NaGa DeMon 2014: TGWAG

Last year I took part in (inter-)National Games Design Month (or NaGa DeMon for short): during the month of November you are challenged to design a game. It's extremely unlikely that you'll be able to make a decent quality game in only a month, but like its fiction counterpart NaNo WriMo, the idea is to get a first draft completed. Last year I worked on Zombology, a drafting card game that has ended up being my main focus in the months since I 'finished' it during last November.

I was very keen initially to take part again this year and then umm-ed and ahh-ed a bit as various impediments appeared in my calendar in November, but some of them have disappeared and I've finally come down off the fence on the side of taking part. Yay!

My focus this year will be Codename: Dragon - a 2-player card game about St. George and the Dragon. It'll be a game of bluff and simultaneous action selection with dice and only 18 cards (so fitting with the Good Little Games ethos). Which makes it easy to test (I only need one playtester) and easier for others to print and play. I'll be posting the rules here along with print-and-play files as I make them and would really appreciate your help in testing and refining the game.

As with last year I'm going to run the game within the game (TGWAG) to encourage you, my internet audience to take part and help me make progress in the very short timespan available to me. During TGWAG I award Pointless Internet Points™ to people who help out and at the end of the month the three (down from five last year) people with the highest PIP totals will get a free copy of the NaGa DeMon version of Codename: Dragon, signed and numbered by my good self. Though probably not until January, if last year is anything to go by!

I'll be awarding PIPs to people who help me out by promoting the game or the TGWAG competition (e.g. retweeting my tweets, Google+ shares, etc.) or proofreading the rules that I post here, or giving me ideas or suggestions for new rules or mechanics or, most importantly of all, for printing out the print and play files and actually playtesting the game for me and providing feedback on what you liked and didn't like.

No PIP competition would be complete without Pointless Internet Achievement Levels (PIALs), so here's this years goals:

1 PIP: Serf
5 PIPs: Footman/Footwoman
10 PIPs: Squire
20 PIPs: Knight Errant
30 PIPs: Knight Sergeant
40 PIPs: Knight Commander
50 PIPs: Patron Saint

Interested? Sign up in the comments below and start your arduous journey to Patron Saint.

In other news, this week was mostly testing and releasing an update of my BGG Last Plays app. It now supports loading over close/restart, landscape support and sideways scrolling of the game name for games with longer names. Plus a couple of minor UI tweaks and fixing a crash found four times by various users.

In yet further news, my latest Windows Phone app (a super secret, unlicensed board game app that I've been developing as a training exercise and for my own amusement) has been approved by the physical game's publisher. So I now need to get it finished off so that I can add it to the store. It's approved for non-commercial use, so like my other apps it'll be free and ad-free.