Twilight Creations has made the the announcement on their site, so now it’s official: Innsmouth Escape, the board game I designed for them, is on the schedule and due out in March.
I’ve seen the cover. And I’ve seen a prototype of the plastic Deep Ones. And I’m more than a little familiar with the game play, so I feel confident in saying that this game is going to rock.
But then, I’m biased. 
Like many gamers, I’m something of a packrat when it comes to games — especially roleplaying games. After all, they’re just books. Compared to, say, big-boxed board games, they take up practically no space at all.
Unless you have hundreds of them.
In the interests of maintaining some room to walk between the shelves, I’ve been culling my collection recently, and it’s hard. While there are some that I can honestly say I will never play, and can let go without tears, there are plenty more that I just can’t bear to part with.
Nostalgia is a big part of it. I haven’t played Star Wars (D6), Night Life, or DC Heroes in years, but have great memories of past campaigns, and truly believe that I will play them again some day. (And of course that means I can’t get rid of my campaign notes from 12 years ago either.)
Professional interest also stays my hand. I can’t get rid of that book – I have a playtest credit in it. And while I’ve never actually read these books, they’ve got genre-defining game mechanics in them, and I may need to reference them while working on my own games. (Such thinking was justified this spring, when I was able to finally use that copy of Ars Magica I picked up back in 1996.)
But the biggest reason I can’t clear my bookshelves is the reason I picked up the games in the first place: I want to play these things. No, I haven’t yet actually run a game of Etherscope, or Vampire: the Requiem, or even Werewolf: the Wild West (from what, ten years ago now?) but I intend to. Eventually.
Since I’ve been intending to play some of these games for… well, a decade, a more reasonable person might conclude that I will never actually do so, and should just cut my losses and move on. But I’m not a reasonable person. I’m a gamer. And these unplayed, skimmed-through books are an inspiration. Just looking at them again today gave me a little thrill of excitement, a tingle down in my geek-heart that reminded me that there are cool worlds to explore and games to play. They’re here. They’re just waiting for me.
And I can’t give that up.
Here’s my to-do list for the weekend:
1) Rake.
2) Go to church (on Sunday).
3) Prototype and playtest as many different games as possible.
The first game is a new horror RPG from my pal Brad McDevitt. It’s chock full of cults and conspiracies, with heavy themes like redemption, repentance, and how we define “good” and “evil” in our lives. Despite the manuscript being not quite ready for prime time (since I ripped it, still raw and bleeding and unfinished, from Brad’s protective hands) the system held up and everyone had a good time. (Of course, when I reported to Brad afterwards, I discovered that I’d completely messed up an important part of the background, but hey… raw and bleeding, whadya expect?)
On Sunday, I pulled out the latest version of my SKY TRADERS game: an adventure game with a heavy “pick-up and deliver” style economic system built in. This time out, I rejiggered the dice system, combat, the turn sequence, and the econ system — and was quite pleased with the results. It’s still not ready to show a publisher, but it’s a lot closer than it was last week.
After that, I dragged my lone playtester home from the game store so we could test my latest mad creation with my #1 playtester, my beautiful rock star wife. Together, we hacked through the very first playtest of what turned out to be a fun, light card game steeped in the Cthulhu mythos. After playing the game, my testers’ only complaints were that there weren’t enough cards — and there aren’t: there are only 50 cards in the deck, and we need at least 100. Luckily, I have a solution: print each card twice.
I’d like to give a shout of thanks to Brad for letting me dig around in his sandbox, and Ryan, Wade, and my wife for gleefully poking holes in my games all weekend.
