My Stuff - old Nickel Games postcard games

I was going through some old piles of papers, figuring out which ones could be scanned and tossed, and I found these three old projects from when I was partnered with Bill Fleming at Nickel Games back around 2003.  We worked on projects off and on from about 1990, for our own little companies, Encore Entertainment, and others.  He died about 9 years ago, and I hate to see fun ideas never seeing the light of day, so here are a few pieces I felt were worth sharing. 

We were brainstorming ideas for games that would fit on postcards, so you could mail these little challenges to your friends.  They were meant for young audiences, and are just roll-and-write prototypes that won't win any strategy awards, but here they are...

Replaying them now, they're very simple.  But they brought back memories of how they came to be.  

For Tic Tac Toes, we wanted a very unlikely roll in the middle, and the 7 in one corner was guaranteed to fall to someone early on; the rest had varying odds.  If I were to add another rule today, it would be that you can bump an opponent's piece off a space to put your own piece there, but this really needs transparent pieces so you can read the board through them.  The idea here was to use game parts everyone already has laying around the house, but you can look under the penny or dime to see if you can steal the space, sure.

For Postcard Challenge, how much can anyone do with just 18 spaces?  The goal here was to add game time somehow, so the "Roll 1 to Pass" locks it up for a few moves, and having those last 6 spaces as sticky spaces where you have to stop moving and roll the one number to hit the final space by exact count also added a few rolls.  Add a "Lose Turn" and a "Start Over" for a little more play time, though it also feels like we were trying to add traps just to be annoying.  We had an earlier version with funny symbols instead of smileys, but boy the smileys add character.  It's hard not to make some of those funny faces when you land there.

For Capture the Hive, I would actually rather have little dice shown in the spaces instead of having to read all those descriptions of the rolls, and I would add an extra rule: start with 6 counters off to the side; each time a player cannot use a roll, take away a counter; when a roll is playable, put all counters back; when all counters are gone, the game is over.  That way you don't end up just trying to all get the same roll over and over to complete the last space.  After 6 fails in a row, it's game over, count up the pieces.  And 6 fits with the hexagons.

Bill was a master of creating cute characters and animations. We had a lot of fun coming up with these.

We almost ran out of funny face designs, until I went and used some kaleidoscope filter in Paint Shop Pro 8 to generate new yellow freaks.  Here they are, over on DeviantArt.com: Smiley Farm 1 and Smiley Farm 2.  Enjoy.