Time to do a mini postmortem for my game!
I wrote House & Home for Mapemounde. It is a game about building a house, and filling it with life. I used my own experience of what home is to inform the themes and story. It is also inspired by various movies and shows about family, both found and natural: The Haunting of Hill House, El Orfanato, The Shining, Stand by Me, and IT.
House & Home is an asymmetric, gm-less blueprint drawing game for four or more players. It is intended to run about 1.5 hours, and it deals thematically with the creation, maintenance, and rebuilding of familial relationships. The story is divided into 5 chapters, in which the players will separate themselves into the roles of Parents and Children. The majority of gameplay is focused on freeform roleplaying scenes with specific, quirky rules that modify a central blueprint, representing the home you are building. This fits nicely with "A game in which the map portions belong to different ages", as the Parents and the Children are tasked with drawing different portions of the map.
I was really happy with how the game turned out. I am obsessed with small games with specific rules, and I think I made up some interesting mechanics to make House & Home a creative experience. My favorite mechanic is for the Children's portion of the Fill Empty Spaces chapter, in which the players are tasked with "Working together, invent an elaborate game that you play together in your new home. Write a list of rules for your game, the more specific and pedantic, the better." The players roleplay a scene in which they play the game they just made up, and are encouraged to shout over each other to establish narrative canon (against common RPG wisdom). I think this is just such a playful scene that reminds me of actual childhood games I played.
Surprisingly, I didn't steal any mechanics from Avery Alder (one of my favorite game designers, and map-game expert). I've used The Quiet Year as an inspiration for other games before, but this is more of a take on Vincent Baker's Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, relying on modular (if sequential) minigames to tell a whole story.
My only regret is I ran out of time to do a final pass of polishing and playtesting. I also was really strapped on time for art and layout. That said, I think the bones of the game are beautiful, and I plan on releasing an updated version of the game as soon as judging is finished. I hope you all like reading House & Home! It can be found here: https://blooperly.itch.io/house-and-home