I’ve spent a lot of time listening to a lot of smart people talking about table top role-playing games and the great news is that I think the best podcasts out there are better than anything equivalent in the video or board game space.
Thursday 27 June 2024
A Manifesto on Making Simulating Games
Posted by Andrew Doull at 09:41 0 comments
Sunday 14 April 2024
Sixty Years in Space update 2 is now out
For more details see https://half-apress.itch.io/60-years-in-space/devlog/714676/update-2-is-out
Posted by Andrew Doull at 21:12 0 comments
Sunday 31 March 2024
Sixty Years In Space: Devlog 4
One of the great joys of maturing as a game designer is that I've got very good at making complex systems as simple as possible.
Each square represents (for a crew member) 4 kilograms. You cover up squares as you load up equipment and your load number is equal to the highest number you cover up. Equipment slots are represented by multi-square items: B for 8 kilogram slot items through to F for 125 kilogram slot items.
This load table is approximately equivalent to the notion of fitted loads - things like spacesuits which fit on your body and therefore a lot closer to your centre of mass -- and which count only as their actual mass for permitted load (I didn't tell you that the power series in the load table doubles the load mass for every 4 increase in load). But to do that, we need to have space suits load templates which fit as closely as possible to the "astronaut shape" drawn in the lighter greys on the table.
Posted by Andrew Doull at 12:53 0 comments
Wednesday 28 February 2024
Sixty Years In Space: A Primer
Sixty Years In Space is the officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game of the High Frontier board game, which means it already starts with all the hard rocket science that the board game includes. And the inspiration doesn't stop there: you'll be exploring the solar system, finding water and building factories just like in the board game except zoomed in to the scale of individual crew members rather than from the perspective of the mission control. But it doesn't limit itself to the practicalities of space exploration at a human scale. While you're in space, Earth society will be changing, including your mission control, and a significant part of the game is deciding how your crew reacts to the missions your are assigned and the technologies imposed on you.
The game is extremely crunchy - the core rules and first 4 supplements run to nearly two thousand pages - and covers everything from microgravity health risks to robots to colonies. Rather than having a fixed future, your crew will be responsible for defining and reacting to it over the course of their lives, with potential life spans measured in the millions of years or more. It also doesn't have a game master, instead relying on random tables to create missions, other factions, rewards and even space dungeons!; condensing systems modelling insolation, agricultural area and population distribution down into relatively simple maps generated by dropping different coloured counters and dice and placing playing cards. And if you're fascinated by the High Frontier board game map, the A Lot of Zeroes supplement has an appendix which provides guidance on how to create maps for solar systems other than our own.
It's hard to overstate just how much stuff is in this game, with small gems of insight on each page about what a part of a possible future in space might look like. But fortunately you can download the first 120 pages of the core rules for free along with a chapter on space infrastructure and terraforming from the This Space Intentionally supplement, even if you don't envisage playing the game with your regular gaming group.
Posted by Andrew Doull at 22:15 0 comments