Pink Sleeves

From most to least recent

Cube Design

Recross the Paths podcast appearance.

What am I Asking Players to Pay Attention to? Treating attention as a finite resource that can be directed to or distracted from the experience you're trying to create.

Are We Designing For Cubecon? The misaligned incentives of designing for online, versus your local community. Also available as a mini-podcast.

When Flavour and Agency Collide. Looking at how the flavour of cards and what you do with them can interact in uncomfortable ways.

Introducing Your Cube. A pithy infographic.

Cube Design & the Zeitgeist [CubeCobra link]. How the online cube community influenced my Forbidden Trash cube. As mentioned by Rhystic Studies.

Tactics for Stretching your Complexity Budget. Differentiating between absolute and experienced complexity.

Approachable Hand Disruption. Including hand hate in beginner-friendly cubes. Published simultaneously on CubeCobra.

Why is the Robot Sad? [CubeCobra link] Determining the objectives of your colourless section.

Non-Magic Game Design

Getting my reps in as an absolute amateur.

Downtown Loop: A TTRPG zine for my pre-schooler, about helping ghosts in the Toronto subway. itch.io

Transit Puzzle Game: A puzzle game about constrained planning for ≥1 player. Original Post | Tagged Posts

Scare School: An "Imagination Dice Game" [TTRPG] for my pre-schooler. Original Post | Tagged Posts

Also,

Four-player draft of Pink Sleeves | Six packs of fifteen, discard the last eight from each pack.

🏆 Mardu Flyers drafted by DF

Folks, is flying good? Are fixing lands good? How about removal? Vault Skirge + Equipment? Less obvious, but Azra Oddsmaker was also great. Love this deck.

I played a really fun game against it where Lightstall Inquisitor stopped me from casting Massacre Wurm for 6. I kept losing life to Scrawling Crawler, regaining it with Blood Artist. Ended up with four cards in my deck and couldn't find my seventh land in time.

Simic Kruphix Clone drafted by CC

Proof that a ramp deck can work, but I'm still gonna cut Worn Powerstone. Good use of clones and Control Magic, especially when you can get multiple Pelakka Wurms.

Orzhov Living Rat drafted by SJ

I had some very fun turns with this deck, but it ended up fighting itself a little too much. Made my friends discard too many cards for Living Death to be truly back-breaking, only had Pack Rat go off once (but hell yes, got to use my new Ratboy tokens).

Loved being in a spot where I wanted to use all three Rankle modes on each hit. Kept forgetting to cast Lingering Souls from the graveyard. Not enough spot removal, but lots of fun discarding, sacrificing, recurring, and otherwise moving cards between zones.

Selesnya Hardened Bramble drafted by ML

Pack Rat Token, July 11, 2026.

Unfortunately I think the image links for the Magic: the Simpsoning* Cube broke, but here is a Pack Rat Token. I think the negative space in the top left looks awkward, but I'd rather learn that as a lesson for next time than fix it now.

🏆 3-0 Golgari Living Death drafted by one of the Adams, April 25, 2026

6 player draft of Pink Sleeves. 5 packs of 15, discard last 3 from each pack, everyone started with a Cogworks Librarian.

Giving PWHL teams power over their road schedule could reduce travel, control costs, build rivalries, and add another spike of off-season excitement.

Ages ago I put together a thread on a divisionless NHL. Cutting the league into divisions has always created losers. For years, Detroit and Chicago were unjustly kept apart. Nowadays, Nashville shares a division with Salt Lake City (3.5 hour flight, 4 games per season) and a conference with Vancouver (5 hour flight, 3 games per season). This is a team that can get to Carolina, Columbus, or Tampa in a couple hours, yet only takes a single trip to each of them over the course of the new 84 game season.

An old draft of connections for a division-less NHL. Numbers on lines are the number of games opted into by the connected teams (not counting the default home and away). Matchups with less than three games are omitted.

One solution? Abolish divisions. The PWHL is already a step ahead of the NHL on this, but the influx of new far-flung teams, now is a great time to put a structure in place.

I am not going to touch playoff format, I'm going to keep a home and away game for every team so that every market has a chance to see every player, and I'm not going to pretend to understand the work that goes into barnstorming games. With those caveats, here's the pitch:

Each team drafts their road games. Well, the ones remaining after the home and home, which is probably only four, but that's okay!

You're in control of your travel. You're in control of your matchups, and there are a bunch of things a team can do with these decisions:

Minimize travel time

Cut down cross-border travel

Try to prey on weaker teams

Cultivate rivalries

Keep your televised games within your time zone

Travel to cities that are nice to visit

Let your players decide

Let your fans vote!

