#moonshiners

I’ve said that part of the problem with Moonshiners’ development, and why I resist the use of generative art in it, is that I want the conversation about Moonshiners to be about immersing in its world and playing within that world’s spaces. Most of what I’ve been writing on it in this blog has been the name of fully fleshing out and realising the mechanical complexity of the game, and even as-expertly-as-possible collapsing the art needs (which yes, I have done more of). What I haven’t done much of, not lately, is pen down the lore I have to fill this space. This is a reasonable part of the mechanical structure of the game! I need the lore to cohere to the demands of the mechanics, and that’s why beyond the broadest sense, I haven’t really done any of the hard definition that I would have rathered to do.

First and smallest, we have the district called the Velvet Knows. It’s a district which, ambiguously phrased, is a pleasure district. The Velvet Knows is worth a lot to businesses in the area, it’s a high-income territory. The businesses in the Velvet Knows are grand, very expensive gaming halls, and can give a huge payout. Control over the Velvet Knows is hard to get, of course; there are only two of the cards. It’s very easy to ‘split’ it and that means nobody gets to capitalise on its wealth.

Then there’s the Hound’s Pits, which is a former police station, turned from a prison yard into a boxing gym. The Hound’s Pits is also small, but it lacks the same prestigious value as the Velvet Knows. There are only three cards with the Hound’s Pits, but there are also three businesses. That means hypothetically, control over the Hound’s Pits can get the player a lot of advantage, and that makes sense to me – it’s a place for people who like fights, and it represents three of the ‘small’ business types. Its businesses are very lucrative, if the player can pay into them to get them going. You need bank to make book after all.

The Wolf’s Throat is a throughfare in the city, a sort of main arterial that has a host of speakeasies hidden in it. They’re a little out of the way, but they’re easily reached, meaning that the Wolf’s Throat has a great value if you fully control it, though it’s not as lucrative as a smaller place like the Hound’s Pits.

Gnasher’s Mart is a district of stores and sellers, and that means there’s a ton of places for money to get laundered. None of its businesses are huge but it does have four different businesses, which means that trying to control the Gnasher’s Mart kind of implies that the player is going to be able to capitalise on a lot of different connections. Some characters care about areas, some care about businesses and I feel like the Gnasher’s Mart is not a place anyone specifically cares about.

Then there’s Cheek By Jowl. Cheek by Jowl is massive. It’s the second biggest turf in the game, and its businesses are smaller and less-lucrative. But at the same time, it’s seven cards, and controlling all of it is valuable. In my mind, Cheek by Jowl is a not-quite slum, it’s a lot of places people in the city choose to live, with huge black markets and the characters that respond to it are probably pretty lucrative, because it’s easy to feel like the king of nowhere.

Surrounding the edges of the city, and making the bulk of the edges of it, is the Ruffs. The Ruffs has escape routes, black market stalls, it has gaming halls. None of the businesses in the Ruffs are the big ones. I think characters that like the Ruffs are going to be the people who don’t actually want to go live in the city. And hey, a lot of characters don’t want to go to the city, which means that saying they care about the Ruffs means they probably just like moving things into the city.

There’s Collar Bay, which, I mean, yes, that symbol is a rope knot, let’s all get the giggles out now. But the thing with Collar Bay is that it’s the district that feeds the harbour. Great for smuggling, it benefits characters who have some pre-existing criminal skills, provided the player can control it. It’s also got two huge construction companies in it – places that want to build and maintain warehouses, and places that maintain and develop things from those warehouses. Plus, I imagine the ship constructors are a thing. There’s also a drycleaner business, which I think is there as a gateway for immigration and just kind of is the first place where people off the boat wind up, in the same way that Chinatown was a constrained environment.

Here’s our symbols for the types of businesses that show up. They’re a boxing arena, of which there aren’t many but they tend to be lucrative, a pawn store, a gaming hall, a dry cleaner and a construction company. Typically speaking, these businesses are things the characters are meant to want to react to. Some crew don’t care about where the boxing ring they hang out in is actually, they care about whether or not they can punch people. Crew that use dry cleaners to launder cash may want more of them than one of them, and that can show up in the scoring requirements.

I think that construction tends to be expensive to drive, because while a good accountant can lose a lot of suspicious money, but that money is going to need to be in big bricks. Pawn store characters are associated with deals and scoring little bits of extra money. Boxers care about violence. Construction rewards big scale things. Dry cleaners want to make things disappear. Gamers are indulgent.

