Game Chef just announced their 2017 challenge and I’m excited to design something for it! Last year I participated and created Exosolar, which I was pretty happy with.

This year the theme is Borders and the ingredients are Yarn, Echo, Smoke, and Cut. All games need to involve the theme and at least two ingredients in a way that’s core to the theme or mechanics. The deadline is July 9th – you should make something for it!

When the challenge was announced I spent a few minutes brainstorming ideas for each ingredient and generated a bunch of potential games. There a bunch that I like so I’m going to take a Stage Gate approach to narrowing them down. A stage gate apporach means working on multiple ideas in parallel and then having checkpoints where I eliminate several of the ideas.

I’ve already narrowed my list to five pitches. I’ll create short rule sets for each and then eliminate a couple. I’ll then playtest the remaining two or three and choose a winner to submit to the contest.

My current ideas are:

  1. A larp played while hiking where you’re about to covertly cross a border
  2. A tabletop game about unification, where you make a map from strips of yarn and cut the yarn to join neighboring regions
  3. A tabletop game about traveling to accomplish a mission – players use yarn to create an Indiana Jones style adventure trail as they either hunt for artifacts or build a resistance to an authoritarian regime (not sure which theme)
  4. A larp where one player is the surveillance state, sitting in the middle of a room with yarn connecting them to all parts of the room (they’re in the middle of a web); the other player(s) are the resistance and try to move about the room without hitting strings
  5. A game where players are different aspects of a person’s personality. They pass around / unspool a ball of yarn as they share memories where multiple aspects of the personality are present.

As always, I’ll post updates here. Until then, you can email me at [email protected]

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