I'm sure you could come up with more angles and considerations. It's also a marketing opportunity in at least a couple directions.

First, it's another off-season event to generate a little bit of engagement in the dog days. Some of us are sickos and want that kind of thing.

Second, the game can be hyped up by both teams. A road team with fans that travel well can try to take over the arena. The home team can hype it up: When someone challenges you to a game in your own barn, that's extra stakes, and in this system it's all but guaranteed to be against someone you have some kind of rivalry with.

Okay but how does it work?

Pick a draft order, I don't care how. Reverse standings and then snake? Sure, great. Better than great: good enough! (Okay, but important to note that being at the very end of the draft is the one spot where you might end up stuck with a bad flight... but maybe you make a trade to avoid it? So much drama.)

Each team has to host four of these games. In the first two or three rounds of the draft you can't pick the same team to play against twice. Final round is a free for all.

When I did this for the NHL I found completing half the rounds before allow re-picks created a good-feeling balance, but there each team had ten opponents to pick, thanks to the (at the time) 82 game season: 41 road games, minus the one guaranteed game in each city. With a 12 team, 30 game season, there aren't many games to divy up.

So what does the draft look like?

I did a test run, mainly considering travel distance and border crossings (please don't yell at me!). I got this:

Red circles are the last game available in that city. The first three rounds I did not allow repeat picks. Fourth round was a free-for-all.

When you look at teams that elect to play each other at least twice, you get very division-like clusters: Pacific, Canadian East, and American East clusters, but Vancouver, Vegas, Minnesota, and Boston particularly improve their schedule versus explicitly using those groups.

You also get super rivalries:

New York and Boston

Montreal and Ottawa

Hamilton and Toronto

Vancouver and Seattle

These teams each drafted each other's games the maximum two times, leading to 6 matchups in a season. These are markets that twin easily, why not lean into it? Is six games against the same team in a 30 game season a lot? Yes, absolutely... But you don't have to do that! Teams who don't like it have agency.

In the Mothership module Gradient Descent, players are likely to come across The Labyrinth, described as follows:

“THE LABYRINTH: bird’s nest tangle of wet pseudoflesh-lined tunnels and corridors of pipes and scaffolding. Constantly shuddering and shifting in peristalsis.”

This is accompanied by a d10 table with the instruction, “Roll below every time the crew travels in the Labyrinth until they find an exit, The Minotaur, or The Core”

I’d run the Labyrinth as written once for a one-shot. The feeling of repeatedly being kicked back to an exit (20% chance each roll) gave the impression of it being surreal and unknowable, like navigating an Escher painting. It didn’t give it any sense of scale or complexity. I think it can be enriched.

On top of that, as I was prepping for my ongoing campaign, I noticed that the accompanying table is rough. Once I caught that one entry gives random results numbered 1 to 9, other details began looking suspicious. Not game-breaking, but the variety of Androids present raises an eyebrow (why those two specifically?), one entry (2) looks like it may be intended to mirror another (4), but doubles the chance of encountering the Minotaur instead, room references are presented in an unintuitive order… These are nitpicks, but it reinforced my desire to rework the Labyrinth mechanically.

I had a tool in mind: Flux Space, or at least a simplified version.

Spoilers for Gradient Descent after the jump.

Scans for my basics page on Cube Cobra.

Mountain. Duskmourn (2024), illustrated by Nestor Ossandon Leal. Altered by Brent for Untap TO, September 2025.

Forest. Return to Ravnica (2012), illustrated by Yeong-Hao Han. Altered by Brent for Untap Winter 2026, January 2026.

Two weirdos for my basics page on Cube Cobra

Isola [Spanish Island]. Fourth Edition Foreign Black Border (1995), illustrated by Mark Poole.

I ran the Haunting of Ypsilon-14 for my dad and sister last night, neither of whom had played Mothership before.

I read the pamphlet twice and did some prep:

My only substantial change was saying that they had to drop off their delivery but also pick up cargo from Dr. Giovanni, which Sonya is unaware of, but suggests it could be in the Heracles, or down in the mine.

I sketched the workspace just to make sure I had a mental image of the area incorporating all the provided details

I decided on basic timelines for the NPCs to keep introductions manageable: An oncoming shift filters into the workspace (minus a conspicuous missing Mike), an outgoing shift arrives from the mine, they head to different spots in the living area.

Unlike previous Mothership sessions, I put sticky notes in the Player’s Survival Guide for stuff I knew I was going to need to reference, which reduced friction so much.