Oh! And also, I should mention that thing about collapsing the art demands. Now I have the idea that the art objects can be unified under an aesthetic that divorces them from the representation of the characters. That is, they’re going to be presented as black-and-white photos with a receipt next to them, which means the pictures of the art objects can be a variety of different stock aesthetics.

Oh oh and also, I made a bunch of these icons myself!

You know, considering the amount of effort this post is going to represent, it’s pretty funny to me that I’m probably going to be really scrounging for a word count. Anyway, I have been working on improving my playtest kit of Moonshiners. Back in April (April!), I spent a day making a print-and-play version that could be easily put on sticker paper and then playtested from there. And… well, I’m going to give you full-resolution versions of those images here. Right here. Just after the fold.

These are a4 graphic pages; if you’re looking to print them on a Letter printer, sorry you have to put up with that, but you’ll need to resize the images to make it work. I can say this with a great deal of confidence that it’s not unreasonable to expect you to do that, because I know full well, nobody’s going to do it. I might as well provide you with instructions on how to stick a fairy in a bottle. These nine images represent an entire game, and this is not a blog that attracts the print-and-play crowd, I know that much.

Here are the four card faces, and their explanations.

I think I want to show these off in part to make it clear that a prototype should be clear more vitally than it should be impressive. These are not how I imagine these cards looking, but by making them like this, they’re easy to print and easy to cut apart.

This is a crew card, represented by the werewolf icon on it. It’s worth 2 points, if you control the territory with the Fleur De Lis symbol in your total Turf. If you don’t, she’s not worth any points. She still gives you her special ability regardless. This technology, of the characters looking for territory, aims to create tension between how different territories are valued by different players. Denying you control of a territory may not get me much of anything, since I can’t control it either, but it might mean you don’t get a bunch of extra points.

These are also what I think of as ‘generously margined.’ The actual cards I’m sticking this on are 7x7cm squares, and I give a .25cm border on each side. These cards don’t need to have the text as prominently in the centre as this, but if I do it like this, this is going to be nice and clear for when I explain it to a new player.

This is one of the Art Object cards. I kind want as much of this to be done with iconography in the final version of the game, but the more I think about that idea, the more I think that an icon to express an artwork on the card is itself, a mistake.

Like consider this; if I have an Art Object icon for these cards, instead of the text ‘Art Object,’ and the card just has a nice artwork and a symbol indicating what set it’s from, isn’t that wasting the information I’m putting on the card, and indeed, wasting the cost of the art asset? If the card is as simple as this, with a nicer artwork of the art object in question, it’s not like the icon is adding information. This set is just the cards that look like this.

Turf cards are pretty simple. An icon for the place to mark on the other cards that care about what turf you control, and a number that is both the cost, and the number of cards in the set. I do think that visually, the final version of this should be a map of the city, with one specific section ‘lit up’ to indicate where in the city the Hound’s Pits are. For the sake of the prototype, though, this is all that’s necessary. There are now seven different districts, instead of the five, and there’s one new ‘mega’ district that it’s likely everyone will have a bit of. The Turf’s role in improving businesses comes along here, too;

Finally here’s a business card with all the new information. That is, these cost $3k to ‘turn’, and it’s situated in the district with a Fleur De Lis symbol. If you control that Turf, the card will improve on its own at no cost. This means you can save your money cards for later in the game. On the other hand, if you have a bunch of cheap currency cards you don’t want to hang onto, you can throw out a lot all at once to improve your businesses.

The future business card face should reflect the map in the Turf cards, and similalry be oriented in a diamond shape. That means that all the ‘place’ cards are oriented in a different grid to the art objects, which can sit or stack up differently, and the crew, which don’t stack up at all.

Making this prototype brought some more stuffness to my attention. That is, this prototype, as it is, does not exactly scream ‘bootlegger werewolves.’ The new design, where you’re trying to own businesses and have control over orders for Turf, reduces the feeling that I had originally in Moonshiners, where the player characters are kinda socialist, the remotely removed people making the booze and delivering it, but not necessarily that involved in the gang activities within the city. On the other hand, though, I do really like the way this builds a feeling of investment.

