Games

Available Games

Look here for games that I've created, whether they are made with Twine, print and play card games or rules to games you can play with any 52-card playing deck.

King's Army Rules

A History

Some of my earliest memories involve gaming of some sort. In my youth I spent countless hours playing on the NES and SNES systems, adventuring through RPGs or questing for the Super Bowl in Tecmo Super Bowl. As I got older, I fell in love with Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy games on Playstation. The stories are what captured my imagination. So, naturally, I tried my hand at creating my own games. First with an old DOS-based program called ZZT and then later with RPG Maker 95 and RPG Maker 2000. I spent so many hours creating characters, stories, new lands, scouring my dial-up based Internet for tips and tricks (Google was in its infancy back then and Ask Jeeves was the big dog on the block). Sadly those games were lost when I graduated high school and moved on to college and other things took my attention. I still regret not doing a better job of backing up that stuff.

For a short time I enjoyed board games as a kid. There was one game in particular, an indie board game about deer hunting that really spoke to me, so much in fact that I grabbed some construction paper and created my own version of the game. I think I was probably 10 or 11 at the time. In high school I created a game from playing cards called King's Army, which had some aspects of deck building and Magic the Gathering, even though at the time I had zero clue what either of those were. In fact, I don't think the deckbuilding genre had been created yet at that point.

To this day I still enjoy trying to create new games, though I tend to focus most of my energy on writing stories instead. I'm in the midst of creating and testing a few different board/card games. One, Galactic Settlers, is a deck building style of game where you and your opponent race to build space ships to colonize planets that offer rewards such as victory points to win the game or special cards that can help your next ship get into cosmos quicker. Its theme is heavily based in my Webwork universe where Dulcima takes place and if I ever get the game to the point where it's ready for mass production and distribution to the masses, I'd like it to be a Webwork Chronicles tie-in. Why re-invent the wheel with a brand new universe?

Another game I've worked on here and there is a deck builder for younger kids called Bedtime Monster Bash, where you build your deck of pets and toys to defeat the monsters that live under the bed. This game has taken on many forms since I've dreamed it up and will likely keep on evolving. Having an idea is easy, actually getting it to work and be fun is something different entirely!

I absolutely LOVE card games such as Star Realms, Ascension, Summoner Wars and Smash Up. I haven't played much Magic the Gathering, but if I did, I have a feeling I'd get addicted very quickly. Recently I've been turned onto the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, which combines PPRPGs and card games. The cards are basically your GM. For someone who has done zero PPRPGs (though I'd love to try it), this is a great introduction, especially if you don't know any skilled GMs.

To feed into my writing skills, I really enjoy creating "Choose your own adventure" style games using Twine. Twine is web based and works on any device (recommend a keyboard!), but it's really easy to make some fun text-based games. You can add pictures and music to add to the immersion factor among other things. Someday I tell myself when I have more time I'll make something really complicated and deep with Twine. For now, I create funny little games for family and friends on Twine, but the potential is there for something bigger. As I create new Twines, I will post them here.

What I'm Playing Right Now

No Man's Sky

Star Realms

Skyrim

Grim Dawn

Endless Space 2
Master of Orion

Borderlands 2

I don't have a ton of time, so my tastes in gaming lately have tended toward more casual, drop-in and jump out style games. This means story-driven games kinda take a back burner until the winter, when I'm not outside as much (though in the last 2 years skiing has occupied huge chunks of my weekends).