week. I’m not sure how many of us have regular gaming groups and could accomplish that, though; either way, we should try to get in a significant amount of post-submission playtesting (for others’ games and our own).