The new rules about Nana giving people stuff if they don’t wind up with anything from the Meets means there’s more of that social feel, the idea that everyone is a friend. After all, you can claw-fight and grab a bunch of stuff and leave, but that kind of thing doesn’t infringe on the fact that sure, you’re still buddies at the next Meet. With this kind of vibe in mind, and the generally jovial element, I’m hoping the increased mechanics of the crew allow for players to get further into the idea of negotiation and complaining.

I’m working on playtesting with Moonshiners and reflecting on things I’ve seen in it. You like playtesting notes? Course ya do!

The problem is pretty simple; it’s possible for a player to finish multiple seasons of Moonshiners having won no auctions and therefore having nothing in front of you. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, of course; after all, players need to be able to lose or fail at a game. But it’s still a problem where it’s possible for a player to wind up starting season three with no cards in front of them and feeling like they have to endure six auctions with no opportunity to really get into the game.

The game isn’t stuck at this point, in my opinion! It’s possible to have a lot of materiel in the early game that sucks, and doesn’t come together in the late game. Art is less about being complex sets and more about smaller pools of good effects, and it’s possible late-game lunges for value can improve things. Plus, the push to make sure the rules include negotiation is going to be part of it.

Players who have a lot of resources in front of them, even if they’re comparatively worthless, *feel* better. Problem one with this is that normally I treat this as an opportunity for a player to get knocked out, and problem two is I don’t want to complicate the structure with adding explicit ‘the player in last place’ effects. After all, ‘last place’ is hard to calculate unless the players are doing live-fire evaluation of art pieces, and I don’t want anyone to have to do that.

Idea One: Nanna’s Portion

Here’s a pretty simple solution. The players are meant to be friends hanging out and divvying up a task, there’s a measure of Appalachian socialism at work. The task is itself, a task, everyone is doing their best with what they have. At the end of each Meet, then, there’s meant to be something social going on here, somethign that represents a feeling of companionship and friendliness.

That means if you walk away from the Meet with nothing – at all! – then at the end of the Meet, Nanna tells everyone, oh, let your cousin have something. And so each player who has more assets than there are players offers up a thing, and the deck offers up a thing. Then those cards, the Nanna’s Portion, is dealt out at random to the players who got nothing.

Now, there’s also going to be room for wheeling and dealing. Once the players get the Nanna’s Portion, players are allowed to negotiate for the goods – they can make promises or deals. There should be some of the feeling of hanging around, of having a chat, and letting people have stuff that’s theirs. Since everything in the game is worth some points, there’s a reason to try and throw away things you don’t want to concentrate on what you can. Turf that doesn’t have a meaningful value to you because you probably can’t control it, and you don’t expect to get businesses or crew that work with it.

Idea two: Hand provides value.

Right now, the bidding cards are meant to be fluid value. They’re meant to just go away every turn because you have bills to pay and food to eat. It’s not meant to represent building up a stockpile of meaningful cash. The whole point of the bidding cards is to be ephemeral, and having a greater success in the industry only gives you a chance at better returns. I didn’t want those mechanics to encourage hoarding or recovery or to focus on a kind of economic aspect of the game.

However, that means by the end of the game, there’s nothing to care about in your hand. Players chuck the currency into their businesses but don’t really care about having a ‘good’ hand at the end, there’s nothing to save for in the last round, and that means people run risky boards where they don’t care about having their currency stolen by a Fight.

Here’s the new rule idea: At the end of the game when scoring, players’ cards in hand represent value. You get to add your ‘cash reserves’ at the end of the game to your total value. This means players can value the cards in their hand more than the cards in the lot (at the end). This also means there needs to be some kind of way to sculpt your hand, to make it worthwhile, and means that players who are doing badly over the course of the seasons are capable of using their hands.

Before: At the end of each round, players all discard their cards and draw up to the 4 cards. Then each player who controls the majority of a Turf draws another card, and every player who has a special ability draws an extra card.

Now: At the end of each round, players discard as many of the cards they have as they want, and draw up to 4 cards. Then each player who controls the majority of a Turf draws another card, and every player who has a special ability draws an extra card.

That is to say, players who want to stockpile cash between rounds can do so, and represents saving up for later seasons. Hypothetically this means a player who never successfully wins a Fight can wind up at the end of the game with something like 24 points from just their cards in hand, which also means the rest of the deck is going to have lower values.

