Spelltacular! [Apples to Apples meets Dungeons and Dragons]

Thanks to a marathon design session on friday that went eight hours (starting at 10pm) that Kindulas soldiered through with me like a champ - we just had the first playtest of the first draft of Spelltacular! right after tonight's D&D game (Kindulas was proxying up cards and assembling them during the adventure). We clearly didn't have time to really do a polished draft and should have stepped back to examine the design on a formulaic basis - but we were just having too much fun brewing up random spell ideas.

Since we wanted it ready by tonight, we just decided to pick our favorite 100 spells or so out of the 300+ that we and you all had come up with - tweak a few things so they'd work a bit better together - and the top 50 encounters or so. Just for the first playtest of course.

How did it go?:

Details:

From Skype:

DIVE KICK - Event
You have been forced to participate in the prestigious Dive Kick tournament - a martial arts tournament that only allows diving (jumping upwards) and kicking (downwards diagonal kick) as allowed moves. Your opposition are all capable dive kickers, to the point of being able to decapitate their opponents with a well-aimed dive kick to the head.

Objective: Survive and/or win the tournament.

No, I'm the Batman! - Spell
Flip a coin: If heads, summon Christian Bale. If tails, summon Kermit.

Dubstep Quartet - Event
A quartet of barbershop singers, armed with hyper-sonic dubstep sonic subwoofer vocal powers, is annoying the seniors of a retirement home. Their voices are powerful enough to incapacitate anyone without ear protection, and break fragile materials (glass, etc...).

An offer of a lifetime - Spell
Summon a working devil, who will proceed to offer faustian deals to all creatures with souls present, granting them wishes in return for their immortal souls (once dead, they are immediately sent to hell and cannot escape easily). Any deals made with a wizard allows them to pick out X spell cards they want from the deck, or force X events, but they cannot draw cards for the next X events.

Devil went down to Canada - Event
A devil is trying to bargain for the soul of Justin Beiber, but he's too stubborn! Help a poor, working devil out, will you?

Objective: Help the devil convince JB to sell his soul.

Updates Every Moonday - Event
A wizcomic artist is slacking on his wizcomic artistry, due to some silly "real life" and "full time employment" taking up his time. As a mildly-interested fan of said comic, you just won't stand for it!

Objective: Give the wizcomic artist enough free time to update already, by relieving him of his mundane tasks!

Charge! - Spell
Target creature can now move through any creature and obstacle either knocking them away, or leaving creature-shaped holes (fully immobile obstacles only).

Cave Canvas - Spell
Create a picture of a tunnel or door or portal on the nearest vertical surface. Wizards can use this picture as though it were real (emerging on the other side, or out the nearest similar portal/door/tunnel available), other creatures cannot, but are easily convinced they can.

Yoink! - Spell
You can successfully steal one material/non-material object, or metaphysical concept from another object or creature (for instance, the clothes its wearing, or its pride, or its talent). The theft cannot be fatal (trauma is ok).

Attack of the giant... uh... - Event
Wait a minute, this card is blank! Time to improvise - the DM must look to his immediate right and pick the first object he/she sees. It becomes the encounter, in the form of an animated, kaiju-sized, irate monster. It has whatever traits/powers the object has, or the DM finds appropriate for it to have.

Objective: Defeat the monster.

I *can* use these things together! - Spell
Combine two objects of choice, irregardless of how possiblie it would be to do so. Effects vary.

Crushing the Spirit of Evil - Event
A greater demon has hired you for a most perioulous task - giving his immortal, world-shatteringly powerful, 800 year old daughter Suzy the difficult talk of explaining that Satan Claws is not real. Note: Suzy has the personality and rationality of a 8-year old spoiled brat, and can kill the wizards with a flick of her fingers.

Objective: Give Suzy the talk and have at least one wizard survive.

Convert - Spell
You change the color or one creature to red (or to blue, if already red). Any creatures of different colors present will immediately begin fighting each other.

DEMACIA! - Spell
Summon an ordinary, person sized shrubbery. Anyone entering this shrubbery, or coming within 2 feet of it, is attacked and brutally skewered by the overzealous knight hiding within of it. If the shrubbery cover is lost, the knight flees.

SWAT raid - Encounter
Oh snap, it's the fuzz! The SWAT (Special Wizard Assault Team) have surrounded all the exits of your wizard fraternity house, and are threatening to break in. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem for a law-abiding citizen, but the house is full of contraband from last nights party, scattered all over - crystal balls, phoenix downs, pixie hookahs/hookers, dwarven booze, etc... Not to mention, the SWAT team aren't exactly "gentle" with their arrests....

Objective: Avoid getting assaulted/arrested/brutalized by the SWAT team, either by fighting back, fleeing, or not letting them find any of the contraband (giving them no reason to arrest/brutalize you). Avoiding destroying the house is not required, but wanted.

Deadfall (Event)
Well, great. You've upset a chaotic god for one reason or another. Now you're hurtling towards the ground from a few hundred miles in the air.

Objective: Don't die! You'll hit the ground in 3 minutes.

And Many, Many, Many, Many, Many more. (Event)
It's Cassandra the Vampire's 10th birthday! Hooray! Using your amazing magic, throw her an absolutely normal 10 year-old's birthday party.

