I have created a monster

 

I’ve recently introduced my son, 6, to roleplaying. While we were in quarantine, walking tight circles in our small garden, trampling what was left of the grass into the ground, we talked. And I said something along the lines of “Let’s play a game. I tell the story, you tell me what the main character does. It’s what I do with my friends when we talk on the computer. Let’s start by creating your character.”

My son was doubtful for about two minutes, then he was hooked. He’s been demanding more and more adventures every day, more than I can feasibly make up between working, keeping up with the family, and two children. But that’s another story. This one is about my son becoming something terrifying: A would-be Skaven-player of Warhammer Fantasy.

How did that happen? Well, the other weekend he asked me what my favorite monster was in the now almost daily roleplaying sessions. “Ratling,” I said, “that’s why they are in almost every game I develop or lead.” My son wasn’t convinced and told me he liked skeletons. I said I prefer zombies because I kind of see how they could feasibly function (one of the drags about being an adult: Weaker suspension of disbelief). We agreed to disagree.

Then the kid asked me if I had invented ratlings myself. I told him no, they’ve been around in some form or the other. Skaven from Warhammer for example. I followed up with a short, child-friendly description of what a tabletop-strategy game is. Then I whipped out the phone, googled some images of Skaven armies. “Did you play them?” “No, they were too expensive for me. I had evil elves.” “Can we play this game with my toys? Legos?” “Sure, why do you think there are still mechs left over in the Legos that you inherited from me?” The conversation drifted elsewhere.

Then, while getting ready for bed later, he talked to my wife. She came to me “He’s been talking about saving all his money to buy an army to defeat you with rats?” the mother of my children asked me, knowing full well that this was about some form of nerdery by her men that her normie-brain couldn’t possibly understand. “Fuck,” I thought, this wasn’t going where I had hoped. I gave a her a quick-rundown of what tabletop-strategy games are, then of my youth with hundreds of Marks wasted on the stuff. “I will defeat you with the army you never had, Papa!” my son called from upstairs. “No!” I fathered back, “You are not going to get into Warhammer before you’re at least 13 or 14!” Then to my wife who was standing closer to me: “It’s definetly note made for kids.” “But he wants to save up for it.” “And he can and if he does, he’ll have enough money for a Skaven army by the time he is 14.”

The story doesn’t end there.

The next day, he was in preschool. Quarantine had ended in the meantime. When he came back, he had two Eurocents in his pocket that he didn’t have when he left: He had told his peers about his plan to defeat his father with a ratling army. And one boy had actually pitched a coin he had on him into this quest. My son had started crowd-funding his way to a Warhammer-army.

I never wanted for him to get into what my former roommate and friend Justin calls “plastic crack”. I have created a monster. Should I curate stories of my younger years more? I don’t know but it feels like I succeeded as a nerd and failed as a father. Not good. Oh well. I don’t even know if I still have my dark elves. If so, they must have been gathering dust somewhere at my dad’s place for almost two decades. I’ll have to clean them up. Well. I guess I have eight years to get them into fighting shape.

Book Idea: Cogite Ergo Sum

 I've been thinking: What if you made a book that pretends to be a chatbot that pretends to be sentient? Could one do that? I mean, you can have computation of sorts by making a choose-your-own-adventure and have the reader do some of the lifting by following instructions to find certain pages. Then you can add a couple of bits of RAM/Memory like I did with Der Dornengarten. Can you make a book that pretends to have a conversation with the reader, arguing for its own sentience, perhaps even be convincing in it? I'll have to ask a friend who studied philosophy what the killer arguments would be and then make up ways to have them flow into a conversation where one side can only pick out of multiple-choice answers like they're playing a video game. It's just an idea but what if...

Free Release: Zombie Mansion

 A new fully-fledged release by your truly: I've been slaving away what little spare time I have next to two kids and my day-job in order to delve deep into the bowels of what Twine can do. I present to you:

This is my idea of what a text-adventure-version of Resident Evil is like. I made my own story with my own main character for it but the beats are there: A mansion full of zombies. Combat that always puts you at risk of injury. A handgun, a shotgun, a close-combat-weapon and the almighty magnum for weaponry. Inventory-juggling. Finding secret items and keys. Lots of optional content.

