One Small Step For d66 Exploration
Game Night
“Hey everyone. Bryan here. What’s going on?” That’s how I start my YouTube channel videos that I record but rarely edit and post. I persist because the truth is there’s a LOT going on. In my head. At least.
My grand announcement is our family trip to Ireland will finally be realized! In one week, I’ll be gone for two.
Join me on NOTES to see some Emerald Isle. It’s beautiful and I’d love to inspire!
I’ll be doing some hiking in real life though my Exploration Game Library is pretty neat. I’m attracted to games that invite journaling and building up imaginary places either alone or in groups. The tension can be cooperative or competitive but the latest addition to my collection is a bare bones d20 hex crawler called HXPLR - clever.
Somehow I downloaded it almost the minute it became available on itchio and there are typos and missing page references and missing words, but the idea is tidy. You arrive somewhere and the 20-sided die helps you populate and figure that place out.
My own d66 Solo-TTRPG Journal Hexcrawl would benefit from an idea that I haven’t seen yet in my exploration collection - rolling for distances. The strategic components of most of these games have you leverage what you gain (points, resources, advantage) against what you lose (time, money, fuel, etc.) and Distance as a randomly set variable would add a lovely dimension to the mechanics.
GAME ON
ARCS A big, juicy box filled with bits and bobs for creating and exploring and securing your part in a new solar system. It’s the only board game on this short list. It’s received mixed reviews. Some find it highly engaging and others criticize its complexity and the randomness of card draws.
STA: Captains Log Among my first items to see what random space travel rules might look like is the Star Trek Adventures game book. The solo-player setup lets you pick bunches of details and then has a Play Cycle. You roll as you go along and have encounters with ships or people or aliens. It’s designed to help you mimic an episode of TV with a clear goal to solve for the mission.
Exploration Cycle Playing cards help plot terrain and encounters on hex paper. Dealing with encounters and situations is a little smothered, lacking the grit some RPG players might be up for, but the resulting map is actually usable anywhere in other games. Clumping terrains avoids the strange randomness of unlikely terrain types neighboring each other.
HXPLR uses that 20-sided die and handles encounters pretty well. Not even 24 hours old yet, its terrain picks and details are sparse and ordinary, but the interaction potential and management of ‘spells’ and healing make sense. Like many newer RPGs, the mentality is that life is precious and just banging away at things doesn’t generate games that connect us.
The World We Left Behind During this casual worldbuilding game, players draw symbols on playing cards to create a planet, populate it with traits, and uncover the mystery of the species that left this world behind. The mapping is familiar but the lonely concept or abandoned mystery landscape is quite at odds with the narratives I’d like my game to inspire.
DREAM PICK
I missed the Kickstarter for EARTHBORNE RANGERS but the premise has me: Earthborne Rangers is a customizable, co-operative card game set in the wilderness of the far future. It’s on my Wishlist. Even characters are generated by drawing cards implying that you’re responsible for tending one of the wardens responsible for stewarding this future earth wilderness. That’s just really appealing to me as a game mechanic and as a story concept.
Space Radio You’ve got a ship and you’ve got a crew; one or the other is confronting the features you roll for... You arrive at a new star and slowly discover features around you through the use of random d66 lists. You plot those things on a hex-covered paper and decide what to explore further and in the meanwhile, act and react to keep momentum moving forward. (This is the game I’m developing.)
The World We Left Behind and HXPLR and ARCS and Exploration Cycle all accomplish similar things in differing levels of complexity. You’re left with maps to share and stories to tell; some lonely, some stories of conflict and intrigue. Maybe you even solved a mystery or two. This is a handsome list of games that I would love to call peers one day. I’ll find more and I’ll develop more.
I’d guess I might have a workable first version of Space Radio within two months - in the meantime, the story 0/1 is an example of a story I would hope Space Radio could seed! And the next installment of 0/1 comes tomorrow.
As always, thanks for reading and supporting! Share this with any folks you might guess enjoy creativity, light-scifi and game nights. That would make my day.
Bryan