As we announced a few weeks ago, it’s nearly time for the latest installment in our series of public domain game jams, Gaming Like It’s 1930! It’s an extra special jam this year as we begin a brand new decade of works entering the public domain, and as always it will begin on New Year’s Day (a.k.a. Public Domain Day, a.k.a. this Thursday!) and run until the end of January.
Head on over to the game jam page on Itch to sign up and read the full rules. There are also some ideas there for works that you could draw on, but we encourage you to go do some digging of your own, especially if you want to compete for the Best Deep Cut prize (personally, I suggest searching the Internet Archive for things dated 1930 to find some truly unexpected treasures). For extra inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.
The new year is approaching fast, and you know what that means: new material is entering the public domain in the US, and we’ll be celebrating it with the eighth installment of our public domain game jam. What’s more, this is an extra special year because the ever-growing public domain is hitting a new decade: it’s time for Gaming Like It’s 1930!
As in past years, we’re calling on designers of all stripes to create both analog and digital games that build on works entering the public domain. There are plenty of interesting works to draw on, including:
Written works by Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Langston Hughes, Olaf Stapledon, Sigmund Freud, William Faulkner
Art by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Grant Wood, M. C. Escher, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian
Films All Quiet on the Western Front, Animal Crackers, Hell’s Angels, and the first Looney Toons
Music by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, the Gershwins, and Son House
Other characters including Nancy Drew and The Little Engine That Could
The jam will begin on January 1st and run through the end of the month, accepting submissions of both analog and digital games based on works from 1930. Whether you’ve participated before or not, we encourage everyone to get involved!
Even if you don’t have any experience, it’s never been easier to try your hand at game design. There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.
At the end of the jam we’ll be choosing winners in six categories, and awarding a choice of prizes from Techdirt and Diegetic Games. You can read the full rules and other details, and sign up to participate, on the game jam page over on Itch.io. We’ll be back with more reminder posts as the jam draws nearer, including a look at one card game submission from last year that has since been released for purchase and is getting great reviews (so stay tuned for that!)
A couple months ago we offered up the few remaining copies of our social media card game, One Billion Users, after fulfilling orders from our Kickstarter backers. Quite a few of you took the chance to snag one, and now we’re down to an extremely small number remaining: at time of writing, we only have ten undamaged copies of the game, and a few dozen of the damaged copies that we are offering at a deeper discount.
So if you haven’t gotten a copy yet, or you know someone who might want one, now’s your chance. And remember, gift-giving season is nearly upon us!
Also: there are still some of our original Kickstarter backers who haven’t completed their surveys, meaning we can’t yet send out their games. Don’t worry, we’re holding onto them and not selling them as part of this sale. If you’re reading this and you’re one of these backers, please complete your survey as soon as possible (if you’re having issues, there’s more information in this Kickstarter update).
Probably the most iconic painting to enter the public domain this year is René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, best known to many as the “this is not a pipe” painting. We knew it would almost certainly yield a few entries in the jam, and one of these stood out strongly. This Is Not A Game About A Pipe is the type of game we don’t see too often in these jams: a full-fledged original card game with novel mechanics that both honor the source material and make for a truly fun and endlessly replayable experience.
The basic idea is a standard trick-taking game. The rules are then filled with comedic surrealist energy, best exemplified by the four suits that exist in the game’s custom deck of cards: Pipes, Cards, Tricks, and Winning. Yes, “Cards” is a suit. So is “Tricks”. And yet the game itself has you using cards (only some of which are Cards) to win tricks. You might win a trick with a Trick card, or lose a trick with a Winning card, or the opposite, or… this is sounding confusing isn’t it? Well that’s kind of the point — and yet the rules themselves are not actually confusing at all, and it’s quite an easy game to learn! In addition to having its own bizarre suit, each card is also capable of either affirming or negating the suit of another card: declaring that it “is” or “is not” what it purports to be. Players must manipulate these mind-bending mechanics to find valid plays and attempt to win tricks.
Our judges were blown away by just how cool and original the game is, emerging from only three short pages of rules. It feels like the sort of game that could become a genuine classic. And it is so firmly rooted in the painting it’s based on, and the concepts and questions that the artist loved to explore, that you can’t help but feel like Magritte would thoroughly approve. For all that, it’s a worthy winner of this year’s Best Analog Game.
Congratulations toMac McAnallyfor the win! You can get everything you need to play This Is Not A Game About A Pipefrom its page on Itch. That’s a wrap on this year’s winner spotlights, but don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1930.
This is a brief detour in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and Best Adaptation, but before we move on to the last two categories (Best Analog Game and Best Digital Game), let’s take a moment to run through the honorable mentions that we included in every category this year.
First up, the honorable mention for Best Remix went to Eleanor by Micah McFarland. This short piece of Twine interactive fiction artfully combines public domain artworks by more than a dozen artists, each one carefully chosen to illustrate a scene in the story. There’s some great succinct writing, multiple endings, and some hidden narrative mechanics under the hood.
Next, the honorable mention for Best Deep Cut went to The Last Tower by Zee Ham, a tabletop dungeon crawl game based on the 1929 architectural floorplans for the Chrysler Building. Using the plans as a skeleton, the game builds out a fun environment full of puzzles and encounters, as well as rich environmental storytelling woven through the details of the various rooms.
The honorable mention for Best Visuals went to Benten Pond by cutegamesclub, a simple sidescroller game based on a 1929 wood block painting. Though the gameplay is a bit frustrating, the visuals shine: the painting has been carefully and lovingly recreated as layered pixel art with parallax scrolling that takes full advantage of the original composition’s sense of depth and distance.
For Best Adaptation, the honorable mention went to DIY Dalí by haunted-jug, a meditative little game about remixing the iconic imagery from Salvador Dali’s paintings. It’s simple and engaging, and it puts the focus squarely on the source material — plus, it kicks off with a fun little animated flourish that perfectly sets the tone.
On to the two categories for which we haven’t yet had the main spotlight winner spotlight posts (those will wrap things up on the next two Saturdays).
For Best Digital Game, the honorable mention went to Thrall by Kanderwund, another piece of Twine interactive fiction, and one with an incredible sense of style. The prose is pretty stylish by itself, but the real eye-catcher is the presentation: full of lively lo-fi video backgrounds and set to moody atmospheric music, it’s an incredibly polished product for a game jam entry.
Finally, the honorable mention for Best Analog Game went to Red Harvest by fuzztech, a compact and well-designed mystery TTRPG for a game master and one or more players who roleplay as private investigators. It’s based on the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name, but with a twist inspired by that name: it transports the story from a mining town in Montana to a mining town on Mars.
And that’s that for the honorable mentions! Congratulations to everyone whose game was chosen.We’ll be back next week with the next in our series of winner spotlights, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1930.
This is it: we’re about to lock in our order quantity for One Billion Users, the competitive card game about running a social media network that we funded on Kickstarter last year. If you haven’t yet become a backer of the campaign, you can still make a late pledge to order as many copies as you want. If you’re already a backer, you can fill out this form to let us know you want additional copies. Either way, today is the last day that we’re accepting orders, so if you want to guarantee that you’ll get the game, this is your last chance.
We have no plans to produce more copies of the game after this. There’s a small chance that we’ll have some leftovers after fulfilling everyone’s orders, in which case we might make them available at some point, but we can’t make any promises.
Thanks again to everyone who helped make this Kickstarter a success. We’re confident this is a game you’re going to love playing, and we can’t wait to get it into your hands. Keep an eye on the Kickstarter updates for more information as production proceeds, and for now here’s one more sneak peek at some cards from our sample copy:
Do you have what it takes to run a social media network that grows to one billion users and beyond? That’s the question in our new card game, One Billion Users, which we successfully funded on Kickstarter last year. Now the game is entering production, and since we have no plans to make more copies after this, it’s your last chance to get one for yourself. The Kickstarter is accepting late pledgesthrough the end of tomorrow, Wednesday May 7th.