I wish I had prepped physical descriptions of the miners, to give them a little more presence, although I think the quick descriptions do give them enough personality to run with.

I had both of them roll up two characters each, with the intention of treating one each as contractors, but they just played them as normal, which was fine.

Rules didn't feel like an impediment at all. The combination of the character sheet, the “how to be a good player" section, and the back cover of the PSG gives such good, consistent, scripted onboarding.

There was a bit of staring at character sheets for answers (“none of my skills are useful” and “what is the point of my trinket?" (I took the opening to re-explain spark tables)).

There was a lot of out of character discussion of what they should do, to the point where once or twice I told them they needed to talk to each other in character. I’ve seen the advice of having players only be able to talk to each other in character to build immersion, and I’m liking that more and more. It feels like a must in situations with obvious time pressure and/or NPCs present.

I’ve run the Panic Engine close to a dozen times now, and it felt like the first time I called for saves and panic an appropriate amount: PC’s ended with between 5 and 15 stress, and there were several failed panic checks. I do kind of buy that the Panic Table could be more dramatic, but it works when panic is happening frequently.

I really like how open ended yet constrained the adventure is: because they decided to go down to the mine almost immediately, it was very yellow goo-forward, instead of monster-forward. I’ve seen it progress very differently in actual plays. The story is going to advance naturally, without having any story beats prescribed.

Survive, solve, or save?

I’d give them half marks on all three:

They killed the monster

2 of 4 player characters survived

5 out of 11 NPCs (cat plus 4 miners) escaped with the surviving PCs. I maybe should've been picking them off faster while the players were down in the mine

See the rest of the review and some of my prep here.

Once you leave Heron Station, you’re met with the text, “It takes a half-day’s hard scrabble through the foothills to get to the ship” and no other details. This is a hard contrast with the trip from Greta to Heron, which had light scaffolding to support you.

Flux through the Jungle

I decided I didn't want to skip over the travel. Getting through an alien jungle didn't feel trivial.

The solution I arrived at was a shallow flux space (5 random points of interest, and 6th “deep” location), with the intention of giving more insight into what the carcs are doing while they aren’t assaulting the colony. I enjoyed coming up with these spots, but I know my friends felt like they weren’t sure what they need to do. Of the five I wrote:

Four gave clues about the carcs’ intelligence and/or intentions

Two had avoidable violent encounters

One gave the opportunity to learn how to solve a later puzzle

None presented obstacles for proceeding

I then re-worked the ones they hadn’t visited for the trip back, with the complication of warring carcs.

I didn’t design in enough player agency. These areas were exhausted once you learned what you could and engaged with or avoided the violent encounter, but with no clear indication that you were ready to move on. They needed problems to solve. In contrast, the deep location--a carc path to the ship--did feel pretty good, because it has a clear conclusion. I think I would keep this flux space for a replay, but I would have to do significant work making it more game-able.

Starting from the blank canvas of, “I don’t want to just skip over this travel,” to researching options for handling it, to writing the points, was a ton of prep time for not a lot of play time, and was enjoyable, but took away from other prep I could’ve done. It didn’t feel like it was worth it for the group, but it did feel like an investment in my own skills.

Prepping the Ship

I like the room designs in the ship, but the three linear paths felt designed to invalidate prep. I’m going to try to internalize a bunch of puzzles, and I know that once the party picks an entrance, there’s a minuscule chance that they'll encounter two-thirds of them. My friends figured out how to open the airlock and took the extremely short [B1], [B2], [B5], [D] route. I know there’s always going to be stuff players miss, but this makes the feel-bad explicit.

The strength of the linear design is that it turns gameplay into a series of puzzles to solve, which in some ways was a really nice change of pace. What it failed to do was make the ship feel like a real, labyrinthine, alien location, and my players commented that it felt a little anti-climactic. If I were to run this again, I would seriously consider re-working the layout of the ship, but that did not feel like a realistic option for me as a new Warden running a published adventure, and I wanted to try it as written rather than assume I knew better. There would also need to be some kind of mechanic to guide players in the right direction, in case they lost or didn't find have the tracker for Hinton.

Hinton and the Nobles

When I initially read the module, the Court sounded very under-explained, but at least for me, this ended up one of the spots where I had the most fun thinking through how it ought to play, and how to tie all the threads together, without feeling like it was a burden. No notes.

Make up your own Scenario IV mechanics

The ask for the final act is weird. It’s true that it would be difficult to pre-write, depending on the specifics of how your adventure has played out, but with the zooming out, simplifying big actions, the way the timeline works, you’re being asked to make something up that you haven’t done before. There’s not really any way to take what you’ve been taught so far and apply it. This involves changing the mechanics of the game to portray kinds of conflict that aren’t well-covered in the Player’s Survival Guide.