If you play, do so mindfully: It's unlikely, you'll make it on the first attempt. There are several routes one might go and they are centered around what weapon you get second. There is also a speedrun you could try, killing only a few zombies. It is risky though. I recommend, methodically killing nearly alls zombies. You do not have to fight the bosses though. Avoid if possible. Draw a map. Study movement patterns of said bosses. Be smart. And

Have fun!

How big does a dungeon need to be?

 When it comes to dungeon sizes in games, the differences are vast. From a design perspective, the bigger of a dungeon you create, the smaller the level of detail you can put into each room. I've been experimenting a lot with world sizes in my games. The trick is to make a few rooms seem a lot bigger. But how do we do that?

Three Horror Game Scenarios

Pen and paper horror is ideally made in one-shots. Two of these I have GMd before, using my crad-drafting little pnp-system. It's possible I'll make some of these into one page dungeons or something similar at some point. For now:

The Drillhole Trilogy

1. Oilfield

• You are the survivors of a plane crash. The engine of the passenger jet just cut out.
• Clinging to floating seat cushions the high waves carry you towards a darkened oil rigg.
• Inside, everyone is dead. There are weird symbols scratched into the walls.
• There is a shoggoth in the main tank. It's angry.
  
• Twist ending: The world has ended. You are among the few survivors.
• You must stop a second event. The source of the mass death is on this oil rigg.
  

2. Abyssal Entrance

• You are a group of urban explorers somewhere in the Russian hinterland.
• An old research installation is legendary among your ilk. It is completely abandoned.
• Radio picks up scratched transmitions. They turn out to be coded christian prayers.
• The bore hole that was used to explore the depths is at the bottom of a strip mine.
• Down there there is a record of a prayer powered by a radionuclear battery.
• In the 60s, the Soviets accidentally drilled a hole into hell.
  
• The record needs to be replaced. If it isn't or if it is turned off, hell will invade earth.

3. Icy Prison

• You are political prisoners in a penal outpost all the way out on Pluto.
• Every day you get to suit up and do geological exploratory digs.
• One of your fellow inmates catches something from the hole and goes insane.
• He infects some staff. They start killing people.
• You team up and try to survive.
• Can you fix up a space craft? Wait for help in several months time?
• Or do you stop the transmission of this mimetic disease before it spreads to other worlds?

10 Sapient Aliens

Dan over at Throne of Salt posted 10 sapient aliens for Mothership. I figured, I'd join the fun. Some of these I have actually used in roleplaying, others are brand new.

Note that in my games, the word "alien" is derogatory when talking about a sentient being. Aliens are animals. People are Xenos.

Technology and Magic

I like my fantasy more medieval than the mainstream these days does it. Outside having an aristocracy, most fantasy authors basically seem to transfer ideas of old-west frontiersmanship into a medieval setting. Lone farmsteads, guarded by farmers with shotguns crossbows. While this does make a murderhobo-fantasy more plausible, it really irks me. So do ginormous fortresses a la World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings. Like - who would have built this? With what manpower? Why?

I really dislike false modernisms in my fantasy. If you want street lamps and cell phones, please, by all means, use a modern setting. Urban fantasy is great in allowing you to do magic and swords while having all conveniances of modern civilization. If you can't think without smartphones, then don't. Fuck speaking stones. Fuck eternal lights. Let me state it here:

ANY SUFFICIENTLY MUNDANE MAGIC IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM TECHNOLOGY.

There, I said it. If every other dude can cast light/bread/whatever, there is no medieval society. Nope.

So magic better be rare, hard, opaque, weird, dangerous. Have the supernatural as a hint, not an everyday thing. And don't forget: If you can actually feel your god's power via visible and undeniable miracles they work through your or someone else's hands – please don't call it fucking faith.

