Heirloom for the Tiny Keepsake Jam
Check out my new two-player storytelling game!
Hey there! One of these days I won't need to apologize for the irregular posting schedule, but today's not that day. (Final copy of my thesis is due this Thursday so I’ve got bigger fish to fry.)
So I submitted a new game to a game jam last week. At this point in the semester I should be more academically inclined, but I’m using my status as a second-semester senior to goof off.
At the beginning of last week, I had no intention of making a new game. But here we are, and it was really fun. I thought a nice way to keep you in the loop would be to run through the whole process of how it came to be.
There were two things that propelled me to make it: a conversation and a Tweet. The conversation I was having with my partner as we finished a game of My City. (I’m hoping to talk about that game in a future post so sit tight). The designer of My City is none other than Reiner Knizia, who’s credited on BoardGameGeek for having published +600 games and books. When I read that statistic, I commented in disbelief and my partner suggested that he likely participated in many game jams.
A game jam is an event (often hosted on the internet) where game designers have a certain amount of time to design a game under certain specifications. Usually, these online game jams are specific to video games, but this one wasn’t.
I’m not going to do tons of research for this but I think it’s fair to assume there are many more aspiring video game designers out there than wannabe tabletop game designers. On top of that, it’s easier to share video game prototypes over the web than it is to share tabletop game prototypes.
This is all to say, I’ve entered board game design competitions before, but never a game jam.
This is when the Tweet comes in. Chris (@junkfood_games) tweeted about a game jam he was hosting on itch.io, called the Tiny Keepsake Jam. The goal of the game jam was to make a game in the micro game category; in my case, I went with a game where all its rules and contents fit on a single page.
The other goal was to tie-in the concept of keepsakes. Some folks designed cool games where players had end-products, like a bracelet or a bookmark. In my case, I wanted to make a game about keepsakes.
The game I made is called Heirloom. In Heirloom, players work together to tell the story of an heirloom passing from generation to generation. It’s a micro game for 2 players and it takes 25-45 minutes to play.
The game has three rounds. Each round, one player is the Active Player (AP) and the other is the Passive Player (PP). The AP has a bit more power in how the narrative unfolds, but both players are working together to create the history of an heirloom and those who possessed it.
The first round is the Grandparent round. The AP starts by describing a bit about the person—who they were, what they liked, their family, or any similarly important details. After, the PP describes some aspect of the heirloom. (In the first round, it’s usually what the heirloom is.) Then, the AP finishes the round by describing the circumstances of how the heirloom is passed on.
The subsequent rounds are similar; players discuss the Parent, then the Child, who each inherit this heirloom and how it impacts their life. In the rules I suggested that the people across rounds don’t actually have to be related, but with inheritance it’s natural that folks might gravitate toward familial relation.
Since this was a game jam, I wanted to make a game that was fun and playable, but I wasn’t overly concerned with polishing it. I did want to playtest it, though, so I can tell you a bit about the story we created. I’m going to do my best to remember it, but I’m bound to get a few details wrong:
Hank immigrated from Poland to the US in the early 20th century. His father worked hard to support his family in Poland, just to save enough money so that the family could emigrate and seek a better life in the US. His father died before they were able to make it out, but Hank and his mom still traveled to the US with what his father saved.
Hank worked in a factory in the US, supporting his wife and five children. They only planned four, but their youngest were twins.
Hank was just a child when he immigrated. They couldn’t bring much with them, but he took with him a book that his father read to him many nights, “Aleksy the Orange Eel.” The book reminded him of the nights he spent with his father, and reading it instilled in him the importance of his kids getting an education.
Hank passed his book off to Greta, one of the twins. She always wanted to go to college, and to become a famous writer, but they never had the money. She ended up working a drugstore counter in the 20’s, and enjoyed the work enough. She was a suffragette. On her picket signs she included Aleksy (the Orange Eel) as a mascot.
She was a hippie. She enjoyed her retirement, driving around the country, and reading to kids in libraries as a volunteer. She wanted kids to value education, books, and writing as much as she did.
One day at a library in the 70’s, she was reading to a kid named Malcolm. Malcolm wanted to be a writer, too. Malcolm reminded her of her twin, who’d since passed. She chose to give Malcolm the book and the sign, after explaining their significance.
Malcolm became a blogger in the 90’s, just as the internet was starting. He’d forgotten about the sign and the book for the most part, until one day when he vaguely remembered the woman and her story. He wrote about the sign, the book, and the woman on his blog, which was about all sorts of things. His blog lasted into the early 2000’s.
So I’m definitely missing a few details, but that’s the gist of the story we came up with. The playtest went smooth, but I ended up changing one detail: the Inspiration Dice.
Since the game is almost entirely improv, I wanted to have a way for folks to get some help when they had trouble brainstorming. To do this, I included a chart like this:
At any time, players may roll one or more D6 and pick letters corresponding with each roll. During our playtest, I rolled 3 dice to get “1,” “3,” and “5.” I picked “A,” “O,” and “E,” which helped me name the book “Aleksy the Orange Eel.”
The only trouble was that it could’ve been a bit cooler. We only used the dice that one time, so my partner suggested a way to incentivize dice use and to increase interactivity: at the start of the game, players each suggest words to go beneath the letters, which can be used instead of the letters. For example, say I rolled a “1,” then instead of picking a letter I could use our pre-generated word, “Burlington,” and incorporate it into the story.
The game is still a little rough around the edges, which is par for the course considering it’s for a game jam. But if you’d like to check it out, click here. (It’s free!) I hope you have fun with it, and I’m curious to know what you think!
Happy storytelling,
Jules