My work-around was to create a set-piece at Heron Station, with the survivors holed up in the hangar, fighting off a wave of carcs, and the drop ship incoming. I did about half an hour of work creating and balancing a slightly simplified combat system for the carcs attacking and the colonists defending, and that paid off. The party burnt some time on tactics that put them in good position, but likely cost them the lives of most of the colonist inside.

Ship combat for some reason

Once you’re on the ship, I followed rules as written for damage from the attack (it caused a fire, which led to a few rounds of damage before the sprinkler system took care of it), they dealt with Maas, and all the infected got into hypersleep.

I didn’t bother with teaching ship mechanics, because there’s really no payoff. The ship attacks once, then evades. It moves at a speed like they’ve never seen. So, what is the battle supposed to be? I don’t think there’s anything meaningful the players can do, except maybe get a lucky hit in… except that as described in the Shipbreakers’ Toolkit the executive transport has no weapons.

It’s not a problem -- I think a terrifying ship that outclasses you hitting you once provides lots of drama -- there’s just no benefit to participating in player-facing combat, except to check the box of the adventure including it.

What is Mothership trying to do as it teaches you how to run the game?

I really admire Sean McCoy’s work in trying to create an onboarding point for running TTRPGs that doesn’t rely on Wizards of the Coast, and I think he’s doing a great job. The Warden's Operations Manual offers incredible, practical advice that demystifies and tears down barriers to entry, but with both the manual and Another Bug Hunt, Tuesday Knight Games is pulling off some sleight of hand.

Arguably, Mothership’s killer app is the huge library of high-quality zines and pamphlets, both first- and third-party. I love the mechanics, and I initially picked it up because I want to use it as the system for my own zine, but I’ve seen a lot of people talk about the adventures as the real selling point.

The fact is, the Warden’s Operation Manual doesn’t give much advice to help you run published modules, and the later portions of Another Bug Hunt don’t do a very good job of prepping you for running published modules. They are both much more focused on getting you comfortable with the idea of making your own adventure.

I would call it insidious, except look at the outcomes: I suspect that trick is a big reason why there is such a virtuous cycle of people enthusiastic and confident enough to make stuff for people to play. Is Mothership built on a lie? Maybe, kind of! Am I going to hold it against them? No, I will not.

The early sections of Another Bug Hunt gave me exactly what I was expecting. The later sections provide something else, something that makes Wardens stronger, makes the community stronger, but doesn’t necessarily lead to the best experience for players, and doesn’t always feel like you’re getting what you signed up for. I’m really glad I ran it all the way through, but this is an adventure that is purposely incomplete, and as the introductory adventure, I don’t think that’s what everyone comes in expecting. As you get farther in, it stops being a fun, pre-written adventure to share with your friends, and starts being creative exercise.

That sounds like a dour note to end on, but there was so much in Another Bug Hunt that I loved, memories with my friends that I will cherish, and I think it made me better at running games, and especially writing my own stuff. I think it’s unlikely I’ll ever run a longer play-through again, but this provides great fodder for one-shots, and I’d easily recommend this, with the caveat that it’s going to make you do work.

Break a leg saving, solving, and surviving!

Spoiler-heavy player handouts for Another Bug Hunt!

See the rest of the review and some of my prep here

Scenario 2 has some high highs and some throw-you-in-the-deep-end stuff.

Shipbreaker’s Toolkit and the APC

It feels a little weird that in the absence of a description of the APC, the module doesn’t call out something like, “details on the APC are available in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, or feel free to make it up yourself.” Because the toolkit is inessential for running most adventures, and an APC isn't a ship, it’s easy to miss that the APC is in there, even if you have it. I realized it was there during our one-shot, which is bad timing, but I was appreciative of not needing to improvise it.

Ride of the Valkyries

Scenario 2 opens with the suggestion of an encounter while your friends travel from Greta Base to the Heron Terraforming Station, with the explicit instruction to flesh it out as much or as little as you want.

This leans into play report territory, but I am getting to a point, I swear…

The situation I came up with is that there’s a bend in the path along the river, and just beyond the bend, bugs have downed trees, and dug hidden pits in the jungle. I had already decided that the jungle was majority bamboo, but I did some research on invasive trees that might be used for terraforming in thin soil. Taking elements from Black Locust and Honey Locust felt appropriate: black bark, long thorns, sparse leaves, and big pods. Alien-sounding, but purely terrestrial.