I think I can do both of these ideas. They’re both tenable and they don’t require a major change to any components. They’re just going to be changes to the rules booklet when it’s finished. Plus, the Nanna’s Share or negotiation elements add more space that Crew can react to. That gives me more room for more nouns and some verbs that can interact with.

Okay, good talk!

Lol nah that was the original working title for when Dimitri first met Lorelei. There was a running idea for Dr. Mellabamith's Miscellaneous Misadventures being like a series, working backwards from the original story Moonshiners. You'd have him fighting pirates, helping a kitsune prince, and whatever else I'd come up with. And it works backwards until you get to the last part of the series. The beginning of it. It's not Dr. Mellabamith anymore because it's set before he became a doctor. Before he took Lorelei for a wife and adopted her name. I don't think I'll ever do an official story of Dimitri and Diane? Or if I do it might just be something non-serious like Stella and Utar.. That being said, I'll share a bit of Mr. Balludson's First Adventure. ^^

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I'll never forget those beautiful blue eyes.

They were the very first thing I saw.

So deeply focused and caring. The hints of gray that made me think of a stormy ocean. They held that beautiful spark of life and sharp intelligence.

I remember her long hair. Like curtains of light, soft and smooth like silk made of gold, framing her delicately flushed face.

I heard her heart fluttering, and it was like beautiful music. She smelled like Spring. Like sweet herbs and honeysuckles.

She spoke in an urgent and quiet voice. I tried to make it out but my brain was so consumed by the fog of my unconsciousness. As I slowly came to, my sluggish tongue struggled to speak.

I have this spread across a few locations, but! I was able to take the latest version (v3) of Moonshiners to a family gathering and did some play testing with it. Now, part of the point of this play testing is to reflect on feelings I have in the experience, not to, in any way, represent the other people’s opinions. That is to say, no direct quotes, no names or faces of anyone involved in the play testing. But it was a play testing session and it was delightful to finally feel this ‘feature-complete’ version of the game under people’s hands, especially because finally, I was able to see how I felt about things when there was a tension between what I was experiencing and what others were. A lot of the play testing thus far, after all, has been done with either a much simpler version of the game, or, well, me playing with myself. That sounds vulgar. You know what I mean.

Some thoughts on the stuffness of the game, the physical material that makes it up, well, the first thing to spring to mind is that the square deck is teetering on the edge of being shuffle-able at only a hundred cards. It’s a challenging thing to shuffle; I’ve already noticed the way that the rotational symmetry of the cards means that it’s harder to keep the cards oriented the same way.

I want to make sure that the card backs are fully rotationally symmetrical, which isn’t hard to do in the design stage, but it does impose demands on the style; it suggests viewing objects from above, which suggests for the turf places and businesses, they’re viewed from above in a ‘map’ design, and it means art objects are likely ‘laying on a table.’ That can give a nice standard card face for all the art objects, though, a table with a nice checker tablecloth on it, you know, ‘cos Nanna thinks it’d be nice and classy.

It also means that I might want to keep card information visible from all angles, so flipping them requires minimal rotation. Providing the information on two edges of the card isn’t hard, providing it on all four may be a bit of a strain. Although it might be doable with just symbols, depending on how I want to handle the art objects and their potential escalating values (more on this in Enrolment, for the point salad effect).

Cards have more room on them for information (being the size they are) than I thought when I wrote the designs. The cards can be a little more complicated, the art can be a little ‘withdrawn’ from the edges. What’s more, I just don’t need as many cards as I thought I would, meaning the auction deck can be smaller, which makes it easier to shuffle.

How many cards are necessary for this game in its current design? Well, I originally designed for 120 cards with the notion that not all cards would be seen, meaning each iteration of the game brings with it a new set of rules for players to become used to. Since the story is players dividing up a city though, it does seem better if that deck is mostly exhausted in each play through. That means I’m wondering whether or not the auction deck should be much smaller, like 80 cards.

With four players, there’s four seasons of lots, that start at 3, 4, 5 and then increase by 3 cards per season; that means it’s 12, then 15, then 18, then 21, which total to 66 cards. With five players (not currently necessarily an option), they’d be 2, 3, 4, 5, and increase by 4 each season. That is 14, then 18, then 22, then 26 – or 80 cards total. At that point, in a five player game, you can rely on the whole auction deck being used.

