Move forward, even just a little

Another holiday rears its ugly head today, serving as a reminder for those things that you’ve been putting off: Make Noticeable Progress on a Project Day. That’s right, pull that thing out of the box and try to make it work again, go out to the garage/yard and bang on the car some more, actually stir up the paint before the masking tape become a permanent part of the walls, and so on. We all have projects of this nature that sit, neglected, and should be cuddled again and assured that they matter.

I am deep in the throes of this myself, since Dan Palmer and I are currently at Unpub 25, a festival coordinated by the Unpublished Games Network to feature and playtest new, unpublished games (ah, that’s where the name came from!) among many other game enthusiasts. We had a table on Friday and are manning another today to demonstrate the Gnonom Deck and various games designed for it; in fact, I spent the past week or so getting things together for this endeavor, including a play-through video. Dan, meanwhile, has been working on this off and on for the past few months, rewriting rules for clarity and consistency and making his own play-through video. The Gnomon Deck website has been updated for a few months now and we add things periodically, so it’s actually starting to flesh out a bit.

Dan Palmer and Al Denelsbeck at the family day of the Bridges 2024 Conference, Richmond, Virginia
This is not Unpub 25, but the previous demo opportunity at the family day of Bridges 2024 last year

It should be fun and informative, but I haven’t attended before so beyond that, I don’t know what to expect (can you tell I wrote this three days ahead of time?) Dan’s been to one other, but doesn’t know the behind-the-scenes stuff like how beneficial it was overall and how many people got their games noticed and into production. So, we’ll see/we’re seeing.

Feel free to check out the GnomonDeck.com site – it describes the deck, has several initial games with a couple of videos, and has a mailing list to sign up for further news. I may be back later on and let you know how it all went.

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