The status of my games

A small update and the chance to share some of my fears and disappointments.

I'm re-re-writing Guts & Glory, trying to filter out all the trash, polish it down to the bare essentials and organize those minimal rules in a coherent and elegant whole. Then embellish with examples and a little more prose. Either way, I think I'm very pleased with the game. Oh, and it's called Chains of War now. Much more fitting.

What kind of bothers me is that the guys at VSCA are doing their own squad-based mini wargame/rpg now. Which means I'm basically competing with a bunch of guys who do a shitload of playtesting and already have a successful game out. I can't help but feel...outmatched. Which is similar to what happened to Hearts, Clubs & Murders: I was jockeying about with that game (the whole point of which was to simulate Agatha Christie's crime fiction) and then out of nowhere Graham Walmsley comes out with A Taste for Murder.

To top that off, I've just been over on Story Games and Daniel Solis starts talking about this game where people have the power to make Rules. And I'm like "dude! that's Dysangelium!". I know originality is overrated and everything, but it sucks to see someone come out with a good game that basically makes your own game (on which you've been working for a while) completely obsolete, because it covers the same ground. And I see no point in having two almost identical games on the market really, even if one of those games is mine. Ugh.

Anyway, I've also spent a lot of time in the last two days putting together a playtest document for Subterranean Adventures. It's more work than I expected, but it seems to be coming together nicely. I'll post some more stuff soon-ish.