My son as a game master

As a gift for Easter, I produced a Heroica Fanfiction Audioplay for my older son. Fifty minutes of fantasy-action, just for him, including the bosses and monsters he and I made up. I even gave his favorite characters the best moments. This, after repeated listenings over the holidays, inspired a creative frenzy in my son. While I was doing things like household chores, he was upstairs in his room, labouring away with the boxes of Legos that he inherited from me. Then he presented me with an adventure of his own making. He'd play the bad guys, I'd play the heroes. He was going to be my game master (although he doesn't know the term, this has happened totally organically).

His idea of a great adventure was that the Goblin Kings (The Twins, we usually call them, as we have two of them and they together form a boss encounter) have gathered all the monsters in their keep. Except for the Spitting Snake and the Giant Spider, all bosses are there as well. The goblin fortress is seperated from the human village by the bridge. In it there is the main hall full of horrors and troops, as well as three side wings. In one there is first the Kraken, then the Hydra, its den serving as a treasure chamber full of gold, potions, and a key. One is the throne room with the two Goblin Kings. The last one is another side wing. It features two hidden keys and a secret door that leads to another land.

That other land is the goal of the quest, as my son informed me. The kidnapped king of Heroica, father to Prince Alrik, leader of the heroes, is held there – but the heroes don't know that yet. I was allowed to have four active heroes at the time, the other four waiting as backup at the village tavern.

Mathematically, my team was very unlikely to defeat the massed foes in the main hall. My first strike team consisted of the Prince, the Knight, the Priest and the Thief. I had a plan: The team would head straight for the treasure chamber, where the Knight would hold the monsters from the hall off while the other three dealt with the Kraken and the Hydra. Then everyone would retreat with the loot to the village, where the treasure would allow them to heal and gear up.

The plan went reasonably well. While I lost the Knight and the Thief, the Priest and the Prince got out with the treasures. I filled the ranks with the Archer and the Druid and started back to the Goblin Fortress. That's when things got even more RPGish.

My son had used the turns I had spent buying stuff in the village: He had set an ambush with werewolves on the bridge. That failed to stop my heroes. When a single Level 1 goblin came out of the fortress, I decided to negotiate. I told it/my son that he didn't have a chance as a single goblin against four heavily armed heroes. My son conceided. The goblin decided to become a good citizen and went onto the big ship to take a nap. Later, while my heroes were entering the fortress again, he would go to the village oak to nibble on its big branch. As my son explained, goblins love meat and wood. He was the smartest of the goblins and thus decided to be a good guy.

Inside the fortress, my heroes encountered another wave of enemies in the form of miscelaneous smallish monsters and the Dark Druid. Then the remaining goblin forces surrendered – under the condition that my heroes leave the throne room and their kings alone. I decided that these were acceptable terms for Prince Alrik, after he had learned that the goblins didn't have his dad. The heroes went into the wing with the magic door undisturbed and we decided to call it a night and continue the adventure/campaign in my son's other land another day.

It was only half way through that game of Heroica that I realized that I was in fact playing a roleplaying campaign designed by my son. He is only five and can't read or write but the graspable little character sheets made from Lego combined with the simple tactics of the dice rolls and loot system enabled him to become a game master. I am astonished and proud that he put thought into things.

He even heeded my advice from an earlier game and gave me a good reason to go into a dead end full of boss monsters (all the treasure and a mission-relevant key). During my last assault he even realized that his guys should try to kill my healer (the Priest) but after that failed, he figured the smart thing for the goblins would be to give up. I'm glad he isn't one of the bloodthirsty kids that assume that murder is the only way to play this. And I'm very very curious what the land beyond the magical door has in store for my quartet of heroes.