Though I now need to consider how I word that. After all, in my mind, that 5-player set of lots is because it’s the 4-player set of lots, but one lot is bigger. Though how to phrase that is enrolment…

Which is as good a time as any to start on it. Enrolment is thinking about the rules, how we obscure player intention and tell people how objects interact in a strictly rules-based sense.

Let me see: Deal out a number of lots, face-down, equal to the number of players there are. Each lot should have as many cards as there are players. Once these are dealt, take one card from one lot lot and put it in another lot. The lots are bid on in the order of smallest to largest.

That means in a 2 player game, you deal out one lot of 2 cards. Not a great jam but I don’t know how well the game works for two. In a 5 player game, that means the deal is 4 lots of each 5, which then become a 6, a 5, 5, 5 and 4.

I’ll think more on this. It might be worth it to just bite the bullet and make a table.

While I’m still talking about the stuff that goes into that deck, the characters that make up that deck are great, and it might not be a terrible idea that every player gets to start with a crew member in order to vary things up for each player’s bidding angle.

The big one is that the original idea behind the game was the art objects representing the end-game goal, and all other parts are about trying to acquire that. The problem is that acquiring territory and crew feels cooler, it gives me a sense of personality as I’m playing, which means that I feel like the rules are pulling in an inappropriate direction.

Right now I’m thinking of shifting to a more pure ‘point salad’ – crew members are worth points, and they have reasons to value one another (which isn’t hard to do; characters can have a simple number, then a bonus number if you have a certain other symbol in your tableau). Territory should be worth points at the end, if you control the majority of it.

Art object groupings should be smaller and more rewarding once you have collected any sets. The businesses also have a problem where their rules don’t make much sense – you dump six dollars into a business and it only advances one step? The next step is to make businesses that have a cost-to-amplify, and if they get a symbol for interaction/point bonus reasons, then the businesses can be improved if you’ve a related business. This will involve a deeper consideration of the fiction, mind you.

Fictionally some elements are really strong. I like the way the players feel like lairy, untrustworthy werewolves willing to fight at the drop of a hat, BUT I do like the idea of werewolves who forgive one another very easily. Similarly, the idea of the bidding being done with stuff, not with cash, is much better for conveying the vibe of both being a bartering-like arrangement, and an out-of-city thing but also helps to explain why cards are less reliable.

The character abilities are sometimes really clear – Rory “Rory Rory” Rory Rory is for example, very clear, when you send Rory to get a lot, she’s going to start a fight. Nice and clear. On the other hand, some characters are less clear, drawing and discarding. Hell, just the value of drawing and discard is a little vague from its original idea.

Also, nobody cashed in their art objects for cards. That rule may be totally superfluous. Most auctions were determined by fights, though which might mean there should be more lots, but smaller.

I’m really excited by this version of the game and I can tell I’m excited because I can’t wait to go and change it up, to make another edit, to take the thing I just made and move on to the next version. I can re-prioritise what’s exciting and I can improve what I like best. This is a game about gangs that build their own identity and who are reasonably friends with one another, it’s not a cutthroat business – but still, we like to shout and boast and express ourselves.

Imagine me pulling the rip tab on a drink and sculling half of it in one go, except because I’m in my forties, this time the drink is a bottle of fridge-cooled water. It’s late at night, I spent all day making a new prototype for Moonshiners, and these are some notes of the latest version based on handling the interface of the game with all the information on it, at the scale that the final game is going to be, for the first time.

This is technically, the third complete prototype of Moonshiners, and it’s the most complete. It has actual game rules on cards, it has cards divided up by specific type and there is a direct intention behind all card parts. Cards are given special orientations and ‘faces’ that are meant to convey information about them. This was not a ‘printing’ per se. I had a printing done – sticker printed card faces – but applying them went hellishly wrong and rather than wait a week for new stickers to print, I took blank cards and just started writing on them with sharpie in as detailed a play as I possibly could. I put a show on the TV – Murderbot, if you’re curious – and a friend on discord, and then the rest of my day was spent with coloured markers and pens drawing on every single card in the deck trying to construct a minimal version of every single card face in both decks. I didn’t have a full 120 cards for the square deck, so my version is a little smaller, but that isn’t necessarily a big deal.

One of the findings already is that the square deck doesn’t have enough cool people in it. It’s a lot of stuff, which is really important, too, but I think that the mix of characters might be too small in handling lots. I mean the werewolves are building a gang, people want to express themselves and imagine a gang working for them in a particular way. I shouldn’t have such a small number if I can help it, going forward.

