I Dreamed a Dream

As I was trying not to wake up this morning, my mind wandered somewhere between dreams & reality, eventually coming back with this souvenir: a new game design!

I've been experimenting with a lot of different concepts in the last month, taking advantage of this time out from the world to explore different types & styles of game design. Roll & Write games are something I've been interested in and have dabbled with (see Doodlerama), so I found my thoughts trending more in that direction: I'd sketched out a memo several weeks ago, which amounted to "What if the tiles of a dungeon map were boxes to write things in on a character sheet?" but it hadn't gotten any further than that.

This morning, it all clicked and within minutes I had most of the rules that became Countdown Dungeon (the name took longer to come up with than the basic rules) so then it became a race to get a complete game ready while the idea was fresh. Some bits were altered as I wrote them, or went back and proof read them: there was originally a more competitive element to the bids for the Quest value at the start of the game, but I dropped it when I realised the number you picked was a gamble in itself. If you go low, you're more likely to get to zero, but you still might be beaten by someone who picked a higher value and filled more squares.

I've also been playing a lot of Slay the Spire recently and that inspired me to take a bold step with The Wizard: I went for some asymmetry in the design, so rather than having a set of characters that are all basically the same, just with different values and effects, The Wizard should hopefully provide a completely different play experience.

There were places where designing this game felt like writing a version of Doom that plays on a pocket calculator: the mechanics of the game are sparse, so trying to come up with meaningful things for the characters to do with them was challenging, especially The Wizard but I feel that I came up with something interesting... hopefully. The game needs a lot of intense playtesting and it might prove to be broken in all kinds of unpredictable and exciting ways; for example, I'm not sure what a good target number is for the initial Quest value, which is another reason I've left that decision up to the players!

I sincerely hope some of you out there have some fun with this: let me know if you do, or just any feedback in general and, as always, stay safe and keep playing.