Wednesday, February 11, 2015

What Kind of Books do YOU Have on Hand?




Welcome back to the Conversation!  Today I’m joined by Matthew Moore who is here to talk to us about his project Bring Your Own Book, the game of borrowed phrases.  

Hello, I’m Matthew, game designer for Bring Your Own Book. I’ve been a professional video game designer for a few years now, but this will be my first published tabletop title. I’m excited for it to happen and happy to have a chance to chat about it.

By the title alone one might think you’re creating some kind of book club with your project, but that’s not right at all is it?  Can you tell us a bit about Bring Your Own Book and what kind of shenanigans you have waiting for us?  

Sure! Bring Your Own Book is somewhat inaccurately described as a card game, because what we provide is cards and a timer, but really it’s a book game. In order to play, every person at the table needs a book. Different books make for different experiences, so you can challenge yourself with textbooks, have good clean family fun with children’s books, or enjoy a raunchy game with racy romance novels. It is what you make of it.

The core activity is taking text out of context. If the prompt asks you to find “A line from a teenager’s diary,” you’ll need to search through that detective story you brought and pluck out something that works. It can be any amount of sequential text, from a whole paragraph to a single word, and it can ignore existing punctuation. For example, a player recently tweeted at us their find for “The name of a beauty product.” They proposed “Pledge: For Her,” which they extracted from “‘I will not take a pledge for her,’ I replied.”

The mechanics are simple and not unlike other popular social games. Players take turns drawing prompts from the deck. The player who presents the best selection receives the card as a way to keep score. Any time any player gets to three cards, everyone passes their books to the left. The first to get enough cards wins, and it’s time to play all over again with different books.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Our Last, Best Hope...



Welcome back to the Conversation!  Today I’m joined by Sam Oplinger who has come back to Kickstarter for the relaunch of his Last Starfleet cooperative board game.  Thank you for joining us today!



Hi there, thanks for having me.


The name “Last Starfleet” brings up images of wandering space ships containing the last remnants of humanity, was that the plan? Can you give us a quick overview of the game?


Right on target, yeah! In the distant future… players take up the helms of their very own starships, and together, form the Last Starfleet. You’re trying to establish a colony for humanity after you all learn that Earth has exploded! You have to choose what world you’ll try to populate from a meager selection. If we’d known of any ideal choices, there would already be another colony.


So, that’s the story. All the ships and planets are unique and you can change the story significantly by playing with a different combination of decks. It is super easy to pick up, but as you get used to playing, you’ll begin to see many more layers of complexity. The plot thickens! I’m very proud of what we did with that.