As you hopefully know by now, we are once again hosting our annual game jam celebrating the works that enter the public domain in 2026, a.k.a. today! This year, that means we enter a new decade, as works originally published in 1930 finally exit copyright protection and become free to remix, repurpose, and build on. Gaming Like It’s 1930! begins today and runs until the end of the month, and we’re calling on designers of all stripes to help us show why a robust and growing public domain is so valuable and important.
You can sign up on the game jam page on Itch, read the full rules, and get some ideas about works you might use (but we encourage you to go looking for other hidden gems too!) As usual, we’ll be giving away prizes in six different categories. 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.
We’re always astounded by the creativity on display in these jams, and I’m sure this year will be no different. 2026 has now begun, so it’s time to get designing!
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!)
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.
1929 was the year the Marx Brothers made their film debut in The Cocoanuts, a movie where they ostensibly run a resort hotel but mostly just engage in their regular antics. Cocoanut Hotel adapts this career turning point for the famed comedians in both content and spirit, turning it into (what else?) a full-fledged hotel management sim. Just as in the original, the story (and now the mechanics) primarily serve as a vehicle for the comedy, resulting in a game that’s both fun to play and filled with entertaining material from start to finish.
As the player, you are tasked by your boss Mr. Hammer (a.k.a. Groucho) with getting the hotel to maximum capacity in 30 days. To achieve this, you must tweak the rate for rooms and your various expenses. You’re given little information on precisely what impact these choices will have, which turns the beginning of the game into an intriguing and often-surprising puzzle as you experiment with your options. Each day brings various events, whether that’s shady characters checking in because you don’t spend enough on security, not-so-clever con men raiding your savings, and of course, U.H.A. (Unexplainable Harpo Activity):
Ultimately the game isn’t too challenging, but it isn’t mindless: you need to engage with the mechanics and figure out how to win. It’s peppered with fun details, including a couple jokes about copyright, and above all it feels like a complete and quite polished product. For that, Cocoanut Hotel is this year’s Best Digital Game.
Congratulations to Geoffrey Golden & G.C. Katzfor the win! You can play Cocoanut Hotelin your browser on Itch. We’ll be back next week with the last 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 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.
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.
One of the requirements for digital entries in these game jams is that they be playable in the browser, which puts a limit on just how graphically ambitious they can get. But A Warning pushes that limit to its breaking point, in service of a striking aesthetic built around a selection of Disney animated shorts from 1929 combined with lighting effects and a 3D-rendered interface.
Screenshots really don’t do it justice; you need to see it in action. The game is a simple but tantalizing video puzzle, in which you are tasked by President Herbert Hoover (by way of a fully-voiced briefing video) with uncovering secret messages that Walt Disney has hidden in the films. You’re then tossed into the main interface with minimal instruction, and must experiment with the rotating slices of animation and the various buttons that swap out the soundtrack and apply color filters to the visuals, possibly revealing hidden elements. Piece by piece, you must reconstruct the cartoons and their secret layers, all while they continue to play before your eyes. Uncover all the secret messages and you’ll make it to the ending (but no spoilers: you’ll have to get there for yourself!)
Last year was the year that Mickey Mouse’s new public domain status made waves and headlines, but while that was certainly an important milestone, we can’t forget that it just marks the beginning of what we now get to celebrate for years to come: masterpieces from the golden age of American animation entering the public domain. These are historic works that pioneered styles and techniques which continue to define animation today, and the visual feast they provide deserves to be celebrated. A Warning does just that, and does it with flare, while also being a very fun little puzzle game to boot. For all that, it’s this year’s winner of Best Visuals.
Congratulations to DigNZ for the win! You can play A Warning in your browser, or download the PC version, 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.
Perrin Ellis is our second returning winner, having won the Best Adaptation category in 2023 and 2022. This year, their entry A Pocketful of Peril! was also a strong candidate in that category, but it stood out even more when we were looking for the best deep cut. That’s because the game’s source material is arguably the deepest kind of cut possible: lost media.
Pocketful is a group storytelling game for 2-4 players based on some adventure film serials from 1929: stories told in twenty-minute increments and shown before the feature film at cinemas, a precursor to serial TV shows. Many such film serials survive today, but the four specific old serials the game uses as its core inspiration are lost, and nothing remains but some still images, the series titles, and the titles of their chapters. And what evocative titles they are: The Diamond Master, The Black Book, The Fire Detective, and Queen of the Northwoods. The game has players using dice and a deck of cards to mix and match these titles, and the chapter titles, and the common tropes of the genre, to tell a story that fills the void these lost works have left.
The end result is a game that adapts a film that doesn’t exist anymore, which is a fascinating feat in and of itself. The mechanics are well crafted to capitalize on the elements that are most useful and inspiring for storytelling (curiosity-piquing titles, and the basic genre tropes that provide scaffolding for a story) while leaving the creativity up to the players’ imagination. When these serials were first made, they were part of a deluge of similar works, and at the time there was nothing too special about them; now that they are lost, they have become a tantalizing historical mystery, and any game that celebrates that is a fitting winner of Best Deep Cut.
Congratulations to Perrin Ellis for the win! You can get everything you need to play A Pocketful of Peril! 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.
Today, we’re kicking off our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ll be going through all six winners in no particular order, starting today with the winner in the Best Remix category: AccoutrementsbyNora Katz.
Nora Katz is one of our returning winners this year, having previously won Best Analog Gamein 2022 with Nude On A Yellow Sofa, as well as receiving some honorable mentions since then. Accoutrements, a roleplaying and character-building game using a deck of cards, was a tough entry for the judges to place, as there were good cases to be made for it in several different categories. But ultimately we decided that the one were it stood out most against the competition was Best Remix, as it certainly draws from a wide variety of works to build on its core foundation.
That foundation is 1929’s God’s Man by Lynd Ward, a wordless “novel in woodcuts” that is considered a kind of precursor to the graphic novel. Its story of a Faustian bargain provides the narrative foundation for Accoutrements: a group of one to six players take on any roles they desire and engage in this bargaining process, to receive an otherworldly boon in the form of a magical implement, be it tool or weapon or talisman. Using simple procedures and a deck of 52 custom cards, they will choose the Hilt, Center, and Point that comprise their boon — and it is in this deck of cards that the game’s source material opens up far beyond God’s Man.
The cards all feature photos from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access Collection, depicting artifacts that are extremely public domain, what with most of them being hundreds or in many cases thousands of years old. These are carefully paired with prompt words and questions for the roleplaying process in a clean, photo-forward design.
As mentioned, there are 52 of these cards, each of them unique. The gameplay process has players engaging in the remixing themselves, choosing and combining these elements to describe their patron and build their boon, fleshing out its meaning and its impact on their character and the world. As noted in the rolebook, while Accoutrements can stand alone as a group storytelling game, it would also make a fantastic minigame for players in another, larger tabletop RPG campaign: a way to advance their characters and develop magic items and new story directions.
Although only one of its sources is a 1929 work, Accoutrements does a beautiful job of combining a vast selection of artistic works into a new and unified whole, while also incorporating the act of remixing into the gameplay, and also being a game that could itself be mixed into other games. For that, and for a beautiful deck of cards that will make you want to give each and every one a closer look, Accoutrements is this year’s Best Remix.
Congratulations to Nora Katz for the win! You can get everything you need to play Accoutrements 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.
