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Binary Seek

Published January 2, 2025

Written January 2, 2025 in 2 minutes as part of the Gentle Games Habit

A game for 1 or more players.

Take a piece of paper and fold it half repeatedly until you have lots of little rectangles. Number all the rectangles. There should be a lot. Do the same thing to another sheet of paper so you have identical sheets.

Cut up one of the sheets so you have lots of little numbered rectangles. Hide them where you live. Make good hiding spots.

Each time you find one, cross it out on the other sheet of paper. When you find them all, you win. If you don't find them all before you die, you lose.

Even/Odd Dice

Published January 1, 2025

Written January 1, 2025 in 1 minute as part of the Gentle Games Habit

A 2 player game.

Collect a bunch of dice - more than you can count on sight. It doesn't matter how many sides they have, they can all be different.

Put one to the side. Throw all of the others.

When a player thinks they know which there are more of - even or odds - they take the set aside die, give it to the other player, and call even or odds. The player who called even or odds takes those dice. The other player takes the remainder.

Whoever has more dice wins.

2025-01-03 Playtest

Played with a friend as written. I started by throwing 143 d6. It was simply too many to make any sense. In conceiving the game, I thought that would be a fun "this is crazy!" moment. Well, it was crazy. A crazy, overwhelming task. Maybe we should have stuck with it as an experiment. I liked the sort of psychological confrontation with the task. But we moved on without attempting to play like that.

We then started with fewer dice and increased. It took a few plays for eyes to adjust to the task. I was surprised at how cognitively demanding the task was at first. 18 seemed to be a sweet spot - a number you could actually count, but could also get an edge by making the call before evaluating all the dice.

We also adjusted to an odd number: 17 or 19. Naturally, the odds are that there will be a close to 50-50 split on evens and odds. An odd number of dice makes it so that there won't be a 50-50 split.

We also did away with the grabbing and passing of the die. It was intended to break splits, but just doesn't do it. It actually disincentivized making the call if the split is 50-50. You lose on a 50-50 split when you pass the die - if both players are playing perfectly, the game locks because there is no winning move. An odd number of dice takes care of the problem: it prevents a 50-50 split and you're incentivized to make the call (and make it right).

Gentle Games Habit

Published January 1, 2025

This is a page for a project I did for most of January 2025. For a review of the project, go to Gentle Games Review.

I've been wanting to design a game - a board game, maybe a tabletop roleplaying game. I recently read Sophie Yanow's A Gentle Comics Habit, and I thought "I will have a Gentle Games Habit."

Each day I'll make up a game. That's the "Gentle Games Habit."

I say "each day", but I will skip days. I won't skip more than one day in a row though. Skipping days will allow it to be a "Gentle Games Habit."

I say I'll make up a game, but I will keep a loose definition of game. People will read some of them and say "these are not games." They will be right except for the fact that the real game is one I am playing called "Gentle Games Habit."

I'll allow myself 1 minute to write the first game. Each subsequent game I will allow myself an additional minute. I won't go over (too much), and I will think about the game before writing it. At some point I'll stop making games in this manner, because I don't want to spend that much time on games each day. By then it will hopefully not matter because I will have made a bunch of small games and developed a "Gentle Games Habit."

The games

2025-01-01 Even/Odd Dice
2025-01-02 Binary Seek
2025-01-03 1 Page, 3 Objects, 6 Words
2025-01-04 Walk or Run
2025-01-05 Cake Slice Rummy
2025-01-06 Paper Pentomino Stacker
2025-01-07 House Maker
2025-01-08 The Egg of Gungyria
2025-01-10 Scheduling Next Session
2025-01-11 Invasive Species
2025-01-13 Card Backgammon
2025-01-14 Clear Bag Burglaries
2025-01-16 Monster Builder
2025-01-17 Character Cache
2025-01-19 Flashback RPG Structure
2025-01-21 Suit Seekers
2025-01-23 Chasing Windmills
2025-01-26 Gentle Games Review

The Ratcatchers Tale

Published December 7, 2024

The first time I ran a tabletop role-playing game was in my teens. My friends and I played Magic: The Gathering and the video games of the era: The Legend of Zelda series, Ultima Online, Diablo II, etc. In high school, our friend's Uncle Bobby introduced us to RPGs through a fantasy LARP that he ran. Playing Dungeons & Dragons on our own was the next obvious step.

As the only one willing to read the Dungeon Master's Guide, I was the obvious choice for Dungeon Master. I had practically no clue what I would be doing. But in preparing to run the game, I had come across two guiding principles.

The first principle came from Uncle Bobby. As our nerd-elder, he had gaming wisdom we didn't: video games are restrictive. Live-action and tabletop RPGs were superior because they weren't limited by computer programming. In an RPG, the players can do anything!

Amazing! Got it.

The second principle came from the Dungeon Master's Guide. With the help of my obsessive personality and strong desire to run the game "right", I read the whole thing cover-to-cover. I can't remember what it said 30 years ago, but I do remember the godlike responsibility it bestowed upon me. I had to portray a real, living world.

In my mind I thought: "This will be so awesome! We're going to play a game where the players can do anything! I'm an honest guy, I'll facilitate this realistic fantasy world!"

I spent hours designing a castle on graph paper that my players could explore. I wrote up little evocative descriptions of the environments. I was so excited! We were going to have a sleepover so we could play all night. My two friends came over, we got our dice, their character sheets, and we got going. It's midnight by the time we start the adventure.

Late, yes, but I was going to get to see what D&D was all about.

And the adventure began:

Two heroes approach a massive castle, surely full of dreadful beasts which they'll have to slay. They swing open the doors and enter. I paint the scene for them: a long corridor of dressed stone, the damp dank air, a rat scurrying across their path...

"A rat?" My friend asks. "Where did it go?"

I'm stunned. I have no idea where the rat went. This is not in my notes. But I can do this. I read the books. I know that anything can happen here. I can do this, I just have to portray a realistic world.

"Uhhh... there's a little hole in the wall, it scurried in there." Phew! Good thinking. This is going to go just fine.

"I get on my knees to check out the hole." Hm. This hole is meaningless. But they players can do whatever they want, so let's see where this goes.

"It's a small crack between the stones, big enough for a rat to squeeze into."

"I stick my sword in the hole to see if I can get the rat out."

For the next two hours, I facilitate the telling of an epic tale of two fantasy heroes attempting to locate a rat in a castle wall.

I tried to edit the scene, move them along, but it didn't take. I got frustrated, straight up told them that they needed to move on. But they wouldn't let it go. It went from mystifying to irritating to enraging to comical. The other player and I were folded over in half laughing about this hero who wouldn't let go of pursuit of this rat.

The next morning, the bleary-eyed ratcatcher earnestly asked me: "What was the secret about the rat?" I told him it was just flavor text, mood-setting text. I don't think he believed me.

The campaign ended that night, I'm pretty sure. If we played again, it wasn't as memorable. We talked and laughed about that rat for months. It was so stupid. And it was amazing. Uncle Bobby was right: we really did things we could not do in a video game.