Dice Exploder

The Space Fam Scene Menu

Sam DunnewoldComment

Sometimes you spend one thousand years revising the same piece of a game (or movie or book or painting or…) over and over until you feel like your brain is leaking out your ears. By the end of this essay, I hope to give you a thorough taste of my current brain leakage…

Apocalypse Keys is a Wonderful, Frustrating Game

Sam DunnewoldComment

I love so much of what this game is doing. Its vibes are immaculate. It has… just… so much, for better and worse. I wish my experience playing it had been more satisfying.

Apocalypse Keys is designed by Rae Nedjadi and published by Evil Hat. It’s “the Hellboy RPG” — a game in which you play monstrous humanoids investigating world-ending supernatural mysteries while you balance your humanity against your monstrosity. (It’s gay.) It kickstarted fall of 2022, and a full version of the rules was released to backers during the campaign.

Space Train Space Heist: Design Commentary

Sam DunnewoldComment

Because I’m shy on twitter, I never talked about the first RPG I ever finished designing: Space Train Space Heist. But I recently remembered how much fun it was, back when I was playing a lot of forum mafia, to read and write debriefs on a given game’s design and playthrough.

I thought today, while STSH is part of this itch bundle of Forged in the Dark (FITD) games, would be a fun time to revisit it. So let’s do it! Here’s a post mortem, retrospective, “director’s commentary,” and/or essay about the design of STSH.