More Heroica Bosses

My older son and I made some more boss enemies for Heroica. It's basically a continuation of this post. It's easier to make boss enemies than regular foes. The regular beasties require tiny figurines and are, rules-wise, rather boring. So, here's three new bosses and their rules:

The Chained Snake: My son made this boss and its rules. It has 3 HP and can not only fight in close combat, but also attack a specific field in the corridor leading up to it by spitting acid there. If a character ends on that squre, you roll a combat die but cannot harm the snake. Shield: You deal one damage to the snake. Sword or sword/skull: You lose one HP. Skull: You lose three HP. A tough monster to fight.

The Sewer Kraken: This boss has a setpiece. You gotta get past its tentacles before attacking it from a square behind it. On the dark grey squares, it can attempt to grab you with an attack roll. If it hits, you get into the appropriate tentacle. On your next turn it hands you over to the next tentacle and you roll another combat roll. On sword or shield, you get free, on skull, you lose another HP. That way, the Kraken will make you run the parcours again. Once you're behind it, you can actually hurt it. It has 3 HP.

The Hydra: With as much as 6 HP, the Hydra is very hard to kill. For every two HP you take off of it, it loses one of its three heads. Combat rolls function normally, the Hydra deals damage equal to its remaining heads. So it's basically a more defensive version of the Giant Bat.

So our new bosses include our first experiments with bosses that have ranged attacks. Also, the Kraken can, like the Giant Spider, manipulate the heroes and their positioning. This makes for a far more dynamic battle and is balanced out with the low damage output of this boss. The Hydra is, in my opinion, the coolest looking of the trio but also mechanically the most boring one as it is just a straight-up fight.

In the future I will likely design more set-piece-fights like the one against the Kraken. That one is, by the way, ideal to be placed in the sewers, reinfocing the Monsters in the depths.

Instant Dungeon

So, these days I (and all my co-workers) work from home. The virus is threatening public life where I am, although it has yet to spread wide enough to cause panic. No one wears masks in public (yet). Because we're a society that has forgotten that threats beyond vague promises of terrorism can and do exist. And our state agencies are failing where they can. So better stay home with the family.

As I save time of my regular bycicle commute every day, I've had not just more time to spend with the family but also to do creative stuff. My older son and I have been playing a lot of Heroica and I was thinking about how to make a modular dungeony board game (once again). I have a writing block that I use to doodle during calls for work - and I decided to use said doodling for a useful cause. A new game is in the making. What's special about this one is that I am doing a lot of artwork.

16 Pages thus far, each one representing a business meeting over remote work. They can be rearranged in whatever order, most combinations allow for every part of the labyrinth to be traversed in some way.

Even if it doesn't become an actual playable game it will probably look decent enough when spread out together as a labyrinth on a table. But the idea is that everyone gets a character to play and that chests mean loot, monsters mean fighting, big monsters mean big fights. Keys open doors, obviously. Loot will come in the form of equipment cards that each have different benefits, from giving you extra HP to better fighting to lockpicking and all that. Have yet to think of actual rules but it will be a fun, kid-friendly labyrinth/dungeoncrawl once done.

The cool thing is that it inspired my older son to make his own version of the game. It's even bigger than mine.

Megaman

Lately I've been, for the first time in ever, dabbling in something one might consider to be fan fiction. I've always despised using other people's characters but my son made a wish for Easter: Dad, make me a megaman Tonie. Tonies are, for those without a young child in their life, figurines with an rfid-chip that can access cloud-based audio when placed on the appropriate speaker box. The makers offer some figures with ready-made audio plays (my son is listening the The Little Prince right now as I am typing this). And ones you can freely upload stuff for.

My son never played a Megaman game. My son never saw the 90s cartoon with its terrible soundtrack. His peers have no idea who or what Megaman is. He only knows what he heard then I explained to him that I was going to a concert by the Protomen this fall. And what he saw in fan-made music videos to their work. That was enough for him to wish for a Megaman action figure for christmas, which he likes to play with in conjunction with landscapes made out of Lego Duplo.

And now he wanted a Tonie. There is no Megaman Tonie. There isn't even an audio play I could use. And the cartoon show is terrible. I needed to improvise and create stuff myself, just like when he asked me to make a PJ Masks Tonie. At least he accepted that I'd drill into his Megaman action figure to install the chip from a butchered Tonie.

