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I am deep in the throes of this myself, since Dan Palmer and I are currently at Unpub 25, a festival coordinated by the Unpublished Games Network to feature and playtest new, unpublished games (ah, that’s where the name came from!)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.
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.