Carousel in the dark.

 Pre-history: error-cell was my first attempt at making an analogue adventure game of sorts. I was in high school so at the this point the idea has been played with off and on for twenty years.

The game has changed many times from the title green and purple, to error cell, and descent in to the dark. To the current Idea of carousel in the dark. 

I will talk about each version right now

Error-cell: was a game with characters stats on cards and functionally was a skirmish game on a chess board definitely inspired by final fantasy tactics dice were used in combat as stats so a d8 a d10… it slowly creeped up in power scale. I put more thought into the themes than the mechanics of the game… though theme is generic in hindsight. The characters were squads made of literary characters I was fond of that were in the public domain (think league of extraoridnary gentleman). Most of the thought was spent on visuals scribbling out versions of the characters in cohesive style.

Green and purple: is a version that at its core the same Where I reskinned error-cell with characters from my novella collection Dharma-Discharge (a book I abandoned because it seems borderline demonically inspired in hindsight).

Descent into the dark: was a simple variant where you made a load out of a squad of dwarves and fought your way past room after room of goblins. Each room was just a chess board with 28mm miniatures fighting it out for as much treasure as loot and get away with. After three floors you fought a dragon (and normally you would run off with treasure as a kind of scoring system). 

And the current one I been playing with while working on grim metal bedlam is carousel in the dark. Which play like a conglomerate of twenty years of design and iteration.  The main thing changing is the theme which you play as a esper trooper and summon demons from the aether and battle it out for the center of the board.

The board pictured above is the only thing that has mostly not changed in all the years of design but the function of the this specific layout has changed a lot. 

The orange and black squares in the middle are like a tower where when occupying it you can summon creatures anywhere on the board.

The six red squares are mana generation points any time you have a model on one at the end of the turn you gain a mana point.

The tow boxed areas are like castles in that your characters can gain a bonus from occupying them and can also regenerate health.

There is multiple victory conditions. 1: if your esper trooper is killed the game is over. 2: if four of the six mana points is occupied that player wins the game. 3 if you home castle is occupied by three aliasing aether demons you lose the game.

The main thing I am struggling with is using a deck building style of magic system. I am thinking thirty or forty cards with just text (too much art for me to do alone right now). And again the play testing… getting the numbers right.

It’s at its core thematic chess variant with dice (I like dice because they level the playing field and keep games from becoming an exercise in memory.)

The aether demons movements are all inspired by chess pieces and your character can only move a square at a time like a king.

Question: “why share all of this if it’s not complete?”

Answer: “The world is ending and I spend so much time alone working on stuff I just felt like talking about some of it before it’s gone.”