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Completely get it. Deadline is extended by two weeks!!! I love the idea - very much looking forward to seeing how you adapt the premise into game inspiration. 

It makes me so excited that you were so excited!!!! Can't wait to take a look at your first submission - I did extend the deadline if you find yourself with time to pull together the second, but no worries. I hope your IT department had fun!!

Ooh excited to see your submission! And I have extended the deadline. I went ahead and gave everyone two more weeks - one week didn't feel like enough purely because all the winter holidays fall right during that week, so I hope that this actually means folks get more of a chance to wrap up their submissions! :)

Hello, Train Jammers!

This jam has been chugging along and it's hard for me to believe we only have ONE WEEK until it pulls into the station. I have enjoyed taking a look at the two games posted so far, and I can't wait to look at those in more depth and also read the rest of the submissions that y'all are working so hard on right now. On that note - does anyone need me to extend the deadline? I'd be happy to add more time; I know this is a particularly busy time of year for a lot of people. 

In addition to that, I'd love to hear more about how your projects are going! Feel free to answer any or all of the following questions: 

1. What are you working on? What's your core premise, what type of game is it, what makes you excited to get a working game together for the Tabletop Train Jam? 
2. What type of train, train mechanic, or moment in train history (or future!) inspired your train game? 
3. What's one thing that has surprised and delighted you about working on your train game?
4. What's one challenge you've run into? 
5. Have you taken any cool train trips recently? 

Please feel free to let me know if a little more time would make your life easier. 

We're jumping in soon because I'm too excited! Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns! I'm here to help. 

If you're looking to discuss this jam and your entry in more depth, you might want to join the TTRPG Collective discord server, where there is a whole thread dedicated to the jam and some folks already brainstorming their ideas. It's an awesome community of folks who uplift and celebrate each other. 

Just released a new cozy tabletop role playing game, and have put it on sale alongside another similar game of mine! Get either game for 50% off, or an extra fifty cents off on top of that when you buy them as a bundle! Just Passing Through celebrates friendship over time (and over a cup of tea), and Together & Ever celebrates queer community. I hope they capture the cozy feeling of autumn-moving-into-winter for you!

Just Passing Through is a cozy fantasy inspired, gm-less duet armchair role playing game. It tells the story of two childhood friends coming back together after one has gone off on grand quests with an adventuring party, and one has stayed at home, living a life that may be more ordinary, but is no less beautiful as a result. As the Voyager passes through town, they stop to visit the Villager. As the old friends share a cup of tea, they pick up where they left off.

You Will Need...

• A deck of playing cards with jokers
• Two players with enough time for a conversation
• A comfortable space to sit together
• An easy way for both players to access the game book
• A warm beverage for each player
• The safety tool(s) of your choice

Some sample questions from the deck's prompts are below: 

Together & Ever is a gm-less, cozy storytelling game for 2-4 players about the intertwined lives of woodland animals, inspired by Frog and Toad. It celebrates queer community, found family, and the simple joys of a quiet life. In this game, you both play as, and advocate for, a specific character, but you are also the co-writer of a grand, charming story. You can return to this world over and over again and play as many sessions as you’d like, collecting volumes over time. 

You Will Need...

• 2-4 players
• A method to write down your stories
• Safety tools of your choice
• Optional Extras
  • A d20 and/or d100 to roll from the tables
  • A handful of dice if you decide to make a drop map
  • A queer or nature themed tarot or oracle deck to pull cards for story inspiration

Thank you so much! It really was a fun and special one to write. And it was also a great exercise in genuinely thinking about the safety tools that would suit the format. I’ve never felt the need to break into LARP safety tools before, but realized it was an important intersection for a game formatted as a conversation.  

Thank you so much! I really enjoyed writing the question list, and thought a lot about what might be a meaningful topic, so that feedback is much appreciated!

Just wanted to say thank you for the deadline extension so I was able to finish and submit my game! It went through so many iterations from concept to finish that the time was super helpful. 

This made me scream in frustration in the most nostalgic of ways! Great job - even though I'll be coming back to struggle through a pretty-low high score for a while. I will happily work for it!

Really enjoyed this - the fights were fun and varied, I thought that was awesome. Also the tone was very funny. I laughed out loud during the content warning portion just because I was so delighted by the presentation!

I love the aesthetic! Really sweet, with very satisfying sound effects too. I had a lot of fun playing through it! 

I've actually never played Pikmin OR Pikmin 2 but I have been told I'd like it a lot and genuinely this made me want to go play the games!

Trickier than I expected but so fun! I kept trying to jump faster than I was able to. But I couldn't stop trying to beat my own high score! Loved the music, too!