So the main reason why I haven't been blogging during the past weeks hasn't been the virus or a lack of creativity. It's rather that for three weeks, every minute of my free time was consumed by creating an audio play about Megaman. 32 Minutes of it, with music in the background, robot voices and lots of Pew-Pew-soundeffekts and explosions. One hell of a lot of work that the public will never know because I have no rights to any of the stuff in the play except my text.

It's magnificient. It's epic. It's just for one little boy who, I know that, will religiously listen to it five times back to back this Easter.

Current video game project and Darkest Dungeon

Niels and I have been working on our latest video game. We've successfully collaborated before: I still love Choose Your Own CaveVenture and Low Res Dungeoneer was nice considering the short time we had during that game jam. What we're currently working on still doesn't have a title (CyoCV didn't have one until rather late either). When I first made up the mechanics, I jokingly called it Martest Dungeon, because it is my own take on Darkest Dungeon's excellent design and theme. I do hope, the joke-title doesn't stick though. Red Hook Studios might have something bad or lawyery to say about that.

Anyway, some thoughts on the design. First of all, I like the feel of Darkest Dungeon a lot, specifically the cast of vaguely historic badasses. When I read that some fan at some event asked the devs, what time the game was set in, I thought "What a fool! It's The Past, obviously!" You have a crusader, a dude with a flintlock pistol, a musketeer and a beak-masked plague doctor all fighting alongside. And it works. So I made up my own cast of vaguely historic badasses (although I did copy the plague doctor – you don't get around their iconic masks when going this route).

As my dungeon project started it conceptual life as a solo card game, characters are more simple than those in Darkest Dungeon. Every one of them has a maximum of three *things* about them. As combat is done by the party as a whole (same for groups of monsters), some characters have one of their things being that they add one point to the overall attack value. Roll a D6 on or under that attack value and the enemy party receives a point of damage. Base damage for the heroes is 1.

The party always acts as one: You get a pool of attack points and you distribute damage to whoever you want. You can generally only use one special skill in an action (although there is a character who changes that). Yet, characters interact in interesting ways, a well-composed party will be able to do tremendous effects both offensively as well as defensively.

Every hero only has 1 HP - lose  that and they are wounded. That means they are still part of the group but cannot use any of their attributes. They can, however, be healed in several ways, some of them coming from other party members, some from rooms of the dungeon. Also you can heal a wounded character in the village after you return. Some characters have mana points to fuel special abilities, some have special abilities to refill those for other characters.

In Darkest Dungeon there are a lot of ressources to balance while exploring the dungeon: Health, stress, money, light, firewood, food, experience and some less essential ones as well. Thinking about a card game I simplyfied things for my game: There is health, mana and monster tokens (effectively money). Exploration is linear, there are no branches but you can go back if need be. There is no escaping the dungeon once you entered: You need to make it out on the other end of nine rooms/encounters. There you can decide to go home or go deeper. Do the latter and you get another nine rooms

We currently have a working prototype with some features active, others have yet to be implemented. I do have the problem of graphic assets to solve. If anyone is interested in drawing tons of gothic badasses and creepy locations: Feel free to contact me.

Heroica: Our Houserules

My son and I have been playing Heroica about every other evening these days. To make it more interesting and fun, I have made some minor rule changes, pretty much all of them regarding characters and boss monsters. Let's delve into them.

Play Report: Heroica with my son

My first-born and I cleaned up his little childreen's desk and assembled all of the Heroica we have into one big land full of danger and adventure. I knew that this campaign against four bosses and their minions spanning several different regions would take a long while (it wasn't our first big campaign, but the first one involving stuff we had designed and built ourselves). It would replace a chunk of goodnight-reading for a couple of evenings. What we have looks like this:

Our Heroica land is ready to be adventured in.