(For those of you who already backed the campaign but want to purchase additional copies, you’ll have a chance to do that before your order is fulfilled, as long as you let us know about your intent to buy additional copies by the end of tomorrow.)
We’re very excited to get the game into people’s hands, and are on track to do so towards the end of this summer. Here’s another peek at our sample copy from the printer:
As we announced last week, our recently-Kickstarted card game One Billion Users is about to enter production, which means this is your last chance to secure a copy for yourself. The Kickstarter campaign is accepting late pledges from now through the end of Wednesday, May 7th.
We recently received our proof copy, and it looks and feels great. We can’t wait to get the game into people’s hands:
Currently we don’t have any plans to produce more copies of the game beyond this run for our Kickstarter backers, so this is very likely your last chance to get your own copy of One Billion Users.
(For those of you who already backed the campaign but want to purchase additional copies, you’ll have a chance to do that before your order is fulfilled, as long as you let us know about your intent to buy additional copies by the end of May 7th.)
Regular followers of the jam are surely familiar with David Harris, our one regular entrant who has won a category every single year. And I promise the judges aren’t just playing favorites: this year’s entry is once again suffused with the sort of thoughtful creativity that always makes David’s games stand out. Calder’s Circus (I Think Best In Wire) is inspired by the work of Alexander Calder, best known as one of the earliest creators of kinetic sculptures or mobiles. In 1929, he presented Cirque Calder, an improvised circus performance utilizing dozens of wire and wood figurines. Calder’s Circus the game doesn’t just take inspiration from these performances — it continues them.
Players are tasked with creating their own circus, by building their own wire figurines and telling tales of their performances. Thus it becomes a combination of a crafting/artmaking game with a storytelling game, which thrusts players right into the heart of Cirque Calder‘s unique combination of sculpture and performance. Thanks to the robust design notes David Harris has included with the game, which walk through his creative process in detail, we can understand this aspect of the game design his own words:
Isn’t this a game about wire-bending not narrative? Only if you’re looking at the tree and not the forest. Calder was sketching in wire but he was creating a circus and the performance of that circus was his end goal.
In the game, this manifests as a lightly-competitive group exercise in which, after constructing their free-standing circus scenes from wire (or pipe cleaners if you want to play with kids, who would definitely get a kick out of this), they compete to tell the stories of each others’ performances, randomly determined to be either triumphant or disastrous. The player who tells the best stories becomes the ringleader, and must name the circus and present its dramatic introduction.
As the aforementioned design notes describe, to create this game David immersed himself not only in Calder’s work but also in the context surrounding it: Calder’s life in the art scene in Paris and his comments on his own creative process, and his relationship with real life circuses and the fraught history surrounding circuses themselves as a form of entertainment. It’s no surprise that the result is a game that feels more like a continuation of Cirque Calder than just an homage to it, and a game that is a fitting winner of Best Adaptation.
Congratulations to David Harris for the win! You can get everything you need to play Calder’s Circus, as well as David’s design notes, from its page on Itch. We’ll be back next week with the next in our series of winner spotlights, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1930.
Last year, we were thrilled with the success of our Kickstarter campaign for One Billion Users, the Social Media Card Game. In case you missed it at the time, One Billion Users is a fun, fast-paced game where 2-4 players compete to build the biggest and best social media network.
Now, the game is about to enter production, which means this is your last chance to secure a copy for yourself. The Kickstarter campaign is accepting late pledges from now through the end of Wednesday, May 7th. After that, we’ll be locking in our order quantity with the factory, and the games will be en route to backers some time this summer.
We currently have no plans to produce any further copies of the game beyond this Kickstarter run, so this is most likely the last chance to get your hands on One Billion Users. If you aren’t already a backer of the Kickstarter campaign, place your late pledge now before it’s too late!
(If you are already a backer and want to purchase additional copies, let us know).
Thanks again to everyone who helped make the Kickstarter a success. We’re excited for this game to make it into people’s hands, so you can find out if you have what it takes to run a social media network with one billion users.
