HERE is my submission (with the indispensable help of my creative partner) for Game Chef 2017. The theme was Borders, with Yarn, Smoke, Cut, and Echo as the ingredients.
We thought through several ideas, and we tried to think through making an area control game about shifting borders between countries or factions with yarn for the borders, but it proved to be too wonky for the time we had in development. We also spit-balled another game that I hope we can get written and posted before it goes cold, called Wake. Like many of the 70 odd games submitted, it also included death as the border, and used stories for the element of yarn. The idea was that we would be telling stories about the same character with ritual spoken responses (echo) to commemorate various events in the life of a character who'd died. Each story would be shaped by an emotion, possibly by a randomly drawn length of yarn corresponding to that emotion. After the story, and after the spoken ritual, the yarn would be burned. We liked the idea as a way of building characters in reverse.
I liked that the judges sent each contestant four other games for peer review, and from those one nomination for the winning entry. One of my reviews was for a LARP about friendship growing distant, that, while impeccably written was not a game that I would want to play. The one I nominated was a game about characters resolving issues through the lens of hallucinations that has a Walter Mitty sort of vibe. The other two games included two more awkward games. The first, a competitive one that is meant to be a competitive one that would work better as a story telling game with other players adding constraining elements. The second game was very slim, and more awkward still with mechanics and information that drove exactly nothing in the game, while thematically being about a breakup. All in all, not a fun game.
It was good to compete and complete a challenging creative project. This is my second competition submission (the last being last years 200 rpg challenge). Gotta push through and get busy!