To the left you see the village with the graveyard. It is connected to the grassy lawn which leads into the secret tunnel (both are my son's work), the forest and the catacombs. Beyond the forest there is the goblin fortress. The four bosses are distributed over the lands, each in their own boss room and guarded by patrolling minions. Each of us got two characters, one to play and one spare. The other heroes were hanging out in the inn, with the exceptions of the king and the red mage, who were imprisoned in the cells connecting the catacombs and the goblin fortress. We play with permadeath to characters, by the way.

Expanding Heroica

My older son and I have been playing a round of Heroica every couple of nights now. We have some hous rules, such as bosses having different stats/abilities and the shop being an actual location you have to go to. I've been wanting to make that store part of a small village for a while. This would not only make the world bigger but also give the heroes a home location they need to return to every once in a while to stock up on consumables and equipment. Now I don't have the studded 2x2 plates needed for actual Heroica-style tiles yet (they should be in the mail to me) but I do have build a village:

The store, to the right, is the same one (but I added a window in order to make it more clear that this represents an actual building. The inn is in the background. The place has two tables and a bar, seating up to ten microfigures. A jug from that barrel costs a gold piece and heals one HP – it's for situations where you can't afford a health drink (or they're sold out). The village square has a nice tree in the center and to the left there is a path to the graveyard.

Speaking of the graveyard: That's the new home of the Vampire now. Lacking some parts of the desert temple set that the Golem Lord resides in, that dude needed a new home and now rules over the flooded catacombs that originally belonged to the Vampire. Also, the vampire's minions, zombies and bats, fit well with the graveyard. Naturally, my son wanted in on the construction of the village and added his own stuff. It looked like this:

A grassy area, another store and a long secret tunnel are his additions. I had to swallow my perfectionist pride once again (having sworn never to become the dad from the Lego Movie) and just let him add to the world without any regard on playability or coherent design. Let him do it, it's his Lego now. In that picture you see the bigger crypt (with the cross) that the vampire will reside in. When he dies, he turns into the giant bat, arguably the most powerful of the bosses in our Heroica-world. That means that, despite him sitting right next to the starting village, it is advisable to go after the other bosses first in order to stock up on magical and non-magical gear before facing that monster.

Our fully assembled Heroica-world now has four regions: The village with the graveyard (boss: The Vampire/Giant bat), the forest of Waldurk (boss: The Dark Druid), the catacombs of Ilrion (boss: The Golem Lord) and the Fortress of Fortraan (boss: The Goblin King). The Vampire gets replaced by the vampire bat upon his death, which has 4 HP and deals damage equal to its remaining life. The Dark Druid has no special rules yet. The Golem Lord summons a bat everytime he wounds an enemy. The Goblin King has the helmet and thus an extra HP. Each of them has a magical item that can be looted – and usually some gold stashed by their lair.

I have also made some slight changes to the character rules. As we play cooperatively, you can pass items back and forth when close to one another. The knight no longer has the jump+stab special move but can roll a save die when hit, the shield preventing damage.  The jump+stab is now the domain of the prince. The king has no special move, he is kinda old after all. Also, the archer is female in our games and I intend to buy some microfigs online to add one or two more girls to the mix. Shame that Lego didn't even have a token female among the heroes originally.

Next up: A play report of our first big campaign involving said village.

Kill Team: Re-entering a hobby

I like the basic principle of table top strategy a lot. As a youth, I had a Warhammer-army of dark elves. They sucked and I only ever played against my best friend who first had a high elf army, later an orcish one. 2000 points were our usual match size. I had spent a considerable part of my disposable money on the hobby over the course of about two years, roughly age 13-15. I was in the process of getting my troops painted so I could participate in 1500-point-tournaments at our local hobby place. Then GW decided to reboot the dark elves, making all my models worthless.

Thoughts on Heroica

My first-born and I have been playing Heroica every once in a while now. When Lego released this little board game with a dash of fantasy-rpg mixed in there, I was stoked but quickly disappointed when I actually read the rules of the one set I bought. Now, years later and as a father of two sons, I see where its target audience lies. And I know that hacking this is part of the design.

