Skirmish Game Portfolio

The following are skirmish game rule sets that I've created available for development and publishing:

Kingpin - A 50's noir detective skirmish game. Part of my ongoing obsession with trying to put hidden information into a skirmish game.

Kingpin is part of a continuing struggle to insert hidden information effectively into a skirmish game. Mystery games generally come as tabletop board or card games with a relatively limited number of plays available. The difficulty in skirmish games is the necessity for one or more players to know the hidden information and to create hidden information that may be reused repeatedly. Kingpin deals with these problems by giving both players both criminals and detectives and generating the hidden information during play.

Urban Nights - A simple game allowing multiple players to engage on a small table in short time, based upon terrain and objective interaction.

Battlefield Tactics - A mass battle system designed to allow detailed tactical decisions and total equality of sides such that victory is entirely dependent on tactical ability.

True Chimes - A skirmish game of taking connected related actions.

Legends - A skirmish game of excessive and exaggerated actions, based on momentum building action tree. Simulating combats somewhere between superheroes and kung-fu action.

Legends was built to create a system by which miniatures could gain and increase abilities during game play. As such certain actions connect to others, building momentum and advancing abilities via actions. In the final version of the game the result has been models which can run on air and pick up buildings to hit each other with.

Stars are Right - A Lovecraft skirmish game attempting to introduce hidden information and investigation.

Pitch and Yaw - A piratical game of ship based encounters, unusually for such games actually designed to take into account the dynamic nature of combat in a constantly shifting environment.

Blood - A game designed to simulate Hammer Horror films heavily story scenario based.

Smash TV - The Core - A co-op skirmish game based upon limited communication and pre-setting planned actions.

The Core is the first in a series of connected, co-operative skirmish games. They are set within a dystopian future of hyper-violent death sports game shows. The Core involves players finding their way through a self-generating, constantly extending maze to access and shut down the titular Core. This requires players to co-ordinate since only by working together can they bypass the maze walls, but the game triggers actions based on a player preset collection of cards, so players may only co-ordinate by successfully predicting their partner's actions.

Soylent Ghoul - A horror skirmish game where mechanics rather than just story and background provide the horror elements.

Soylent Ghoul is a horror skirmish game. Its back story is based on the simple combination of concepts that ghouls are created by consuming human flesh and Soylent Green is people. Many of its inspirations come from the horror stories of Thomas Ligotti. Mechanically its base on trying to create a horror reaction for players within game play. It is practically impossible to maintain horror or humour in repeated playthroughs based on background alone. Instead, Soylent Ghoul provides models with peripheral and out-of-sight lines-of-sight and the ability to turn to actions out-of-sight in return for an increase in anxiety. So players must choose between not turning their heads and allowing their opponent to operate with impunity or accepting an increasing level of twitchyness to counteract them.

Models and Modulation - A skirmish game of the novels of Jane Austen.

Models and Modulations comes from two pretty simple ideas. Firstly, I am increasingly disinterested in games directly based on violence. Not for reasons of moral pacifism you understand but for two further reasons; one because skirmish games of violent action have come in every colour and type already and I doubt I can add to the conversation; and two games of violence are games of diminishing options, lessening choices, every slain model is a reduction in available and interesting decisions. Secondly, Austen novels, or at least Georgian culture, is all about negotiation of relationships made in real time and physical space. Which makes them fascinatingly available to skirmish game manipulation. Oh yeah, and Austen is free use.