thread: 2013-05-25 : Complete Games
On 2013-06-09, E. Torner wrote:
Games that are long of text are not necessarily complex. Both Unknown Armies 2nd edition and the Baron Munchhausen RPG have famously hundreds of pages in their rulebooks, when both can condense their rules into less than a page. But both of those designs also hit their target genre spot-on, with all the rules one needs to do so.
Epidiah Ravachol developed Vast & Starlit (I think) partially out of a development phase in Swords without Master when he was trying to explain the game through three different methods: narrative, by example, and through commands. Hitting the target genre spot-on is hard, especially because different people have different learning styles with regard to rules!
In fact, nano-games of this variety aren't even new in the gaming scene. I just found James Ernest's business card, which has this complete game on it called "Fight!" 112 words long. Takes "Two minutes and up" to play, and teaches basic combinatoric math through coin mechanics.
We must unlearn what we have learned.
