#two bullets

Some really fantastic games tonight at the ‘What Are We Playing’ night at the Tap Room! Got to play Cash n’ Guns and Two Rooms and a Boom for the first time! Both are completely amazing and way more fun than I expected.

As I figured, Cash n’ Guns was Reservoir Dogs: The Game and was fun to play with complete strangers. In short, the players are dividing up loot after a heist, and in true crime fashion are backstabbing each other. Each round players point their guns simultaneously at each other, after playing one of their Bang or Click cards. Players who wuss out or are shot don’t get to divide up loot that round, and you play until everyone’s out of bullet cards. Light, silly, and you get to horse around with foam guns.

Two Rooms and a Boom almost stole the night, as we got to play roughly 25 person games hosted by some of the nice fellows from Shut Up and Sit Down. In Two Rooms and a Boom, players are either on a red team or blue team, with secret role cards, in one of two rooms. Each round, both rooms vote on a leader, who chooses hostages to send to the other side. One blue player is the President, and one red player is the Bomber. If the game ends with both in the same room, the red team wins! During deliberation, players chat and generally reveal either the color of their card or their role to each other. It feels like a silly cocktail party where some Bad Shit is about to go down.

In the second game I played, I was a neutral character called the victim who only wins of they get blown up. I knew who the bomber and president were, and on the very last turn, our leader accidentally sent the bomber away, inadvertently saving the president and preventing me from dying. Even with perfect information, you’re still powerless on your own.

Also managed to play Two Bullets for the very first time! It has some issues that need to be ironed out, (as written, once you get lots of money you’re hard to stop! Player elimination sucks, and some of the bidding/betting rules needed to be tightened up), but we ended up having fun betting on whether the other players would live or die! I ended the game broke, and was handed a revolver with five chambers fired… So I couldn’t afford to spin (pay any one currency card), and was forced to thus pull the trigger and reveal the bullet. Blam.

As promised, here’s a link to the prototype PDF for those at Gen Can’t 2014! It’s only ever been played once, and (is probably broken.) Enjoy!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/orkd6grdjruv1sx/twobullets-final-layout.pdf

I also pulled out fuckyeahnobenefits for the tired crowd, and after reading most of the cards and laughing their asses off, we played the first half of a game! It went a little more slowly than normal (alcohol + 2am + exhausted), but we had a few enjoyable rounds before everyone left and we called it a night (We made it to Tuesday, and almost no one completed any assignments). It’s really great to play with new people and see them read through the cards and laugh. The best compliment we got was along the lines of, ‘Individually the cards are all very funny, but there’s a dark streak running through them all that makes them feel real. It makes me feel like I wasted my twenties.’ Amen.

Working on No Benefits under tight deadlines has really helped me get more disciplined at rapidly creating prototypes and iterating based on feedback. There are a bunch of games that I'd like to make next, but the only way I can get to all of them is if I spend as little time on each as I can, while getting as close to the essence as I can within that time. These are some of the ideas I had in my notebook today...

-> Dreamstarter 

(digital, iPhone game about running a Kickstarter project, which has an optional (ironman) realtime mode. There's a lot of stuff I didn't know about it until I tried to run one with Paolo that would make a hilarious (and educational) light management game. The realtime mode would be deliciously punishing, especially if you got push notifications when your fake project got backers/messages. I've always wanted to make a game that ran in real time on your phone, and running a time limited project is really a great application of that. Plus, it has an obvious way to have a high score table! Sort of a Crowd Funding Story game, if Kairosoft were to make it.)

-> Fuck You, Admiral, Sir

(physical, a loosely star trek inspired space combat and exploration card focused on the unpredictability of starship captains after you send them on missions; based on a discussion I had with my brother in law about Starfleet Battles, using some space combat specific lessons learned while I was developing the tabletop game Wormhole)

-> Two Bullets 

(physical, a card game of russian roulette playable at your poker table w/ a stadard deck and chips, or with custom bullet/chamber cards & fake communist money, inspired by That Scene in The Deer Hunter. This is all about the side bets and a LOT of fun to play. The inspiration was me wondering, if 2D6 is such a popular game (craps), could I made 1D6 into a fun game? A little known fact is that this game is ACTUALLY playable with a real revolver instead of cards. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.)

-> There's Nothing Left

(digital, a pared down text based wasteland survival game using your phone, GPS, and real location/time/weather with no goddamn map, just GPS coordinates, visuals inspired by B&W pixelated GPS devices, focused on text events when you go to new physical locations & offline push notifs. Like the oregon trail, but it's just you, the world is basically ending, and there's no Oregon for you to go to. A game about slowly dying and stretching it out as long as you can. There's probably been a nuclear holocaust; but there aren't any zombies to lighten the mood. I tried to make this last year in April during a game jam, but we ended up making it 'cute' with little cute avatars and where the goal was to rescue people. I won't make the mistake of it being uplifting again.)

-> Madman Theory

(physical or digital, 1970's propaganda focused game about getting what you want while driving the other leaders (and the rest of the world) to the brink of nuclear annihilation, heavy propaganda visuals, dealing with 1970's political issues that seem trite now, and using lessons learned from my 2006 DEFCON card game. I'm imagining big fucking white and red stars on cards. This would be a fun game to release as a print & play. Inspired by: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory)

-> This Ain't No Party

(physical or digital, a team management game about sending a recon team on patrols in Vietnam; a game about bravery or stupidity against an unforgiving situation for a cause you don't believe in; emotional attachment followed by inevitable loss; XCOM pared down to the essentials; much love to the Talking Heads)

-> Defenders of Humanity

(physical, kneejerk-reaction XCOM inspired strategic game for no reason other than the fact that XCOM is awesome, saving the world is awesome, and the strategic game always needed a bit more love. Pandemic meets X-Files, playable in 45 minutes, possibly a solo game)

-> World at War: Red Tide

(physical, a simple campaign system for my favorite cold war wargame, World at War, which could be included in their magazine; I've been working on this on and off for 5 years and never finished something I liked. Essentially it's about moving divisions around on a map with very low granularity, then fighting the resulting battles using World at War)

-> Generation Sext

(physical; a light card game about sexting as a teen without getting busted! Written from the perspective of "the parents not knowing what those damn kids are up to." For the sour grapes people who dismiss Snapchat as an app that young people use to get laid.)