I had a lot of fun playing around with this game! I do wish I could have made the window a little bigger, it showed up really small and I couldn't make the screen larger. That said, I think you did a really impressive job making this on your own. I also think that you did a great job keeping the project manageable so you could get it to a point where you completed and submitted it. (That's always a struggle for me!) 

Also Parmesan James is an INCREDIBLE name. Can't believe I forgot to say that. 

This game broke my brain a little! (In a good way!) I really, really liked the vibes. It made me feel like I was playing a game version of some late night Cartoon Network show, or something, mixed in with some visual novel vibes from the text on the screen. I do wish that I'd been able to fit the whole window on my screen without needing to fullscreen it; I didn't FS it at the start and then it ended up being really hard to scroll around. But man the chaos was fun. 

I got so excited when I realized I had added an item to my inventory that I said "ooh" out loud. I think this is such a fun premise, and oh how pleased I was to see the Friend Cube already in my inventory. I also think you did an absolutely lovely job with the layout and the graphic design!! 

wow wow wow i've never completed a sonic game before so now i understand true joy

omg i won

I really love the idea that your downed enemies turn into allies. This was fun! 

Maybe in part because I'm not super familiar with the style of game that this was reviving, it took me a minute to figure out that the enemies were starting more transparent and I had to wait to shoot them. But once I figured that out I was able to plan moving and dodging a little more effectively!

Nice work! 

I loved the style for this! I think it really came together - I'm very impressed with how much you got done in ten days. It was hard for me to wrap my head (and finger muscle memory!) around the rfe for the shooting controls; I have trouble thinking what I'd do instead - maybe something you could easily control with the other hand? A specific note - if they were in a line left to right I think I'd have had a slightly easier time associating with their respective slug. I kept running out because I kept hitting the wrong one!

Anyway I just wanted to drop a note to say I had fun playing this one and I think you really did a great job!! 

I really got into the vibe of digging around looking for ores. It was like mining endlessly in Minecraft, which was a lot of fun! I wished after a while that I had a counter that would tell me how many ores I had collected. I'm not even sure if I'd need to be able to DO anything with my collection, but after playing for a while, that's what eventually got me out of the zone. I also think that I struggled with the sensitivity of the drill - I often accidentally drilled a block I wasn't intending to drill, or did two at once. Just made it a little hard to conserve fuel, especially in the beginning. But overall this was SO much fun and I can definitely see myself trying to rack up a lot of ores here! 

I was blown away by this one at the Show and Play, and have enjoyed playing further since then. I know y’all mentioned a couple of the text box issues that you’re working on already but oh man I’m just so entranced by this one! I particularly love the sound design, and how cohesively atmospheric the vibes are between art, writing, style, etc. Special shoutout to the resources y’all compiled and provided. Amazing work, everyone!!

Aww! <3 I'm so glad! Please let me know how it goes!! I feel inspired to make a BBQuests version at some point in honor of several SoP people talking about how it'd be perfect for BBQs. So. Time to attend some BBQs.... "for research"...

This is so, so fun! I'm such a fan. Firstly, aesthetically it was an absolute delight. Secondly, the tone/voice of the way it's written is so specific and I love when games are able to capture a tone like that. Thirdly, that ending! Amazing! Great work y'all!! 

Aww thank you!! The certificate is definitely my favorite part of the game so I am so glad to know you loved it. Thanks for checking out my little zine!

Had trouble getting it to work on Safari as a browser but it worked totally fine when I opened it in Chrome! Very fun - the sound effects made it even more satisfying. Very much enjoyed collecting my gems. 

This is such a cute little system! I like the vibe of small town gods. I sat down and made a god, and I hope to give it a try with an oracle. I know it was made for the one-page RPG jam - and I wanted to note that I think you did a great job keeping it simple instead of trying to fill every part of a page with text. I think the options you have for Quest-Giving are really cute and niche, 

That said, I'm excited to see you're interested in creating more content around it in the future. I think as someone looking at it from a "maybe bring this to my friends' table as a one-shot session" concept, I wish there was a little more structure built in from the GM perspective on the vibe of the town, the adventures, the NPCs. I feel like there's a lot of room for you to make this content, and it'd build nicely for folks who are looking for those supplements. (What I'm suggesting, vaguely, is I think you could turn this into a slightly larger system book, and it'd still feel just as cozy!)

I definitely already have some ideas about how I could build out the little town myself, but I always appreciate some built-in flavor for games that have such a vibe already. I love the note you added in V2 about how the setting is really flexible. I think there are ways to create content that offers more structured options without compromising on how flexible the premise is. If I were going to play this with some friends I might create some little playbooks for them - like, here are some types of gods you could use, little pre-builds to modify and build on. I guess as you think about making more content, my questions are, who are you making that content for (players? gm? your own guidelines for how it could be generated for solo play?), and also how can you keep it flexible - if you do in fact want to keep it flexible! 

