Crafting: Captain Pischer's Gold

The first little project I'd like to talk about is a small board game I made for my son. The title Captain Pischer's Gold is an insider between the two of us from the early days of his current pirate phase. Captain Pischer, you must know, is a crazy and very dangerous pirate who likes to piss himself because that's just how little of a fuck he gives.

I wanted to make a board game for my son, when I had this little box of chocolate we got for Easter. It was a nice and compact size and I decided to fit a game into it. The game itself is a simple ladder-game: You roll dice and hope to get on fields that go forwards rather  than falling back. The goal is reaching the treasure first. It's completely random but when you play with a 3-year-old, that's the only way to ensure a fair game.

You start on the boat and make your way over the beach, through the jungle, into the cave.

The crafting is, in this case, a work of love: Every third of the foldable game board is made out of several layers of thin cardboard and the connections are made from medicinal silk weave so that they don't break when folded over and over again. The gold chest opens up and there are actual round gold pieces glued into place that I made of the gold inlay that the chocolate was resting on.

This is probably the smallest project of my current crafting streak but it was also the first an I enjoyed making it. If your kids likes something and you enjoy board games: Make a themed game for them. It's not that hard!

Crafting: Analog Adventures

So, some of my fives of readers might be wondering: "What is MadZab doing? Has he stopped creating things? Has family life finally overtaken his creative urges? How do we fix the gaping gaps in societes the world over?" I can answer the first two questions. The answer to the second one is "No! Even if I wanted to, I couldn't!" and the answer to the first is a bit more complex.

I've had several distinct phases of creating things in my life and I am currently in an analogue phase. That means: What I am creating, is nothing that can be replicated and shared as easily as, say, a pdf or a Twine game. I've been writing and crafting. I think this trend started out with We're Going On A Fucking Adventure (which still needs a decently written rulebook but recent experiences might empower me to finally get to that), where my Roguelike-phase came into the physical world.

Now, I've had a fascination for physical objects for gaming for a while. And I've loved crafting since I was first able to hold a pen and a pair of scissors. Over the next few days I'll use this small series to introduce the projects I've more or less finished over the past few months. They include (so far) a mechanical cardboard pinball machine, two board games for my son, and a game book that I still need to proof read and then select a part of to pitch to a publisher. Stay tuned.

Free Release: The Dare

It's been a while but I made another game. This one is a Twine-game so it's text-only but don't let that fool you: You will have a scary ghost-story, elements of survival-horror and some riddles that differ every time you play this thing. I'll write more about my learnings when it comes to using Twine in another blog post – perhaps even make a bit of a tutorial. Being a gamepunk, I like the accessibility of the tool but dislike the somewhat confusing repository of information and documentation online (which the release of Twine 2 has only made worse). Anyhow, enjoy The Dare!

The Lost Games part 1: Star Atlantis

Even, or especially, in the age of computers, some things are lost forever. They may be digital things that were pre-interent. They may be digital things, that are so obscure and obsolete, that nothing can access them anymore without spending way too many resources. And they may be things that are now impossible to find, thanks to algorithms in search engines that are optimized to other things that are just more popular and have sprung up in the meantime. Let me talk about one such game.

Gonna be at Nordcon

So, first time I will actually show WE'RE GOING ON A FUCKING ADVENTURE! to the public. It's the first print-prototype still, with its small errors and not ideal material on the tokens but it'll do. If you want to play and are in Hamburg this weekend, come by the convention and sit down with me (or my buddy Justin). I'll be in the Spielkultur-Tent, waiting for players and probably socializing with old friends I only see once a year at that particular place.

A Let's Play!

So, Choose your own CaveVenture got its first let's play. The guy was kind enough to tell me so in a comment on the release-posting. If you want to see someone go into the cave blind (so to speak), enjoy this:

I shall repeat my statement I made in the video comments: I'm totally willing to do a co-commentary on any play of my game via Skype or something.

WGOAFA: A Dev-Diary of Sorts

So after my unboxing, I've been digging my claws into my board game, trying to get out the last kinks so I can finally click that check-box in the store on Gamecrafter to release it to the public. The errors I have found so far are pretty much all my fault, not the print on demand place's, so I can actually address them by going back into the graphics files and fixing them for a re-upload. Here's what I found and did so far: