This week’s episode of Dice Exploder can be found here.
The first ever Dice Exploder game jam came to a close about a month ago, and today I sit down with the three hooligans from the discord who put it together and go through some of our favorite entries. If Dice Exploder is a show about concrete examples, this episode is as Dice Exploder as it gets.
All the games we talk about are pretty short, so it should be easy to follow along at home. Check out all the jam submissions here.
Thanks to Audrey Stolze (aka Lady Tabletop), Chris Greenbriar, and Sam Roberts for running the jam!
Further Reading:
Game Exploder full list of entries
Socials
Sam D on Bluesky and itch.
Sam R's game Escape from Dino Island.
Audrey on Tumblr, and her podcast Alone at the Table about solo games.
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam D: Hello, and welcome to a bonus episode of Dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and squeeze it between our dexterous little thumbs like bubble wrap. Except this week, we're not doing that. We're gonna talk about the inaugural Dice Exploder Game Jam. I absolutely did not have time to organize or participate in this, but I've got people who organized the thing here with me today And we're going to look at a bunch of the games that came out of it.
Quick correction already to my pre written intro two weeks after the game jam ended, I actually did make a submission to it so you can find my game, World Ending Game Sam's Version in the show notes. But let's do some introductions. Audrey, kick things off. Welcome back, returning champion to the podcast.
Audrey: Oh yeah, is that how we're gonna crown it? No real episodes, only these roundup episodes. I'm Audrey, I'm Lady Tabletop in the server, I was one of the organizers of the jam. Yeah, you've probably heard me on the Year End Review or Best of 2023, whatever you called it last year, Sam.
Sam D: Year End Bonanza.
Audrey: Ah, yes, that's it.
Sam D: Next up, we have Sam Roberts.
Sam R: Hi, I'm Sam Roberts, I am co creator of the PBTA game Escape from Dino Island. I'm everyone's Sam on the podcast.
Sam D: We'll see about that.
Sam R: We'll find out after this is over. And I think I'm probably the Wario to Sam's Mario on the Dice Exploder Discord.
Sam D: And finally we have Chris Greenbrier, also returning champion.
Chris: If you know me from anywhere, you know me from this podcast. I'm just some guy.
Sam D: Editor extraordinaire of several episodes and back on the Blaseball episode. Thanks for coming back, Chris.
Chris: Thanks for having me.
Sam D: So let's kick things off with what was the deal with this game jam? We had a theme for it, some people followed it, some people didn't. But what the hell was it in the first place?
Chris: Alright, so the premise of this jam came out of a conversation in the Discord. It was basically make a game inspired by another game. Specifically, remake, demake, remix, chop up, mix together, a bunch of bits from other games, and just see what happens.
But ultimately, the jam was more about promoting creativity, so there were quite a few entries that really didn't have anything to do with that.
Sam R: I think there was also an element of people being inspired by the podcast itself, and choosing a mechanic to explode and center in their game and build a game around a mechanic.
Sam D: Yeah, I was really pleased to see a lot of people actually do Otherkind dice games after John Harper and I were sort of pushing people to do that on that episode of the show, which aired right when this jam was kicking off. And yeah, I loved seeing the podcast inspire people, even though I think the core premise of the jam was more interesting to me.
And in the spirit of Dice Exploder as a podcast that likes examples, we're gonna kick things off here with an example that I think really was right down the middle of what this jam was all about, and that's Sam, the game you created for this. Do you want to tell us about Masks Retconned?
Sam R: Sure, so I've been in a Masks campaign for a while now. And Masks is a game that I really love, and also, having played it for two years, have a lot of opinions about.
So I decided to lovingly retcon it. Which is, you know, a superhero comics term, and create a streamlined, stripped down version of Masks, that gets rid of all the things that I didn't really need, adds in a couple of other things, and then it's really built around the one mechanic of Masks that I love most.
The core mechanic of Masks, and a mechanic that I love, is labels, which are what the game calls stats, and they're things like danger, savior, and they're kind of how you see yourself, and they shift over time based on how other people kind of change your perception of yourself and how you grow as a character.
And so, I basically just created the whole game around that, and and so it was left.
Sam D: Yeah, I just want to say, the format of this episode is going to be, we're going to go through and each share two picks of games we really love from this game jam, but I almost picked Masks Retconned before we decided to kind of use it as an example here, because I wish every game was one mechanic that everything in the game was built to support very precisely. That it was like one beautiful, pristine toy for everyone to play with. And I feel like you did such a great job of capturing that.
Sam R: This is why we're friends. Because that's like basically my game design philosophy as well. So I'm glad, I'm glad you picked up on that. I do like that.
Audrey: It makes for a really elegant final product to, like, distill the game down to, like, the single most interesting thing, right? Yeah.
Sam D: And I, I do think you know, the final product you have here is, like, 13 pages, including a cover and a page of designer commentary at the end. And it's really easy to imagine, like, a 36 page zine of Masks retconned that is a lot of principles and agendas and support and, like, character sheets and all that Also, in support of that core one mechanic. But I love a game jam as an opportunity for everyone to just do the 12 page, I did it in Google Docs and then copied and pasted it into like a quick and dirty Affinity Template kind of version.
And I really loved seeing that here. So, great job. Um,
Audrey, you also made a couple of submissions to the game. Do you want to talk about yours?
Audrey: Uh, Sure, in brief, because, like, you talking about Google Docs, I did literally actually submit a Google Doc for one of my games because I don't know if I'm going to revisit it. And I make all these, like, crazy comments to myself when I'm writing stuff and going back to it and I felt like putting that up as a designer commentary was maybe more interesting than the game itself that I was working on.
So the first one, which is that Google Doc one, was called Tower of Babel. And the idea was there's so many games that use Jenga, and I wanted to do, instead of like, taking the tower apart, you're building it up.
So yeah, the Tower of Babel seemed like a natural progression but then it kind of became like a party game thing where like there's rules about like what you can say and how you can say things and replacing words with other words depending on how you're placing your blocks because the idea is that the game ends if you successfully use all the blocks to build the tower, if the tower falls, or if you can no longer communicate with your fellow players.
I don't know. I don't know if I'll revisit that one. There were like some auspices of role playing around it, but then I was like talking to a friend who was like, Oh, I would totally use this as like an icebreaker with my students without the character stuff. And I was like, does it work better that way? And so now I have that to contend with.
But the commentary itself is just, it's a lot of me making notes to myself and like talking to myself in there. And I actually thought that was more interesting than the game in the end.
The second one I probably will finish, it's called Imitation Meat, and it is inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing. So it was intended as kind of an explosion of the two I think most formative games for me growing up which were Mafia with my family, so social deduction games. My dad, for a person who claims to not really like role playing games, used to narrate the shit out of Mafia. And I always just found that really interesting.
And then also other side of the family, Pinochle playing with my grandma was really cutthroat, and so like, to take a trick taking game and also put, like, social deduction into it where things There are things that you can do if you are the one who takes a trick, if you're the one who loses, you know, where you fall in the card order. Things like that.
And so I probably will end up refining that one, but yeah, it was less of an explosion of a mechanic and more of taking a dig into my own, like, past with games and seeing what I could make.
Sam D: The thing I appreciated most about Imitation Meat was the card playing mechanics. I wrote in my notes, like, Did Audrey finally crack trick taking as an RPG thing? I thought it was actually impossible to, like, make that work. Because I'd seen it before and hadn't been very impressed, but I think you maybe did it.
And there were a few other card mechanics in this, I love cards more than dice, I just like shuffling, I grew up playing Magic, and there were a lot of people doing really interesting things with cards, and I was really impressed by that kind of across the board in the jam.
Audrey: Thanks. I know there was some conversation happening like during the jam while it was going on where everybody was like, ah, trick taking stuff never works, and I'm like, ah, god, I gotta figure this out.
Sam D: Well, I think you took a really great swing at it at the very least.
Audrey: And if that's all it is, that's okay. I like to just play around and who knows, like, if I'll leave this stuff up as, like, a record of just having tried it.
Sam R: I'm all about leaving stuff up and being imperfect and I think both of these, even in their imperfect state, are so, so inspire, inspiring makes it sound like, really important, but they're provocative, and they like, they get you thinking about game design in different ways, and, when I was like 16 and didn't know anything about game design, I tried to make a Thing game that all my friends were like, this will ruin our friend group if we play it, so we're not gonna play it.
Um, The rules were literally, you can't be alone with your friend, or they turn you into the thing like in real life. It was, I didn't know what bleed was, but it was all about that. Anyway, we're gonna cut all this anyway, so it doesn't matter, but but no, I, it just like, it brought me right back to my youth as well, and so I like, want to do, it made me want to make games, which is, I think, the best thing a game can do.
Sam D: And I think, they are inspiring for exactly that reason, right? They made Sam, they made me want to make games. I think it is really great to see the results of a game jam and see how some of these games feel really polished and some feel like just a rough draft in a Google Doc and that all of those things are things you can accomplish in a few months and that you can put on itch and that are valid and that I will talk about on my fucking podcast. Like it's and it's worth talking about on my podcast, right?
Like you can just make your cool little game and get it out there. And I think it is great that three of you because I I really did not contribute to running this jam at all I did not have time to and the three of you really made this thing happen and Inspired a lot of people to put their shit online and you deserve applause for it.
So good job.
Audrey: Thanks.
Sam D: So Audrey, do you, or do you want to talk about why did we run this? Maybe I did just cover that, but like, why did we run this, Audrey?
Audrey: I mean, in part, it's what you just said, right? Like, that being open about making games and the process of making games, even if you don't come out of that process with a full game or something that you're going to continue working on can be like a jumping off platform for each other.
And I think that you've built something really cool with the podcast and with the server by extension and your blog and everything, where you're talking about games in a way that makes people want to continue making them and continue playing them and just generally keep being enthusiastic about this hobby, right?
And so I remember when that pitch happened in the server, I literally had messaged you to be like, hey, but I will set this up if you want. And you were like, I mean, if you want to, go ahead. And I was like, okay, cool. And Chris and Sam jumped on board right away. And so we like threw the page up literally within an hour and And it was just one of those things where, like, it's very fun to hang out on Discord and it's very fun to talk about the thing that we're all listening to, but it's a different kind of community experience to all be working on games together and to be lifting each other up and helping each other while we're working on those games.
And so I think ultimately that was one of the goals that we had with the jam. Like, it was an impulse to be like, this would be a fun thing to do, but it was also an impulse to be like, that was related to like, why are we just talking about doing this? Let's just do it.
Sam D: I also think everyone in the Dice Exploder community loves to talk about games. I think it is hard to get this deep into the hobby to find this podcast without loving talking about games and about designing them, or at the very least playing them.
And I think sometimes designing games is the best way to actually communicate your ideas about them. And yeah. I'm glad that so many people here took ideas that had been brewing on the podcast, in the conversations on the discord, wherever else in their lives, and actually put their money where their mouth was and made something about it.
Sam R: What I love, jumping off that, is that it was both at the same time. Like we actually put our money where our mouth is and made games that kind of espoused our philosophies through design, but also, we did it by making games that were in conversation with other games, and talked about other games, which was so, so fun. It was like really cool to see, like, oh, this is what you really think about this game, or this is what this person thinks is the most important, or the coolest thing about a game.
Sam D: Yeah, all right. Well, with all that out of the way, let's do some picks. Chris, kick us off. What's the first game you wanted to highlight on the podcast here?
Chris: My first pick is Democracy by Z Ham. The reason I picked this game, the reason I picked both my games, honestly, had nothing to do with the premise of the jam. It's totally just that I read it first because it happened to be, in the Daily Thread that day. And while I was reading other entries, in the back of my mind, I was just imagining different ways of playing this game.
So, the premise of the game is, basically, you have a 3x3 grid on just be a piece of paper. In my mind this is a playground game, and you are drawing it in chalk on the e asphalt, and you are building a dungeon, and everybody picks a faction they represent that has wants, like putting water next to plants or whatever.
And also, the overplayer is the DM, who has just absolute authoritarian control of everything, and can and will smite you with a lightning bolt if you disagree with about something.
And I have nothing to say about it, actually. I think it's just delightful.
Audrey: I think it's really fun as a, like, I know Z said that, like, in setting up the game, they really wanted to be tongue in cheek about the, like, antagonist GM that you see in every Reddit thread on RPG, right? Like and this does set it up in a way that is still fun for both sides, I think.
Sam R: Yeah. what I love about it is this idea of the antagonistic Dm. And I think that it's, it's very easy and you see it a lot in, in a lot of contemporary game designs, trying to find ways to distribute power more equally or to make the game more democratic in sort of a small d sort of sense.
And what this game does is go completely the opposite direction and say, no, no, the DM is God. The DM can literally just smite anyone for any reason. The DM can stop time when they want. The DM has complete power. But the game is still going to be fun and still going to be about democracy and it makes the thing that is usually the problem into something really fun rather than getting rid of the problem to begin with.
Sam D: It reminds me of that conversation that I had with Alex Roberts on the Kagamatsu episode about exactly that, of instead of trying to level the playing field and redistribute power evenly in the game, of finding other interesting ways to distribute power and playing explicitly with those power dynamics between players.
Yeah, it's just fun.
Sam Roberts, what is your first pick?
Sam R: My first pick is Advanced Fantasy Dungeons by a designer I love and will probably mangle her nom de plume which is Idle Cartulary . And Hodag, who did amazing art for this game.
So she describes this as a paraclone of AD& D 2nd edition. But basically it assumes that the Advanced Dungeons Dragons second edition is a really, really thoughtfully designed text and that it had, there were real core ideas underlying it. And so it takes all of those ideas and reimagines them through a modern mechanical lens and design sensibility. And so, it has you know, tiered success in a certain way, but it still uses a D20. to describe exactly how that works in practice, but it somehow manages to feel exactly like I remember Advanced Dungeons Dragons feeling, while having none of the mechanics of Advanced Dungeons Dragons, other than, the stats are the same.
I've played a lot of D& D in my life, and I have a lot of opinions about some of the mechanical choices they've made, or all sorts of things that I can gripe about all day, but this reminded me that there was a reason I loved this game for so long, and there's a reason still looms large in my imagination, and I think it's really hard, even if you didn't grow up playing Advanced Dungeons Dragons, to pick up this game and not walk away kind of understanding someone might be enamored with that game.
And then you can play this one instead, which comes from a wonderful indie designer you know, it was ethically produced and is just wonderful all around.
It also just has this like amazing GM section that's just like generally good GM practice for anybody. You know, I recommend it for that alone.
Sam D: I think, first of all, it's impossible to talk about this game without also noting that she put it out and then it immediately fucking exploded. There's like a huge discord for it now. Like I, like she was kind of shocked at the reaction this game got but everything you're saying is not just how you felt about it But like a huge number of people really felt about it.
I also feel like this game is kind of like the culmination of a trend I've been talking with people about for a couple of years now where I've been seeing A lot of the sort of NSR, elf game people, and story game people kind of getting sick of the things that they were doing separately and have been kind of veering towards each other.
And it really feels like the You Got Chocolate in My Peanut Butter of smashing NSR and PBTA like together in this way that does exactly everything that you're talking about.
Sam R: push back on that a little bit because I actually, I like, strongly disagree and I think that Idle Cartuleri will be the first to say that she comes from a lyric game tradition and also a DIY elf game tradition, But what I think I love about this is it doesn't feel like either.
It doesn't feel like anything that's out there right now. It doesn't feel like OSR or NSR. It doesn't feel like a story game. It feels like, like the inverse of both.
Sam D: completely agree, but it feels like the place But the the expats from both of those communities have been trying to get to to me. It does feel like this new thing, but it feels like all of my friends from both of those communities have been like striving for this new feeling and that this game captures that feeling.
I also like this game to me feels like what if the finickiness of THAC0 was good actually. Like, like there's a weird subsystem just for like wizard duels that is completely bespoke and I don't know that I need like such fiddly rules but it's so cool that there's, I think there's both.
There's like psionic duels and wizard duels on this and they work differently. Like it's, it's insane. I love it. Yeah.
Audrey: This, it feels like as someone who was not at all familiar with AD& D and who also hasn't finished reading this yet, the more I read, the more I'm like, wow, there are just like so many discrete parts to this. And it feels very much like maximalism: the TTRPG, but in a way that doesn't make me immediately want to put the book down and stop reading, which is the way that I often feel about books that are like over 250 pages. And like, this one's not near that long, but I feel like it could be and I would read it cover to cover
Sam R: Well, every single person is making a settings zine for it, which incidentally is a funny thing about AD& D is that it's like nobody makes modules for it, they just make settings which is very on point. so it's gonna get even bigger.
Sam D: Lady Tabletop, what is your first pick?
Audrey: My first pick is Fishbones by Ian McDougall. So, this game is a nice little 14 page self professed quickstart version of Rod, Reel, and Fist. Ian also wrote an adventure to go with it, which is nice. Uh, It's called All in Mail, Never Clinking, which is like such a fun poetic name for an adventure, so I really love it.
But the reason that I picked this one is because, for people who don't know, Rod, Reel, and Fist is a game by Richard Kelly, aka Sprinting Owl, aka Kumada1. It is a fishing RPG with combat mechanics specifically against fish that you're trying to catch, and then combat mechanics that are different against animals, and you're trying to basically play this, like, fantasy epic, but it's largely about, like, stopping to fish and appreciate the journey and it's still dangerous. And if you've seen the cover of it, it has like an anime girl holding a huge largemouth bass, and this guy karate kicking a bear in the background. So it's one that floats around every so often just as being like a ridiculous game, and I also think that he wrote it in a really short amount of time because he does that with most of his games. But Rod Reel and Fist is like almost 300 pages. And it is a beast of a game, and I have never played it because of how long it is.
And so then when someone said, oh, I'm going to try and make a quick start version of it, I'm like 14 pages? That's totally doable. And one of them's the cover, and one of them's credits, and one of them is just a list at the end that says, this is what I changed from the original version of this game. And, I know that Ian has already said, like, I could make this better, but honestly, I'm just fully impressed because it is very inspired by your tome games, so D& D and other stat based games with lots of fiddly combat rules and a million pieces of equipment and a million enemies. And this game straight up said, yeah, but I can do it in less than 20 pages. And I love that. I think that's great.
And the adventure that comes with it is just a nice. Easy place to start. So for anyone who was like me and was like, oh, this game is 300 pages of fishing RPG. I'm never going to play this. This is a lot more manageable.
Sam D: Yeah. I love this one just for the way that it leaned so hard into the premise of the jam and took a 300 page thing and made it 20 pages.
Audrey: Which was, like, one of the examples that we explicitly said, right? Like, you have this fantasy heartbreaker, but you'd rather it be, you know, 20 pages, and here it is. I don't know, I just have an appreciation for people who want to try and streamline things that are still crunchy and that are still, like, a learning curve to play.
Sam R: So, did you, I don't think you talked about the adventure at all. I'm obsessed with this adventure, and I'll tell you why. It's for a weird reason. I read it, and I was like, why is this in the fishing game? Like, there's a lot of fishing, there's a lot of fish to catch, and there's not particularly good reasons to catch the fish?
Like, there's no, there's no, Like, you need to catch this specific fish to do this, there's like one fish you have to catch, but like, there's just a lot of fish to catch, and I was like, this is so weird, and then I was just like, you know what, like, in Dungeons and Dragons, everywhere you go, there's a goblin to fight, you know, and, and it like made me so happy to imagine that just like, what if instead of everywhere you go, you have to like, fight some people and kill them and take their stuff, it's just like everywhere you go, you just like sit with somebody and do some fishing, for the love of the sport, you know, or cause you need some food. Like it's a game that imagines a world where all the great heroes are just hanging out and fishing and that's what they do all day.
Audrey: And that is the premise of Rod, Reel, and Fist. And so it's like, it's very much like, yeah, you want to catch fish on your adventure, because that's what this game is about. And so, like, I love it. I thought it was a really fun, straightforward adventure. I also thought it was great because there's like a part of the text that's taken from, like, a pamphlet from the US Bureau of Fisheries, which is just like, A great source.
Chris: In lieu of having an opinion on this, because I think it's very good, and you all said why very articulately, I'm just going to say that the equipment list, which is a full page in this game, includes clarified butter, lemon, hand weapon, the only one, skipping stone, and soda. In quotes.
Audrey: You need supplies. Which is delightful. You need supplies. So in
Sam R: quotes
Chris: is
Sam R: so good. You even forgot a truly impressive fishing hat.
Audrey: But yeah, I think it's just a delightful little game. Sam, what's your first pick?
Sam D: Yeah, my first pick is also by Zee_Ham. t is There Is No Game Here, or at least that's what it is titled on itch. When you download it, it comes with a jpeg. The jpeg file name is Seriously Don't Do It. And then when you open the file it says you should've listened, there's a weird symbol, and then I'm sorry if you're reading this, it can see you. You'll know it's nearby whenever you think of this text. This was the only way to get it to move on. It's your problem now, and I don't know what you'll have to make to get rid of it. You'll figure it out eventually, good luck.
Zee_Ham just hacked The Game. And I think that that's an incredible use of this jam prompt. I don't know whether this was Zee_Ham's intention for this to be explicitly a hack of The Game yeah, I didn't get
Sam R: that until you mentioned it to me before that we started.
Yeah, and
Sam D: I should explain the game. So The Game is this famous thing. The game is everyone is playing the game all the time. And when you think about playing the game you lose, and you have to tell everyone around you, I just lost the game, and then they lose too, and it's a big thing.
And this is just that, it's just a weird little mind worm that like gets in your head. The weird symbol that comes with it reminds me of The Discworld book Thud!, where the symbol in question following someone around is like this stand in for racism. Like, but it's this sticky idea and it took such a simple concept of The Game and made it horror. And I think that's so cool, to, to really not even change the mechanic at all, but just put it in a different context, and completely transform what the thing is. I love the simplicity of it. I think it's just really cute and really well executed.
Audrey: I was super tickled by it because I am a person who cannot help but click on spoilers in Discord. It's just like a temptation, I can't resist, and so I like saw this in the jam, and I was like, what the fuck is that? And, like, immediately had to download it, so it was perfect in that way.
Chris: I think, this is your problem now. I don't know what you'll have to make to get rid of this was also the premise of this jam.
Sam R: Can I just also say, I love make. Make is so good. Thank you for bringing that up. Make is such a perfect word that changes the entire tenor of the thing. Yeah. You have to make something.
Sam D: Yeah. If anyone hasn't seen the movie Smile, it is basically a movie adaptation of this game, incidentally. So if that sounds fun to you, go check it out.
Chris, what is your second pick?
Chris: I'm going to bring up Hello Stranger by Michael Durr, who, I believe this is their first game ever.
Sam D: Oh my God.
Audrey: That's awesome.
Chris: So I huge kudos to Michael.
Hello Stranger is a game about covert communication. It opens with this lovely little list of premises, but all of them are essentially two people who cannot, under any circumstances, communicate openly with each other, except by sending songs back and forth, one after the other, and intending a secret message with it and hoping the other person receives it.
I can't stop playing this game in my brain. So when I hear two songs next to each other now I go, Hmm. If I was a K-Pop idol sending this to someone else, what would I mean by it?
The playlist episode of the podcast came out literally today. And that's fresh in my mind. And I think this is kind of the opposite of a playlist game, because you're both just passing songs back and forth one after another, but it still manages to be like, in the debrief, you are still kind of exposing that part of yourself that thinks about things a little too deeply and how you are looking at art and how personal that can get.
Sam D: Yeah, it's cool that the, like, the gameplay is in the process of the playlist making. You're not using the playlist to inspire the gameplay. It's just such a cool, different way to use playlists.
Audrey: Yes. I don't have a ton to add except for that I love a playlist game, and I agree. Like, this one is doing something new, which is just fantastic. And man, I love a game that makes you send songs to your friends. And I love a game that makes you talk in code.
Sam R: Yeah, I think what's cool about it, I love art that like tricks you into looking at art more closely. I'm in like this Music League game right now, I don't know if anyone's playing that, it's kind of like Apples to Apples, but everyone picks a song and then it generates a playlist on Spotify and you vote on which song you think is the best for the theme or whatever.
Anyway and what's, and what's, what's not as fun about that is you're like, oh, I know that song, whatever. And what this does is even if you know the song, you're like, I'm gonna listen to this really closely, I'm gonna figure out what the secret meaning is here. Because it's not, I mean, it could just be the title, but it could be, it could be anything, you know, it could be the vibe. It could be the last line.
Sam D: Yeah. Ah, there's such beauty in that feeling of having to catch what someone else has thrown up into the air in terms of meaning in this kind of communication and just having faith that they're going to pick up what you're putting down.
All right. Sam, what's your second pick?
Sam R: Oh yeah, okay, my second pick is a game called Echo of Ghosts by Andy Pressman. And I believe this is his first game as well. I think he said that. But you wouldn't be able to tell it from looking at it because it's It's a wonderful game design and it's, I believe he is an artist or graphic designer and it really shows the design.
Sam D: He did the layout for World Ending Game by Everest Pipkin, which is really fantastic. He's a layout guy, professionally.
Sam R: Yeah, and the layout is fantastic in this game. I'm, gonna steal so many ideas from it. But this is a pretty explicit explosion of John Harper's game Ghost Echo. And what I love about it is it the way it plays with Ghost Echo, it's kind of like a nemesis, or like, you're getting the other side of the story in a really fun way.
And so in Ghost Echo, it's kind of cyberpunk, you're breaking into the ghost world to steal things of value. And so in Echo of Ghosts, you are playing ghosts from the ghost world who are sneaking into the cruel, grey, smoke choked world of the living to reclaim your stolen things, which could be paintings, songs, or even companions, because the ghost world, it turns out, is colorful and vibrant and full of life, and the, living world is nothing like that.
And so in the, the design, there's this really cool effect where the, the design is mostly all grayscale, but then there are these little colored people who are kind of coming out from the background. It's, it's wonderful. Gotta download this PDF. It's, it's amazing. It's really beautiful but there's a lot to the design that I think is really fun. The way he uh, pardon the pun, but the way he finds echoes of the language in Ghost Echo and kind of reverses them. So there's like, there's wraiths, there's this section about the game being incomplete.
And the mechanics, this is kind of the opposite of Advanced Fantasy Dungeons, which is why picked it , because Advanced Fantasy Dungeons is like, the core feeling of this one game, with the mechanics all torn out and replaced. And this is basically the exact same mechanics as Ghost Echo, but everything else around it is reversed, and so the feeling is completely different, and the premises is completely different. And you can imagine playing that game, and then playing this game, and bouncing back and forth.
And there's just, like, a lot of A lot of really fun like, little details here, like, in the character sheets, like, the forms for your ghosts are, like, big and shaggy, or you can be three stacked stones. Your name might be Beeps, or Cheddar, it's just like, you just play these goofy, goofy ghosts breaking into a very, very serious world.
I love it. I want to play it.
Sam D: I agree.
Audrey: I have nothing else to add. Like, I've never read Ghost Echo, and everything you said about this one just makes me want to play this more, and probably to just read Ghost Echo.
Sam R: Ghost Echo rules. I've never actually played it, but only two pages, Andy kept this to two pages, even though he wanted to do more because he felt like it had to mirror Ghost Echo that way.
But Ghost Echo is a game that, will Give you a lot of cool new ideas. It'll get you, it'll, I'm sure it'll provoke something new in your game design. So I definitely recommend checking it out.
Sam D: Lady, second pick.
Audrey: Yes. My second pick was Odd Matter Force by Paki Spivey, which is a remix of the software mechanic from Cyber Metal 2012 by Adam Vass, a. k. a. World Champ Game Co.
So, I was immediately drawn to this game because the graphic design is such that I would be 0 percent surprised to find out that this was just a chapter that Adam had cut from Cyber Metal. Like, it is very ziney very bright and colorful, very chaotic, which is exactly what you expect from Cyber Metal 2012.
So the premise of Odd Matter Force is that okay, a portal to hell has opened. Sorry, I'm just going to read it because it's so hard to explain and I feel the same way about Cyber Metal 2012.
A portal to hell has opened and must be closed from the other side. This is the only way to stop the onslaught of demons that is ravaging the earth. No human can withstand the infernal hellscape, and so we have built an army of robots that will plunge into its depths, gather information, and close the portal. Your machines, destined for greatness.
And so the whole idea is that like, so software is like a piece of character building in Cyber Metal 2012. don't want to say it's a playbook, but it essentially gives you like a specific set of like powers or abilities or things that interact with the mechanics all serving like a thematic goal. Like one of them is technology and it's exactly what you think it is like focused on interacting with technology and stuff. And the same with one that's called like social.
And so in odd Matterforce, you have robot directives in the vein of Asimov. You have, you know, your action roles and things like that. But like your software is like, everything about who you are. There's not other stuff that you're choosing. And so I found that to just be a really interesting way to approach it, to like take this one element of character creation and say, nope, that's it. That's all of character creation. That's everything that you are.
And It's just, I don't know, it's just a gorgeous game. It's like, not even 20 pages. Please, please just look at it. The zine stuff is so fun to look at. And there's like instructions for printing the software sheets and like folding them so that you use them as your character sheets. And yeah, I, I just really, really love the way that this one came out, both visually and in conversation with the game that inspired it.
Sam D: This was an honorable mention for me. I, it's a gorgeous layout, there's so many ideas in here, like, this is a game I want to explode. Like, I'm not sure the mechanics in this are for me exactly, but there's so much in the graphic design, in the flavor of it, even in the mechanics that I want to, like, take and repurpose in my own work, and I really just loved it.
Sam R: I feel like I'm always looking for a game that captures the spirit of like, 90s first person shooters. You know, that Doomquake era. And I feel like a lot of the games that explicitly do that, don't really land for me.
But this gives me those vibes. Like, this feels exactly like those felt, but as an RPG instead of as a game, even though the mechanics are completely different. Like, we're going in, we're killing Satan, it's gonna be gnarly. Ugh. I can, I can hear it. I can hear the music.
Audrey: Yeah, there's definitely like a vibrance, like an energy to this game, I think, even if it's not one that, like, you feel like you would play. It is so powerful and, like, in your face with its vibes and, like, what it wants you to feel. And I, I love that, especially for a game that's not about emotions. It is a game that is explicitly not about that, because you're robots.
And that's how the robots are here. So yeah, I thought it was really fun and it was nice to hear that it was an honorable mention for you too, Sam. What was your second pick?
Sam D: Yeah, so my last pick is Florilegium by Nick Wedig. This is a demake of Ars Magica by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Ryan Hagen with mechanical inspiration from Grasping Nettles by Adam Bell, I really love Grasping Nettles.
And I have always really liked the pitch for Ars Magica, you're all wizards in this kind of medieval time, Napoleonic Wars maybe time, but like, there's magic. And all the wizards have been, like, shoved into towers on the fringes of society. And each player is playing a wizard, and also, like, an assistant to the wizard, and also someone who, like, does the dishes in the wizard tower. And you kind of rotate between these characters. And the game then takes place over decades of in game time.
But the rules are so arcane and complicated. It's one of those games that just feels, like, so overwhelming to me to try to engage with that I have never felt like I was actually going to be able to engage with this premise that I'm really compelled by, like, I'm out here stanning Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, like, give me that game. And Ars Magica is that game, but want it less.
And Nick, bless his fucking heart, gave me less. Like, I really feel like I could finally play the version of Ars Magica that I want to play in a one shot. Like, it's easy to imagine this being a campaign of, like, three to six sessions. I'm really excited to play that campaign, but also it's just, it's the perfect demake. It took this this legend of RPG history that I want to know more about and has made it accessible to me. And I, I'm so grateful for that. I'm so excited to play this. And I really, I think the mechanical tech of this wheel that you are sort of going around, moving tokens around and choosing firebrand scenes from essentially like little mini games, is perfect tech for this game that is so much about the passage of time. And is so compelling like I don't know what to say it's just it's beautiful too it's got all this like public domain art of like old books that really gets you in that vibe of that eliminated manuscript exactly it's just What a gift to me this game is, I can't praise it enough.
Audrey: Made explicitly for you, Sam.
Sam D: I just finished Pentament, you know? Like, give me a fucking break. Like, I want to play this game!
Audrey: I, so the wheel is like, I remember picking up Grasping Nettles for the first time and going this is neat, and I don't think I've seen something like this in a long time, and so I'm just delighted that that got incorporated into this game because I am a hugely visual person, and so whenever games have like a visual element without getting too board gamey, I really enjoy it.
Sam D: And the wheel really is, just like in Masks retconned where there's like one mechanic at the heart that we're really supporting, the wheel really does feel like the core of flora, flora,
Sam R: Florilegium. Florilegium, like it Apparently the title means a gathering of flowers in Latin and it's an anthology of choice writings from a variety of authors made of literary excerpts, poems, aphorisms and ballads. And he chose it because this game is similarly assembled out of short creative works by a variety of authors.
Sam D: It sure fucking is like it, everything really is in support of this wheel. Like in, in some ways you might think the wheel is in support of all the mini games in it, but I really do feel like the minigames are in support of the wheel as metaphor for the passage of time.
Chris: Everything being in service of the wheel is also how medieval magic works. Like the wheel
Audrey: haha, yes. It's got astrological symbols
Chris: on it. It's the wheel of heavens. It's, it is the thing that it is describing in the rules. Yeah. Yeah. It's so good. IT's so fucking good.
Sam R: we talk also about how in the sort of PBTA, FITD tradition, the Grasping Nettles is apparently this game reinvents the wheel.
Sam D: Yeah, yeah.
Audrey: I love that.
Sam R: Do love that.
Audrey: I also love a name that's on the nose, so like, props to Nick for that.
Sam R: I mean, this is not a jam with winners, but I feel like Nick kind of wins, and I'm not saying this is an ending, but I like he did this, he did another amazing game. He like really understood the premise. He also design the game that inspired the jam, which we didn't mention before, which is, which is So Now You're a Time Traveler, which was similarly a game that takes continuum which is a really wild time travel game from the 90s, I believe, that you should check out if you haven't., it's like just mind blowingly good setting creation and the game is like just a 90s
tabletop game. Uh, so, so Nick turned it into a little Cthulhu Dark one page hack that captures everything great about it, especially if you already have the book to like lean into the setting. And he brought that same energy to this. I just, I think he's so good at what he does.
Sam D: That does lead us really nicely into honorable mentions here. I want to rattle off a few but Chris, I know you had a couple in particular. Do you want to give us, like, a couple of sentences on Psychonaut, maybe?
Chris: Psychonaut is simply a very good thing that I have nothing to say about.
It's a mechanical expression through Songbirds 3E of what it's like to live with migraines. Oh my gosh. It, just read it. I cannot possibly do it justice describing it to you.
Audrey: The writing in it is just fantastic.
Sam D: Man, I thought this was a different one that I wanted to to Honorable Mention. sounds amazing. I'm gonna just rattle off another like seven honorable mentions, so Lucid Thieving was a nice little other kind, almost inception game, where you're going into dreamscapes. It felt to me like the Boy and the Heron of going into this weird dream world and coming back out.
Wild Fields by Jason Morningstar I mean, listen, it's a Jason Morningstar game. He was already working on the perfect thing for this jam, of like, re making some Polish game that I had never heard of. It's worth checking out.
By Moth or Moonlight by Kurt Reifling is a demake of Wanderhome that is just marvelous. I don't know how in one page he captured the entire vibe of Wanderhome. It's really incredible.
Wayward Highway by Capacity for Wonder is a weird Midwest road trip game I think again by a first time designer that is really, really cool.
106 Spiders is a, I would say a demake of Everyone Is John, where you are all controlling a collection of 106 spiders pretending to be a human by DM Spice.
Sam R: The writing is so much better than it needed to be for that joke to land.
Sam D: It's so good. And then, yeah, you mentioned Under the Snowflakes and Stars, also by Nick Wettig, which is this short, poetic, like, almost Arthurian legend, kind of fairy tale game, but I don't know, the vibes were immaculate, really cool color coding.
And then, um, there was one more here, who added High Table Presence?
Audrey: I did, so Merrilee had written basically two, like, micro metagames is what she called them. High Table Presence is one where you're like you're, is this the one where you're awarding points for being funny or is that the other one?
I don't actually, Stick the Landing, thank you. This is the one,
Sam R: I can talk about High Table Presence if you want.
Audrey: Please, please. I love both of them. Stick the Landing was your awarding, it was taking the concept of like pity points from Kagamatsu and being like, yeah, award points to your friends while you're playing another tabletop game for any time that they're, like, being the funniest person at the table. And it was just kind of an awareness of, like, how bonuses to characters and players that are, like, based on real life social skills that people who are neurodivergent, especially might have trouble with can be a weird feels bad combo.
So it's one of those ones where she was like, please don't play this. But it was a great, great piece of writing.
Sam R: Yeah, High Table Presence was similarly Please Don't Play This, and it uses the Jenga mechanic to basically, like, show you how stressful and hard and unpleasant it is to constantly be trying to, like, play really well and be really awesome and make everything as dramatic and rich as possible.
And so, like, the whole point of the game, which she later told me after I read it, was like, to make you feel like you shouldn't be stressed in this way. And I of course was like, I'm bringing out high table presidents, let's do this thing, let's be as stressed, like, let's be as good as possible, challenge accepted. So I'm, I'm that sicko.
I also wanted to call out fluid Realities by Bruno Proseico which is just a brilliant little two page hack of um, Mage the Awakening by Way of Lasers and Feelings, and it's like, it's an immaculate two page game, you can take that to the table and have a blast with it.
Sam D: Guns N Whiskey was another Lasers N Feelings hack that's basically just Lasers N Feelings doing the Peaky Blinders thing, but there were a couple of, like, tiny changes that were really nice little innovations that I liked in that one.
Slim Dungeon was really fun too, also by Idle Cartulary, another sort of, like, Elf game rule set that is just her home thing, but she added like 36 random classes to it because she's a monster, I guess. I don't know. Like,
Sam R: can I call it two more? Do we have time?
Yeah. Yeah. Nicholas Jones, AKA uh, Jonesy brought two games that I did not think I would like. And I ended up really loving. One of them is called Motsudandere, I think, I don't know how to pronounce it, which is a, like, IKEA instruction manual for summoning demons.
Yes. And it's perfect, perfectly executed. And then the other one, equally perfectly executed, It's called, We Don't Belong in This World, and it was based on a tweet by Snow, the game designer putting out a call for an artist brave enough to turn indie TTRPGs into anime waifus. I want a Whitehack waifu, a Lancer waifu, a Mothership waifu. I want them to live in the same AU city and have a deep, interconnected lore. And somehow he, like Did that, and not only did he land the joke, but it actually, suddenly you're like, Oh, I, I don't care about this genre of anime at all, and yet I, like, kind of want to play this game. It sounds like a blast.
Great art, great, great vibes
Audrey: I have one other one, finally, to shout out. So, A Thousand and One by Rowan is literally exploding your dice, like, throwing your dice on the table, just in huge handfuls, and I was like, I don't know that I would ever want to play this game, but it is such a literal interpretation of the podcast title and, like, the jam premise that I just thought it was delightful.
Chris: I'm not letting this play out. podcast end without mentioning Little Dung Guy the Sisyphean Dung Beetle RPG, which is one, perfect premise, no notes. And two, a really, just like, mechanically very interesting little game about going up polyhedral die sizes.
Sam D: There were so many good games. I liked Habitation, which was like a pretty standard sci fi other kind game.
There was just a lot of, just, there were so few misses in this. It was really good. Well, before we honorable mention every single fucking game in this jam,
thank you all for your submissions and for listening. The three of you. I have one last question. When's the next jam? , what's the next jam?
Chris: If you're listening to this episode when it airs, it's right now and it's, oh, my commentary, jam.
Sam D: You know what actually Ken is already doing this jam. Ken Lowry of Void 1680 is doing a jam called the Disc 2 Jam which will probably be live by the time this goes live, and is challenging people to make whatever they want that would be on the second DVD that accompanies the release of their game. And yeah, everyone should go submit to that one, and we'll be back with the the min max jam, where you either go full minimalism full maximalism later in the summer.
Sam R: Kurt is also running Kurt from, from the discord, KurtRifling, Rifling is also running a Majora's Mask jam right now, so people are exploding our jam which is now a phrase that I'm going to say all the time.
Audrey: I also want to say that I have been posting a couple games. That were submitted to the jam every day. I've been going back through to rename those threads with the names of the games. So, if you want to check out anything that we've talked about here and see all the discussion that has happened about the games, you can find those in the Discord server as threads in the Game Jam channel.
Sam D: This has been an absolute riot. I really appreciate all three of you being here. Before we go, where can people find everyone? Chris, do you want to be found?
Chris: No, if you know me. from somewhere, no you don't.
Sam D: Audrey, where can people find you?
Audrey: Uh, You can find me in the Discord, generally being a menace, on Tumblr and Itch at LadyTabletop. I also host a podcast called Alone at the Table. I play solo RPGs and invite listeners along for the experience.
Sam D: Sam Roberts
Sam R: You can find me at samnite. itch. io, I release games extremely sporadically because I have a child and a day job, but hopefully there'll be more soon.
Sam D: Escape from Dino Island! you can find me on bluesky at sdunewold, you can find me at diceexploder. com. There's blog posts, there's more jam coming, we got bonus episodes, we got a mini series coming from Merrilee,
Our logo is designed by Sporgory. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. Season four in the fall.
I will see you all then. Thank you so much for listening.