Welcome to my monthly newsletter - this is six in a row - where I talk about game designs, playtests, interviews and reviews.

I ran an alpha test of Chronocide with a couple of friends and although they were pleased with the experience it wasn’t matching up to my vision of the game at all. I think there are some structural things I want to fix about the premise of the game before I run it again!

So many problems!

Some ideas

I’m going to let this lie fallow for a while, to give me time to mull it over before coming back to it!

After feedback I’ve fixed the medical symbol which would have contravened Red Cross copyright (oops!) and updated the character bios to give them more oomph, and the events to make them longer, proper little short stories. I’ve also reduced the amount of forced moving about.

Next step will be an ashcan release on itch and rpg-trader, so watch out for that!

One of my friends was encouraging me to get back to Road to Romance again. I’ve run over 40 playtest stories and I’ve got a lot of data so… why not examine the data and see whether it provides any suggestions?

I took a look at which were the most frequently chosen settings, wounds, wants, paramours, and troubles. I’ll list some of them here, and then lower down I’ll show a graph of frequency, so you can have a think about them and decide what you think might be most and least popular before looking at the actual results!

As part of this, I had a think about changes I wanted to make to the cards. What if I moved to have 9 cards of each type? When I’m doing print and play cards it simplifies things by always putting all the cards of a type on the same sheet (imposition to get them lined up when there were 10 of each type being printed 9-up on a sheet of A4 or US Letter paper was the bane of my life for a while!)

These are the changes

This gives me an extra couple of cards for instructions (going from 7 to 9) which I can usefully use to introduce and explain the game. I’ll split out Genre and Setting into a card each, which is really useful as they do quite different things to the game. I will also add a card that explains ‘framing scenes’

Strangely nobody had ever chosen ‘Legacy’; I think it is probably down to the description so I’m going to rename it and provide a better description. Healing has been quite popular but I’m not really enchanted by the idea of it here since that is part and parcel of dealing with wounds anyway. So Healing is out.

A little trickier, but ‘dependents’ seems less like a wound and more like a trouble, so I’m moving that one over to troubles, and out of here.

The ‘Strong but Flawed’ paramour was rarely taken, so out they go.

I have both Disapproving Parents and Disapproving Friends as low performing troubles, but I could merge those two together into ‘Disapproval’ which can be defined as friends or as parents.

I’m renaming “Enemies” to “Opposite Sides” because I think the title of that card didn’t make it clear that this was a thematic trouble where the characters are on opposite sides of a divide (Capulet and Montague, for instance) rather than the ‘enemies to lovers’ trope which often crops up.

Although I was tempted to get ride of “Medieval” as the one which is least interesting to me, it has cropped up fairly often so I ought to keep it. My moment of realisation is that Gothic (which I love, but which has come up infrequently) could move to Genres from setting. That makes a lot of sense to me, as you could have a Gothic fantasy, a Gothic Victorian, Gothic Contemporary romance for instance.

One new genre added, Gothic (as above). Arguably this is the psychological partner of the Thriller genre, where the risks and harm are emotional and mental rather than physical.

Sometimes people get a bit ‘stuck’ on thinking of scenes to frame, so each of the genres is going to have an additional card with examples of scenes, twists, stakes, and situations which could be used to prompt when your mind goes blank at the table.

I’ve been looking for artists to develop the cover art and graphic look for the game, and I’m really pleased with the person that I’ve found (although I can’t say anything else just yet!)

For this alpha playtest we decided that time was like a river and the travellers were ripples that needed to be smoothed out. As the danger from time becomes greater there is a louder and louder sound of rushing water, which prompts us to move on before we are captured in an eddy of time.

Our characters were a taxi driver (with a matchbook, a revolver, and a magnifying glass), an executive lawyer (with a necklace, a broken CD and a sample business card), and a PhD grad student (with a lighter, a cloth napkin, and a sharpie).

We started in a diner, had to escape into the street as Time caught up with us, spotted an apartment address on the broken CD-Rom, found the apartment which belonged to a PI, but which had been turned over and he had been killed. The cigarette lighter had initials on that told us who he was.  We realised that our matchbook gave the address of a hotel where he had been, and going there we discovered the people who had originally hired him to spy on a science startup. We got into a shootout but escaped by using the revolver and made our way to their offices - the same law firm that our executive lawyer worked at. The phone number on the fake business card was actually the code for a safe, and we were able to retrieve  the stolen documents and prevent the law firm patenting a world-changing discovery. This resolved the problem and we returned to our own timelines.

Continuing with the mini-campaign playtest of Jen Adcock game of Regency friendship and romance. On this occasion it was an invite to the opera where the main point isn’t the music, but the opportunity to see and be seen by the great and the good.

Some new rules that were being tested made it easier for the GM to apply a ‘stressed’ condition to player characters and those worked quite well. It is a limited resource the GM has but which gets regenerated as we spend our tokens to pick up rumours about other people.

All of our young women made progress towards their goal of becoming engaged, and the ties of friendship between them grew stronger too.

An online playtest using the playingcards.io platform to manage the game with my custom room and custom cards. It was a fun game, with the young technician Robin falling victim to the xeno in a classic chestburster scene. The executive officer withheld the captains medicine so he dies, but she is later sealed in a room with the xeno by her husband and dies herself. The medical officer slowly goes completely mad in the face of all the death and gore, while the engineering union rep decides it is time to kill the person who is most responsible for the Corporate problems, and kills the pilot with a flamethrower.

Despite all these horrible goings on it is the most successful escape situation that has turned up yet in a playtest, with three crewmembers (plus the cat) successfully making it away in the escape pod. Was it the best or most humane crew members? No. Was it the most worthy? Also no!

I like having the opportunity to do short interviews with indie game designers, giving them the opportunity to talk about their upcoming things. I was able to have an interview with Josh Fox of Black Armada games about the pair of ‘advent calendar’ games that they are crowdfunding - they use the daily prompts for journalling, one is a light adventure and the other is a horror. Read more about it here:

I played this with a friend recently, and it is a clever little board game set in Japan in the time of Samurai and Ninja. It is an asymmetric game where the two players have different moves, capabilities, and objectives. Each turn both sides play a card from their hand face down as their plan for that turn (the Samurai also places a nightingale floor tile). The Ninja want to steal 5 valuable statues, the samurai wants to capture all three ninjas.

The Ninja player has three ninjas which are used in sequence as each is captured. Their cards have an action then a move. The action can interfere with the Samurai, change open trapdoors or gain equipment. The Samurai have a move then an action, which lets them move around the vases in which statues are hidden, do things with secret passages and so forth.

The samurai moves quickly, each move taking them to anyone in an adjacent coloured zone. The ninja moves slowly, placing little transparent footstep markers to show their route - if they tread on a nightingale floor they are revealed! But if they are not, then next turn they could start from any point on the trail of footsteps. It really feels like the ninja are sneaking around and the samurai charges from place to place!

We spent an hour playing the game. I was the ninja and won, the samurai had captured one of my ninja in the process. I’m sure the game would play more quickly now we know the rules, and we definitely plan to have another go at it. We’ve both thought of some interesting strategies to try out!

So that’s been my last month. I hope that you have a great August, and I’ll see you at the start of September!

best wishes
Alex White
Plane Sailing Games