Objective: This is probably the hardest challenge.

Nice job breaking it! - Spell
You may use this card after an event is scored, allowing you to repeat the event with fresh cards, but with a twist: this time, you must undo your own spells effects until the original event is once again restored. If you succeed, you gain 2x the points you would normally!

Wildcard - Spell
Draw three random spell cards. Whether for bad or good, you must immediately apply all three to the current event.

Soul-stealer Corruption - Spell
Every time you kill a creature directly (or via effects you control), you steal their soul, empowering yourself - For each soul stolen, you:
- Draw an extra spell card
- Increase in size by 2 feet
- Gain a steadily eviler appearance (glowing eyes, aura of evil, voice of legion)
After stealing three souls, you must flip a coin when using your spells. If heads, you must use the spell in a evil, sabotaging, detrimental way, making it harder to accomplish the event. This spell lasts for three events.

Hey everyone, you might have heard that we tried out the first playtest last night. We did and it was awesome. We raced like crazy to get a very, very rough draft done in time - and we didn't get a chance to make sure there was the right number of combinations or spell/grammar check most of the stuff. You'll find the below documents *covered* in typos and poor formatting.

So why are we even showing it to you?

Because, despite all that, it was still a ton of fun to play! We played for 2 hours last night and then played another 2 hours today. For today's game, we didn't even use a DM. The three of us just solved the encounters as a group and tried to come up with the coolest stuff without worrying about total points.

So if you want to check out Spelltacular for yourself - you can cut out the following cards and enjoy. I reccommend sleeving Magic Cards and slipping the paper in over the face of the card (like we did - the cards are sized to be a perfect fit for this) or just printing them out on card-stock if you've got it.

You can also number them in a list like a rod of wonder table and use an online dice-rolling tool to figure out which you draw in order to try playing online with friends via Skype or similar. This is going to be much clunkier of course, but hey - if you just really want to try a game that sounds fun.

Spells: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/101735796/Spelltacular%20Spells.pdf
Encounter: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/101735796/Spelltacular%20Encounters.pdf

Summon Cage
You summon Nicolas Cage. He can disguise as a bear, Punch/kick/knock out female creatures, attract an infinite amount of bees, and pees fire.

Summon Deaf
Target creatures are deafened. Whilst holding this card, you start out encounter with a hearing horn.

Summon Commissar
Summon a military commander. He fatally shoots any creature (including you, or allies) that shows fear, reluctance, hesitation, or signs of "heresy".

Pacci's Finest
Rotate target creatures or objects by angle of 90 or 180 degrees. They are considered unaffected by gravity during the flip, but not after it. This effect ignores any "anchors" or similar forms of object immobilization.

The grand game marches on!

We've played Spelltacular *endlessly* since last friday. I've played at least a dozen different games and we still haven't tried out all the modes yet. It's a ton of fun and we just finished designing and prototyping the second version of the game. We'll have files up for you to print and play soon, plus we plan to have a professional version on a game website in a month or two for people to be able to buy online.

Played a game with Dan, Logan and Kat, and recorded it! Download is below.

Spelltacular! session mp3

Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Just wish we could have played in person, goes so much faster. =)

And I just finished playing the game with another of my professors. I've played it with 3 of my professors now, two of which teach about game design, and my academic adviser too. All of them loved it, two want to buy it immediately and today's professor is looking into publishing options for us. =)

We finished the game! I can't believe it, but it's been so much fun!

Congratulations!

(Backing up to your previous post) Game design professors? Two of them? Helping you publish things? Geez, where IS this? I'm very jealous.

We're at Oregon State University. We self-published the title for now - because people have been asking to buy it and we wanted to get it out there. There's a cool site called Gamecrafter that lets you create your game and prints them for anyone that wants to order off the site.

Here's the Link to Spelltacular's Page. You can't find it except via that link yet. We just got it up today.

"The Exploding Flamingo Team" made this... That is silly.

The whole game is silly.


 

Huh. Well wish I had known such a thing existed as game design classes (should have looked for that when looking for colleges! I do like mine well enough though.)

I have seen gamecrafter before actually- I've thought about using it myself, though I haven't really gotten any designs to a publishable state yet - and many never will be (many are just for the enjoyment of my friends and family). I have one that's basically finished, even uploaded most of the components to the site, but I still need to edit and reformat the rules to make them presentable and clear. And it might still need a few tweaks anyways.

If you ever want to bounce your ideas off someone, I'd be happy to give whatever feedback I can. Love chatting game design.

I'd love that, but I'm not sure if I'll actually take you up on your offer. I'm probably better off sticking to getting feedback from my IRL playtesters- not sure how well I could convey my ideas, as most of my designs have been boardgames: nothing largely text-based like PonyTales or brilliantly simple like Spelltacular (simple games are the hardest to make, in my opinion!)

Well, if you'd like any idea-bouncing just shoot me a PM or email. I've found that board game ideas, as well as videogame ideas, can actually be conveyed quite well via text - as the psychological principles remain the same and the mechanics are pretty easy to describe. Even something super-tactile like Escape: The Curse of the Temple or Catacombs can be explained in text. Of course, playing the game is almost always the very best way to get a feel for it (the rare times it isn't is when the gameplay varies so hugely between play sessions that it's easier to get the full picture via an overview).