itch.io

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! 

I just wanted to add that I agree with all of this and was also imagining a LARP option, especially because I live in an area where I have access to a subway system pretty easily! I feel like the hardest part would be communicating with each other, and also the fact that if you were to base it in a real subway system, it'd be hard to manage other people being present. I almost was imagining more of like... an immersive solo-esque experience. 

I am so obsessed with this that it's hard to even express, but I'll try to be articulate for the sake of a comment.

First of all, fantastic use of physical space, I have been trying to wrap my head around my own ideas for games that take place in physical space, and I think you nailed it. 

Secondly, you've written fantastic instructions that are fun, clear, concise, and easy to read. Not only do I feel the urge to go out and play this game right now, it feels like that is extremely achievable. (I particularly appreciate your use of bold and italics to cue/prompt the player within the text. Really user friendly to me.) 

Thirdly, everything about the actual gameplay is adorable and intriguing. The prompts are open-ended enough that I can imagine myself into them, and I think the prompt to consider the italics is a really fun and simple way to guide deeper thoughts. 

I crave an expansion with MORE woodland scenarios for my mushroom person to deliver!! 

This looks like a lot of fun and I can imagine that playing it at a group with my tabletop people, it'd be a LOT of chaotic hijinks. I like that your addenda suggests ways to skin it into existing RPGS - I raise you one further, I feel like it could probably also be tweaked to fit into non-space-themed games, if the GM was able to come up with a parallel high-stakes scenario that required characters to interact with it for a "fix" in this timed way. Like, a protective warding spell cast on an object that your party is trying to steal, or grabbing onto steady things when sinking into quicksand. 

I wanted to share the feedback that I had some trouble parsing how to use each of the cores; I think your mechanics are really cool and interesting, but I had to reread through the simple instructions a few times to try to work out how exactly players were meant to interact with their dice, the core dice in the middle, and the rules of their specific consoles. I'd be curious to see if there was a little bit more instruction you could add that would clarify for a potential group of players. For example, "Roll a d6 and add it to the Multiplicator." What's the Multiplicator? Is it the core? Is it a pool of dice you have going at your own console? 

To be clear, I like this premise a great deal, I think it's probably just that I'm missing out on something that feels clear in your head. I sat with a pile of d6 and did some sample rolls, and I think I connected the dots okay enough to see how it'd play out but I'm not sure, and that's where I start to wonder if something could be clearer. I think that's the most challenging part of instructional design - navigating the space between your mechanics and the starting-point of someone who has never played the game before. I hope this feedback makes sense, I can try to explain it further if you have a question about it! 

Anyway, thanks for reading this rambling feedback! And thanks for making this really fun and flexible mini-game! 

Oh, this is a lovely one. I really enjoyed your mechanic of using the number and face cards for different types of prompts, but combining them together to fill out a log entry. I think this creates a sense of variety because things can combine in all different ways, and these prompts are open-ended enough that they do feel combinable in this way. I particularly like how you addressed pacing - increasing the number of face cards per entry, therefore increasing the complications, is a really neat way to capture the panic-mode of "everything is going wrong!" It almost makes me want to simultaneously decrease the number of other cards drawn to make the log entries shorter and even more skewed towards the impending disaster. 

Thank you so much for commenting! I'm glad you liked it. :) It was such a fun one to make so it brings me a lot of joy to know it made you laugh!

Don't worry I totally got what you meant and it's a really interesting thought exercise for me, and probably also a cool learning moment as a designer, because people might totally bring their own feelings to the game - and that to me feels like a really lovely sign that the game resonated enough that people wanted to tell more stories with it. I think there are probably a lot more ways to utilize a d6 in this type of format. I'm definitely pondering on it - in two ways. One, the appendix thing I mentioned before. But two, within the list of other premises I have for this "structure" that I've made, I'm going to look to see if any of them would benefit from other ways of choice-making and story-making as I develop. Thank you for this conversation!!! 

Thank you!!! I'm really glad you enjoyed it - the gondola is so cool! I really like walking the line between being prescriptive and being too vague, so I thought a lot about how to write questions that would allow for people to come up with their own ideas, and yet wouldn't leave people going "I don't know what to do!" 

I LOVE the idea of rolling for more specifics about the people - age, etc. Or even honestly just the idea of using the 1-6 as a scale, instead of just a decision maker. You may have noticed that so far a lot of my 1-6 are just lists that I have sort of placed together. 

One of the big challenges I have faced in trying to distill the essence of these games down into one page is an attempt to keep things very streamlined. A challenge that I have set myself is to keep the scope unemotional - so, like, the bridge (or the headstone in the case of Simple Plots) doesn't have a strong understanding of emotions but can observe things that people do. I think in my head, prompting people to determine things like feelings felt a little too in the vein of "the bridge understanding what they're seeing" rather than "the bridge bears witness to what they're seeing." 

That said, I have a list of other ideas that I want to make into "Simple ___" games, and I would ultimately like to pull them together into a collection. Even though I don't know how I feel about putting feelings-based prompting into the original game's structure, I do think I might consider whether these sorts of questions might make for a good appendix, if folks wanted to add more of this type of flavor in or were looking for these sorts of prompts, because I think it's notable that you walked away from your play experience thinking about it! 

Sorry for the long reply, I hope this made sense! Thanks again for the lovely comment and suggestion!

Thank you so much for this lovely feedback!!! Trying to fit it on one page was a challenge both in formatting and also in being concise. Ultimately I think it made me streamline the mechanics more, which allows play to be simpler - it started way more complicated than just that one d6, but in the end I'm really happy with how I was able to simplify it. Thanks again for checking it out! 

I'm so glad you liked it!!! Honestly I'm impressed you made it far enough to go missing on your walk! I have to say, coming up with the list of ways the parent could die was the most fun part of writing this game. 

Hahaha but wait you might be onto something... Thanks for checking it out!