Mechanically, my favorite part of this system is the rules for failure and mistakes. I love the idea that the gods are trying their best, and they rely on the freely offered gifts of the community to survive, but also that they will in fact make mistakes. I think I would probably enjoy leaning into the clumsy/failure aspect of being a not-so-good local god, and so knowing that the rules have options to fail forward and seeing those heal options feel like a really nice way where I could in fact lean into that without breaking the game. Maybe I just love an underdog!!  

I think this is really sweet, and I think you've done great work! I can also see it being a really fun thing to use as a system for like... taking a break from a regular larger-system TTRPG and doing a bottleneck episode where the characters take on the mechanics of these small-town gods as they visit a city unfamiliar with their larger-system classes/roles/etc. (I'm a big fan of the "mid-campaign, switch-mechanics-for-a-session" concept.) 

Anyway... Thank you for indulging my super long comment! Looking forward to playing around with this more. 

PS: I also really appreciate the less-ink-intensive versions you provided of both the foldable game rules and the character sheet!! 

This is so cute and satisfying! I was grateful for your notes about ways that the tutorial wasn't complete - definitely helped me to get going in the start. I struggled a little bit with the controls for the sculpting tool; I was using a trackpad not a mouse, and the scroll was SO fast that it was always hard to land on the right thing I needed to sculpt. I also found myself wishing I could hold multiple items at a time and also see them displayed; if there's a way to do that I couldn't quite figured it out. (Maybe an aspect of the backpack that I'm missing?) That aside, once I got the hang of it, I had a great time making so many little tools and items for customers! Nice work! 

This was so much fun!! As a huge fan of the OG minesweeper, it was fun to see how this one was both inspired by the game AND completely its own thing! Nice work!

Hi there! Tiny Tomes looks so cool, and I'm flattered! Would love to talk more - please feel free to email me, themagpiepages@gmail.com with more info! :) 

This is such a sweet game! I particularly like the whimsical specificity of character creation - I haven't gotten to play this with a group yet but I ran through the character creation just because I was intrigued, and I love the fairy I came up with. She's a tricksy wind sprite named Gale, and she's better at mischief than whimsy but only by a little! She gets around by flying, which just made sense to me with wind being her domain. Her goal is to explore the world outside the grove - she knows the area because she grew up here, but she's inexperienced... 

Honestly she was so fun to whip up that I might try to weave an adventure as a solo journaling game. (I've never actually played a Lasers & Feelings hack before so I'm not sure how well that'd work but there's no harm in trying!)

Anyway, I just wanted to share how cute I think this is, and tell you about my little sprite! :) I think this is a sweet premise with a lovely world hook, and it made me smile!

This made me giggle so much!!! I'm printing copies to bring to all of my friends the next time we play D&D so we can completely derail the DM and build dice fortresses. I also want to commend how fun your formatting is - I LOVE the true zine feeling of the cut and paste aspect. Your dice drawings are so expressive, this whole thing is just a treat! I can't wait to make my DM mad at me! (Jokes, she'll love it, she's the biggest dice goblin of the lot of us.)

Oh my gosh your colored-in beans are SO CUTE!!! I'm so glad you enjoyed the prompts - finding the narrative 'voice' for the zine was definitely my favorite part of making it. Thank you for giving it a browse, I hope all your bean quests are very successful! Also... I must go find these other bean zines of which you speak. 

Hahaha aw wait I love this idea so much!!! 

Thank you so much for your kind words!! I'm pleased to hear you got so invested in your play-through as a bridge - I hope you were able to get to the rest of the things on your to-do list eventually! If there are any moments from your play-through that you particularly are proud of I'd love to hear them. Regardless, happy to know the game found its way to you! 

Oh dang this comment has alerted me to the fact that there's a whole mechanic from the original Honey Heist that I drafted in my document of rules and just... forgot to transfer over to the document. No time to fix it before bed tonight but stay tuned for a fix really soon! Also thank you for the lovely compliment! Designing how to place the trapezoid shapes was both a lot of fun AND a challenge... you should have seen my face when I realized I needed to modify the shapes for page 2 instead of just using the same layout. 

What a beautiful game - a very appealing layout, and such gently framed content. Hope to run it with a small group at some point. This style of game that fills in the space around a person is quickly becoming a favorite style for me, and I think this is a beautiful way of talking about grief in a small, trusted group. 

This is so much fun! Your design is beautiful, but also it's FUN to play! I grabbed my favorite book (Anne of Green Gables) and immediately started digging around for seeds - literally hadn't even finished reading the full game when I started. It was such a satisfying experience, and I was so grateful for the flexible instructions that encouraged fun over the first suitable word I found. It encouraged some playfulness. I've started some of the Cultivation gameplay now, and it's awesome. Really excited to dig in further, and really enjoyed this game!