A few weeks back, a conversation on the Dice Exploder discord lead to a new game jam: the Femininomenon Jam, a jam about femininity and whatever that means to you, happening now on itch.io through February 11th. To help kick off your thinking on what a game in this theme might look like, today two of the hosts of that jam sit down to talk about the challenge deck from Wickedness by M. Veselak. In this game about a coven of three witches, the challenge deck is a bespoke oracle for conflict resolution. And right out of the gate we get to dive into the deep end with this jam's topic as we ask: is this mechanic "feminine"? What would that even mean?
I usually like to think of Dice Exploder as a pretty focused show with a pretty tight format. Yeah we may sprawl sometimes, but we’re not here shooting the shit, we’re here to talk game mechanics. But sometimes, a guy wants to stretch out like a dog in the sun, hang out for a while, and just yap the day away while answering a bunch of listener questions. And there’s no one I like yapping with more than my friend Merrilee Bufkin. So this week, it’s casual times on Dice exploder as the two of us answer a bunch of listener questions.
It’s a Dice Exploder EMERGENCY POD! Less than 24 hours ago as of recording, John Harper, designer of Blades in the Dark, released a brand new official supplement for the game: Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts. It’s 110 pages packed full of new setting and new mechanic ideas, and I really wanted to talk about it! I love Apocalypse World’s concept of “advanced fuckery,” and I’ve never seen such a good and extended example of it all in one place.
I have complicated feelings about ranking things. When you start ranking art, you start deciding what makes one art “better” than another, and that often leads to trouble. But also… it’s fun?
The thing about Google Slides that makes it my favorite virtual tabletop is that everyone knows how to use it. No setting up accounts, no learning a new service, you just get right to playing. It’s easy to navigate and remember where things are. And if all you’re doing is dropping in jpgs of character sheets and putting text on top of them, maybe with a few extra slides for session recaps and notes, Slides is fully functional. You’re killing it even.
I’m kind of obsessed with this article over on the excellent Indie Game Reading Club. It’s a guest post by Jason Morningstar in which he describes his process for throwing together a game in an hour. And I don’t mean prepping for a session, I mean soup to nuts all the mechanics and everything, done in 60 minutes.
This post is more or less a love letter to that article. Here’s how my playgroup did that and what we learned.
A few weeks back, a conversation on the Dice Exploder discord lead to a new game jam: the Femininomenon Jam, a jam about femininity and whatever that means to you, happening now on itch.io through February 11th. To help kick off your thinking on what a game in this theme might look like, today two of the hosts of that jam sit down to talk about the challenge deck from Wickedness by M. Veselak. In this game about a coven of three witches, the challenge deck is a bespoke oracle for conflict resolution. And right out of the gate we get to dive into the deep end with this jam's topic as we ask: is this mechanic "feminine"? What would that even mean?