Hurricane Irene really set me back on finishing up Kodrek. But I managed to get a video of play up in time to get it into the Thousand Year game Challenge!

Also excitingly, I’ll be printing up booklets and sending out games in the coming week!

The 1.0 rules of Kodrek are complete! I’ll be sending boards out to all the Kodrek-level Kickstarter backers just as soon as printing is complete.

The timing means that I’ll also be entering the game in the 1000 Year Game Challenge. It’s got some stiff competition!

Kodrek is a game with a funny background. It comes from an actual game of Human Contact. Because HC is about cultures and their expressions in contrast with other cultures, we needed a game that summed up the part of the culture we were soaking in during a particular scene. In this case, it was an Academic (a bit of a dick, that guy) who was gambling. Now, keep in mind, the Academy doesn’t have money; its members trade in ideas because of their post-scarcity environment. So the guy was gambling with money that he was manufacturing. But he considered all the marines and pirates around him murderers, so he figured it all came out it the wash.

My specification was that it be a three-way game with shifting alliances. Vincent wanted it to be a game where you committed to plans in secret and then revealed them to each other, then dealt with the consequences. You can actually see the scene in Human Contact on page 84. We described the triangular board, the move-slapping, and that was about it.

After the game, Rob had to go home and Vincent and I went for a walk. We kept going back to the board game idea and rough-sketched play. I’ve thought about it for a few months and have come up with these final rules.

The game has a lot of variables and the rules discuss some of the things you might do differently if you lived with a different clan. I look forward to seeing the variants that players come up with!

I’m considering publishing the game. For the time being, it’s though I might loosen it up a little bit, allowing commerical products and derivatives once I’ve decided.

Download the rules here!

Hey, I like to talk a lot! Want to hear me talk about Shock:Human Contact? Listen to the first of the two parts! Want to talk listen to me talk about Kickstarter? Listen to part two!

[This post was sitting here, unpublished, because I was so tired when I got back from PAX that I got taken out by a cold for a week.]

PAX was wonderful. Got to rock some good science fiction at the table, ran into a guy from my college RPG, sold more than I’ve ever sold at a con before.

Christian, AKA Father Fletch, the dude who runs the tabletop area, made us feel very, very welcome. A bunch of us are trying to figure out how to get to PAX Prime in Seattle for August now.

The two panels I was on: How to Use Kickstarter to Fund Your Project with Evan Balster, Andrew Plotkin, Max Temkin, and me (modded by Cindy Au), and How To Get What You Want Out of Your GM with Jack Graham, Luke Crane, and me (modded by Thor Olavsrud) were astonishingly, knee-knockingly well-attended. Hundreds of people. The latter one was at an awkward time: as the con was closing. I’m hoping that doesn’t happen again. It didn’t seem to dramatically affect attendance, but it did shut down a lot of post-seminar discussion that could have led excited people to our booths to see what we were talking about.

Our Indie Bazaar grossed about twice what we made the last time we hit up Gen Con, too, and at a lower cost. We’re still sorting out the money, and if the other publishers want to, I’ll publish the numbers here.

PAX is a wonderful crowd. They’re at the expo because they want to learn about new ways to play. We talked and played with a lot of people who had never played RPGs before and gave a bunch of them very strong first impressions. It’s a beautiful thing when someone’s first time playing an RPG is Apocalypse World, Misspent Youth, or Shock: We get to go straight for the meat of the game and don’t have to worry about explaining that it’s different than they know.

And then there are the experienced D&D players who are looking for other kinds of experiences. They’re eager to see other things, to look in other directions. Those guys are fun, too. I’m particularly excited when it’s someone who loves D&D but wants to add other techniques to their experience. Those people are our people srsly.

So thank you PAX, thank you Father Fletch, and thank you PAXketeers for making it a fantastic weekend.

Good news! After two weeks of technical issues, the first copies of Human Contact are in! The technical issues persist, unfortunately, so there’s not quite closure, but I have 60 copies now, should have another 200 or so next week, and another 50ish the week after that.

The nature of the technical issue isn’t clear; it’s just one of those thing that happens when printing. But I can say that my printer, 360 Digital, has done a fantastic job of both printing them and keeping me abreast of things that have gone wrong. The measure of a printer, after all, is not that nothing ever goes wrong. Things go wrong. The measure of a printer is in how they communicate and make good when that happens.

I won’t be shipping any books until more are in, but I will have copies at Dreamation, so if you’re one of my backers, please let whoever’s at the Indie Bazaar and I’ll sign and hand you your copy right there.

A very exciting FedEx package just arrived! I have to confirm a couple of things with the press, but it’s looking good to go straight into production this week!

Alex Drummond just sent me this sketch of some fine, respectable gentlemen playing a friendly game of Kodrek. He also sent me some earlier roughs:

Gotta say, I’m pretty excited.

I’m doing preliminary flows of the text of the game into an InDesign file right now. I sure wish style importing was more smarter.

I’m excited to say that Human Contact Draft 2 is now up for download on the playtester’s forum!

If you’ve playtested Human Contact before or backed the project at Kickstarter, I’d love to have you in the playtester group! I’ll be looking for feedback on the readability and playability of the text by January 1st, and if you can put together a group — especially a group that can play multiple chapters — before then, I’ll be very, very happy.

From the beginning of the article:

Joshua A.C. Newman is a real character, committed to the strangest and most diverse things (what relationship do you see between sculpture, the construction of aerial drones, and ancient poetry, to name a few?)

You can read the English translation of the summary article here.

Thanks to Giullina for translating for me. She’s an amazing interpreter, and I had an amazing time at Lucca Comics and Games. I hope I get to go back someday.

The Human Contact Kickstarter has just one day left. Thanks to you 200+ funders (and special thanks to the first hundred, to whom I really owe a debt of gratitude for getting the ball so dramatically rolling), it’s over 300% funded. Human Contact will now go into submarine mode, taking onboard only the project’s backers. I’ve got a whole lot of writing to do and will only be posting abstractly and distractedly as I generate drafts and get sketches from Alex.

If you want to keep up with the project, donate at any of the listed levels and you’ll get project updates as they come, including playable drafts, early sketches, and probably a few extras. I’ll be putting out a call for playtests to backers and, if you want to collide some cultures before March of next year, this is the way to do it.

I also have to get on making those Kodrek boards. I was expecting to have to make two. Instead, I have to make 14. That interest has made me start to think about publishing it as its own thing in the future. Boardgame publishing is hard, but I’ve seen some real successes among my indie peers and I think I can make it happen.