First things first, colour coding pens to divide up groups isn’t useful for a colourblind player, but it was useful for me making the prototype. I had my pens set up in a little rack, red, then green, then blue, and when I was done with one, I put a lid on it, put it at the back, then picked up the next one along. This is a real example of mechanical behaviour – how I’ve organised physical spaces – that’s got a direct knock on effect to the product (the colour on the paper) that then has a knock-on to how I convey meaning.

Looking at the cards in production, I can tell that there’s a distinct difference between each type, but each type is not, necessarily,visible from a distance. Since that became a problem I started putting names on the groupings of cards – vague, but meaningful ones. “Business, Small” for example, to represent all the businesses with the same kind of payout (which was, of course, small).

This also comes up with the loot cards that represent art objects for sustaining value after the prohibition ends. After all, these cards are going to be important for players trying to win the game, that means I want to make sure there’s no ambiguity about what belongs together. In the prototype they’re all signified with a letter in a ring, but that might not be the worst idea on the final versions either. I think maybe I want to include a little ‘lot tag’ on them that indicates that they’re set J1, J2, J3 etc to make it clear.

Also I think the art might want to be from the top down, which both abstracts the appearance, but also means that they look like objects set up on a table.

The playing card deck of bidding cards was in the original design, something like sixty cards. This was to make it so that there was room for players to do a lot of drawing and discarding (though they don’t discard, they put cards on the bottom). I haven’t been able to test it fully, but I think with an actual hand of cards, the chances of anyone running out of cards permanently is now less important, and instead the variance between the cards needs to be closer.

What’s more, the fungible money problem is just too overwhelming. Looking at the cards in hand I found myself unable to reconcile the way that some cards represented large numeric values with the smaller ones – how the hell do I have a bundle of hundreds, but not a bundle of fifties? Money doesn’t work like that. Because of this, the bidding notes may need to be something else, which I think means they’re going to wind up being trade goods – yes, stacks of dollars for the bottom end, but then the next tiers are somehow made of precious metals, singular objects that the werewolves are willing to use to trade.

The highest value should probably be a bar of silver (after all, we all know how dangerous that is to handle).

Square cards shuffle hard! It’s very hard to maintain their proper orientation in the deck of cards what with how they’re able to realign when a deck is being brought together. When shuffling, typically in a riffle or arch shuffle, the cards are pushed together then brought to align at a corner. In a rectangular, poker-style card, that means the cards wind up being re-set into the same alignment, and the only opportunity to reorient a card in the deck comes when the card is rotated 180 degrees before the arch.

This leads to the deck being ‘boxed,’ a term from Magic: The Gathering, where some cards are in sleeves oriented towards one another and run the risk of a sleeve being pushed into another sleeve (hence forming ‘a box’). In the case of a rectangular deck, there’s almost no way to avoid that. Rather than have to negotiate with all possible ways to hide information, this brings with it the important note that the card back for the square deck needs not just to be symmetrical on one axis, but full radially symmetrical, to ensure a boxed deck doesn’t give anything away.

In my thesis, I am working on a series of case studies explaining games and their development. Their playtesting and their production is part of this, and once I’ve made the game’s prototype, I reflect back on the process. How I do this is by starting with a plain-language, general-reference kind of version of the case study.

What’s going to follow here is a template of the process, developed in making Lysen Co, and then the first section of that text template filled out. I dont’ imagine this is going to include much new information if you’re absolutely keyed into how Moonshiners works.

The template looks something like this:

Introduction

Formative Experiences – anything that I can see the game relating to in my past now I have the game to use as a lens

Concept Emergence – the game’s actual first prototyping point as best I can prove it

Examining the Fiction

Examining the Enrolment

Examining the Stuffness

How does the framework apply

How does the framework synthesise together

Conclusion

Now, in that space, again, as plain language, here’s what I got. This will be made into proper academic language, so I’m just trying to make sure I can communicate clearly here.

Introduction

Moonshiners is an auction set collection game, where players take on the role as leaders of alcohol brewers just outside a Prohibition-inspired city of wealth and excess. Oh, and the gangs are all werewolves, which is why they don’t really care about tussling with the police. The players are trying to make their money while the prohibition lasts, knowing that time is limited, and that means part of what they’re trying to buy up is control of turf to sell their product, businesses that can launder money, crew members, and just art that they can turn into cash when the whole era ends. Mixed in with the auction, though, is the threat that everyone is, in fact, a werewolf, so any time someone wants, they might wolf out and ruin the bidding, which while a little socially ungracious is also very effective at picking up whatever they want in the lot.

