So, once again I find myself floundering in a world of half-baked ideas, half-written home-rules and a glut of anxiety over my ability to actually do something with my ‘passion’. That is to say, I really enjoy Tabletop gaming, I really enjoy tweaking about with rules, but the world is big and scary and I never seem to really get to the end of any thread I begin to follow.
Such is my current predicament. I’ve been working on my pirate-themed tabletop board game/role-playing game under the working title ‘Castaway’ for about 3 maybe 4 years… It’s been through about 5 major revisions and was just starting to feel right… But then while enjoying a board gaming evening with some chums, one recommended we play a game he’d been recently enjoying; To my surprise, this game, with which I had no prior knowledge, was nearly, in every discernible way, exactly like the game I had been thinking up.
And so, that project is now all but thrown to the bin as apparently someone – Other than me… Had already made the game I was dreaming up. So shockingly close were the mechanics I genuinely have to wonder If my ideas were somehow stolen. It is uncannily similar.
Instead of outright binning the work though, I shall amalgamate it into the work I’d long since passed over on my 5HIT roleplaying system. And now, I am determined to self-publish 5HIT as a digital good (maybe even as an NFT with some kind of after-sales benefit for those that have a valid NFT…) Whatever happens, I am going to have a game with my name on it, for sale… somewhere, and if just one person buys a copy, I’ll consider it a total win.
While suffering my great existential executive disfunction and drifting awkwardly between about 4 various hobbies, I have out of some erratic part of my brain, spawned a new project, a new game style for me to look into; Deck Builders. I have had a bit of a love-hate relationship with several Deck Builder games recently. Dominion is fun, but honestly, the ‘meta’ of the game makes me dizzy, there’s too much going on for me to enjoy it. Star Realms has some good stuff, but I find the game unbalanced. Shards of Infinity improves on Star Realms a little, but playing the basic set gets very samey samey.
So, I thought, can I do better? I want Dominion, but a little lighter… And so, that’s what I’m doing, along with the other hobbies I’m floating between, I now have this new tinker toy – So far, I have a theme, a working title, and some core mechanics all scrawled into meaningless unintelligible notes. It’s going quite well. I shall add “F**k This Place” to my projects page, and update the status of Castaway.
In some happy, unrelated news: One of my 3d models has had a slow amount but tricklingly continued sales. nearly enough that I started another 3d model. If something out of the many hundreds of things I do each day might bring a little money to me for my effort I need to grab a hold of that. So, here’s to me, almost being a person that makes money from what they do.