I’ve certainly spent a lot of years doing a lot of things inside the gaming field, each time trying to one-up my last project. That is the way evolution works, the seemingly organic investment of time and energy into making yourself and your products better.
For me, this goes back to that first RPG, but there have been other projects outside the role-playing genre that have also captured my attention and time along the way.
One of these is a card game I began toying with back in probably 1993. It has had many different incarnations over the last twenty years, but the current one I’ve titled After the Apocalypse. I went so far as to commission a full deck design for it, including artwork, back in 2010 and even had an app program in the works before the designer pulled out of the project.
It was a lofty goal, and one that I’ve put a great deal of energy into, so I thought I’d share some of it with you all today.
The concept is pretty simple, an open table, multi-player combat where each card has a value and the person who ends the game with the most points from those values wins. Set in a post-apocalyptic U.S., the game revolves around a series of gangs, each with four special types of characters and a place of origin that can determine how effective their powers are. Vehicles, ala Mad Max, are also in play, and there are random event cards that can also sway the tide of battle.
I believe the most interesting aspect of the game is that there is no player limit, and that the combat and strategy revolves around unspoken alliances between players and the ability to read the table effectively as attacks can come from any direction at any time.
As I’ve been playing this game since 1993, I’ve had my fair share of outstanding games, and at one point I went to Paizo and offered them the game, but they said that the shelf space required from a deck the size I’d shown wouldn’t warrant the price point.
So, I still sit on my game, only dragging it out once a year when my old gaming group gets together in Indiana. There, after a long day of role-playing, we sometimes take out the deck and have a war or two just to take the edge off a long day in the RP trenches.
Anyway, just another example of home-brew creations that have come out of my ever-creating mind since my youth.