The game has two basic competing tracks; the first is that players are trying to accumulate goods and sets of goods, which means they can regard auction lots in terms of both what they grant themselves, and what they deny others. The other is that any given auction is at risk of turning into a fight, and players don’t just ‘win’ the auction if they wolf out on it. If two or more players wolf out in the same auction, none of them win the auction, and they’re all kicked out (which can leave any remaining players with an opportunity to get lots for cheap). That means there’s a call-your-bluff element of the auction to go along with the acquisition part of the auction.

The game is composed of two sets of cards. One set is a deck of playing cards, standard poker proportions, that represent the currency available to the players to pay for different lots. These lots being fixed values and irregular in amount rather than wholly fungible is meant to represent that they are as much trades of goods in bundles and stashes, maybe even chunks of valuable materials, somehow. They’re meant to represent the payment the gangs work with being in difficult-to-manage chunks. The rest of the cards are square tile-style cards, that represent what goes into the lots. These cards represent all the goods that people can bid on.

Art goods that have post-game value but can be discarded for a cash card at any point.

Crew members that give that player a special ability, such as increasing the size of auction lots or allowing them to manipulate their bidding.

Territory cards, representing greater control of different parts of the city, and increasing their available funds in each auction.

Business cards, representing businesses players can invest money in at the end of each round to turn into post-game value.

That’s what makes up the game. It’s the only components, there’s no dice, there’s no tracking components, and everything that leave a deck becomes public information.

At this point, I have the components of a prototype; I don’t like it, it’s a bit ugly, in part because the art available is either extremely nonspecific (made with game-icons.net), or it’s a private copy I don’t have shared anywhere on the web, which was made using image generator images in order to do due diligence in engaging with these programs for the purpose of prototyping. Once the prototype was made, I began to consider the things that go into it, and the influences on me that led to its interest.

Formative Experiences

Completely honestly I think one of the earliest things I can consider that has some implication for Moonshiners is a Penny Arcade comic describing the Worgen of World of Warcraft as part of their commentary on the Cataclysm expansion in 2010. In the comic, Tycho is shown a werewolf in a top hat, and describes it as a ‘dapper lycanthrope.’ Now, dapper lycanthrope in this case is referring to something kind of Victorian English in its structure, but over time in my head, ‘dapper lycanthrope’ kind of became a specific reference for something that I knew I liked. I think monsters that are signifying their attempts to be approachable and meaningfully human are cool. I think it speaks to the way that I know my trauma makes me a potentially monstrous person, and how the task of not being cruel is an act, which includes displays and sincerity. What’s more, ‘dapper’ doesn’t really mean a Victorian gentleman to me. Dapper signifies in my mind, more of a rough person who is doing what they can to present themselves well; it’s a working class person who nonetheless engages with fashion, in a style not unlike the work of Derek Guy at the Die Workwear! Blog.

These ideas I know form part of the characterisation of Moonshiners. The association between moonshine, the liquor, and werewolves is something that I originally conceived of in a tabletop roleplaying session with a friend, where I wanted to give them something interesting to interact with that could let their character show off a measure of their skills (it had to do with making good on debts).

Dredging my memory, I think there might be a comic with a similar idea; Moonshine, published by Image comics. The first issue of Moonshine is from 2016, and my earliest record of the roleplaying session is 2017, which means the timeline works. I don’t remember ever reading Moonshine though, suggesting I may have just heard the pitch and liked the wordplay.

I know another element that informs Moonshiners is the significance of the history of bootlegging to the history of NASCAR racing. My dad is a big fan of racing, and while NASCAR is never his most beloved form, I do pay attention to it to some extent to have something to talk to him about. I know that I learned about this connection from a Youtube documentary titled there will Never Ever be another driver like Dale Earnhardt, by EmpLemon.

I knew I wanted to do something with an auction game, inspired by watching No Rolls Barred and other online tabletop gaming channels play the game Cash & Guns. I know that I am biased towards crime games, too.

I don’t currently have a good handle on the best ideas here, but the important thing is ensuring that I have raw data that I can dig into.