On the ride, the player in the turret spotted a glimpse of a carc in a tree. I used trait 73 from the random table, but that wasn’t rolled randomly. I decided to progressively ramp up the weirdness of traits. That paid off as players developed competing theories about them, and gradually had elements of those theories confirmed or (more often) contradicted.

The players decided that rather than ramming the trees, firing the APC’s mortar, or going off-road, two of them would get out and investigate, which is terrific horror movie logic. They got ambushed, one of their backup marines was dismembered and left comatose, before the carcs were drawn away by Valdez.

It is amazing that with around a hundred words the authors set up such a fertile but well-bounded prompt to get new Wardens to stretch their legs. Masterful, economical pedagogy.

Running NPCs

Heron Station's NPCs are… daunting. You’re given more than enough information to do a good job with Valdez, Brookman, and especially Edem, but damn, running a situation where three NPCs are in the same spot and all trying to get you to go along with their competing plans is intense.

This was intimidating, and in my pursuit of guidance I came across a couple reviews of the module that called this out as a difficult spot to put a novice GM in, which was reassuring. The warden's manual focuses on the roles of NPCs in an adventure, more than the front-line work of playing an NPC, so wasn't much help. I will come back to the interaction between the warden’s guide and published modules in a later post, because I think that dynamic is interesting.

I mitigated the issue by having Valdez give her spiel to the players outside the base before you’ve met anyone else, but it still felt like a juggling act.

I liked having Sobol as the voice of god to answer questions about the base and technology. They're enriched past being an info-dump by their suspicions about Hinton, which Valdez can dismiss as prejudice.

Edem’s secret is a great opportunity to stress-test the lack of social abilities, and frankly, it just works. It works for players to ask, “can I get a read on this?” and be told that she seems like she’s hiding something, and let them pick at it. I didn’t feel like it lost anything at all by not being hidden behind a roll.

I think I under-developed Brookman, but my friends decided they would go to the lab and then the tower, which feels like the default path a lot of groups will take, although I'm sure that my bias leaked in. 

Hinton’s Whereabouts and the Logic Core

One bit of timeline-breaking is that if the players find the long-range scanner in Greta Base and then speak to Valdez in Heron Station, you get two tough-to-reconcile reports on Hinton’s location: he’s already up in the mountains, but he just went down to the reactor. Not impossible, but I thought it was more interesting to lean into the weirdness.

Meanwhile, what is there to stop you from calling down a dropship and just waiting for it to arrive without ever engaging with the later material?

My solution was:

Hinton managed to either clone or surgically remove his logic core (yes, hand-wavey sci-fi), and it is in the mothership, which is what is being picked up by the scanner. He really did go down to the reactor. Sobol can speak to android technology, and that he doesn’t have an answer for how he could be in two places.

When you restore comms, Maas is enthusiastic and then asks for the identification number off the logic core, which would require either physically having it or getting that information from Hinton. He does not respond in any way after requesting it.

When you get to Hinton at the end of part 3, he has already deduced everything, and is more than happy to hand over his logic core, for his own nefarious reasons.

I was happy with how all of this played out. The downside was that spending time on this siphoned time away from other prep that I should have done, like writing evocative descriptions that I’m not good at improvising.

The Laboratory

The laboratory was pleasantly self-contained, but I made a mistake. The party was extremely cautious going in and engaging with Ziegler, and I let them get the jump on him and had him less far along in his infection, because I just didn’t think another fight with a carc would be fun in the moment. The issue was that it made the whole laboratory feel very minor. That was the wrong call, and the module doesn't bear any blame for that.

The Dam and the Tower

Without getting into play-by-play, the dam and the tower went better than I could have expected. I’ve heard of prepping situations instead of props, and loading them up with potential energy, and this was an incredible demonstration of that power. The players’ actions, the complications, and the consequences flowed naturally, and ended up cinematic and exciting. I think it hinges on the attack ending with the death of the carc as a release valve, because otherwise the situation would be doomed. There’s lots I bet I can learn by studying this section, and this was the highlight of the whole adventure. The only snag was that the players who got into the control room didn’t understand that they could kill the carc, and I’m not sure how I could’ve communicated it better. One of the others was on the roof (the fourth was hiding in the storage room at the base of the tower with a broken collarbone after being knocked down when Brookman slipped on the ladder), and he did get it and eventually asked, “why aren’t you killing it?”

The Reactor

Spoiler-free player-facing mission organization chart for Another Bug Hunt, plus a somewhat inaccurate map for players to fumble with (it worked well with my group, imo!)