We've been lucky enough to acquire a few additional sets from a friend of mine at an okay price (the full sets have become somewhat expensive since they're out of production). We do not play in competition but in cooperation. That means, the monsters barely stand a chance. We do have permadeath for characters but each of us usually has two characters spare waiting for the first one to die.

Our current landscape. (c) 2020 Me on my Blog.

My son with his five years loves the thing. A usual run through all the lands we have usually takes us around 45 minutes, a good time for a kid his age. He generally spends the next thirty to sixty minutes after that playing with no rules and making his own stories into that world. It's really rather excellent and something I totally didn't account for when I bought the game as a university student with no offspring in sight.

Some things need to be changed about the monsters in order to make them more different from each other. The Goblin King in our game usually has that helmet-thingy and thus an additional HP. The Vampire can, of course, replace himself upon his death with the Giant Bat which has four HP and a damage rating equal to its HP – it is out of the box the most interesting beast in the game. Still trying to figure out how to make the Druid and the Golem Lord more interesting without breaking the game.

I also intend to make the game bigger and perhaps even add come characters. This will cost me some money and I need to scour BrickLink for some items but I think it could work. Perhaps a central village and one or two new landscapes with enemies like spiders and rats can be done without too much trouble. Also some female heroes are totally in order. When I get around to all that. Perhaps, when my second son becomes old enough to join us.

In the pipeline

The year had ended. I have been busy with new responsibilities at work and two kids at home. But yet there is the spark of creativity that creates needs that must be fulfilled. I have crafted some things for my older son but those are of no consequence for this blog. What is however is, what I have in the pipeline: A new video game and the third piece for my cardboard arcade.

On Catacomb Kids

Sometimes you find a game that just clicks with you. I like me a good roguelike (or -lite or whatever definition you personally think should be universally applicable for the term) and last month I bought the early access version of Catacomb Kids. I love it.

The game itself plays like a more rogue-ish version of Spelunky (which I loved as well, at least the original free version, which I beat more often than my schedule these days would ever allow for). You jump and run through an often very vertical level in an old-school side-view. Unlike Spelunky, Catacomb Kids has a lot of different weapons, many of them magical, with random stats. Also there is the roguelike tradition of unidentified potions. And spells – a lot of them.

Combat can get frantic and intense but also slow and stand-off-ish. When a grumbul and you are facing each other across a pit with spikes, waiting for the other to move, that's where the true drama comes in. The fact that these enemies operate on the same rules as you and will flee the level if injured too badly makes things more immersive. And I always prefered games where even a single enemy is of consequence and a credible threat. I do, however, usually die to some trap combined with my lack of youthful reflexes.

I really enjoy the short sessions this game allows for: I rarely have more than half an hour of game-time a piece since we had our second kid. As I am not yet very good at Catacomb Kids, I rarely last more than ten minutes per run. The only problem is resisting the urge to do just one more try several times in a row.

Now the game is far from finished and I have some performance issues on my old computer here. Still, it's one of my favorite experiences in video gaming in the past ten months or so. I recommend anyone who likes a good action-oriented roguelike to try it out.

Labyrinthmaschine in action

A game is not truly tested until someone other than the designer has played it. Now I have in the past been somewhat careful about letting others even touch the Labyrinthmaschine – I was scared it could break. By now my fears have been alleviated and a small handful of others have been allowed into that particular dungeon of mine. Today, my older son wanted a go – and I let him.

Update: Finished the Labyrinthmaschine

So, I finally got the right size of cardboard and some free time to finish up the Labyrinthmaschine with side panels. This means the user interface part of the cardboard arcade cabinet is not facing upwards in a 45 degree angle which is much, much more comfortable to play than before. I played the game a few times since the upgrade and the pinball machine has seen some use as well recently (by both me and my older son who can't slam the trigger hard enough to get the marble over the bridge but still enjoys it). Current record for speedrunning the Labyrinthmaschine was 1 minute and 52 seconds. The one recorded for a player other than me is over four minutes. This is the final version: