My new game Kill Your Grandad is out!

…full details over on the project page…

Really delighted with this one. It’s an idea I first had 20 years ago: an inverse Back to the Future, a black comedy where foolish teen time travellers try to force a grandfather paradox because they think blowing up the world is a great idea. Gregor Hutton even threw together a mockup cover for me:

The date on that image file is June 2005, and it is wild to me that it took a full twenty years to the month to get it released!

I used that mockup cover on a bunch of draft versions over the years, and none of them worked. I remember once talking to Steve Hickey and saying I had designed it so thoroughly it wasn’t a game any more. Which was true! There were so many things caught in the procedures that there wasn’t any room for surprise, you would just have been narrating the results of an overelaborate oracle!

Those early versions were GMless, and I only really started making progress when I put a GM back in the mix. (I think a GMless KYG would work, even with the final set of rules for the right group, but I couldn’t make it go properly.)

Right at the start, the idea of two oppositional stats was part of the mix. Resentment vs Empathy, at one time. Some versions collapsed that into a single track: Commitment to Nihilism. Roll under to do nice things, roll over to do hard things (or the reverse, depending on edition, sometimes with different dice types). I have emails between Gregor and me back in 06 shaking these out, trying different angles. This is, some will note, similar to John Harper’s Lasers & Feelings – is this yet another game design where I’m building on Harper’s work? No! Not this time! L&F was years away from coming out when I was doing this. The actual origin of this thinking was, oddly enough, White Wolf’s Changeling: The Dreaming, which had interrelated scores for Banality and Glamour, where you needed some Banality to actually function in the world okay, but also Glamour to stay in touch with faerie.

Anyway the final version came in when I saw how a GMful game could offload some game design to GM “soft power”, keeping the focus on the characters and their interactions. The dice version was too muddly for me though and it all clicked when I realised I could just do it with a tiny deck-tuning procedure, as seen in countless board games.

The last step was to talk myself out of overcomplicating the card system. There is so much information on the cards: their value, their suit (not just colour), potentials for sequencing or face cards/number cards… but all of it was just unnecessary. The system could stay very very small and it was still enough to keep folks busy for a solid one-shot game.

I’m really happy with it. I’ve had great playthroughs and folks seem excited by it. If you give it a go, please let me know!

(Longtime social media followers will know I also wrote a Kill Your Grandad novel a few years back. This actually got picked up for publication but the small press in question fell over due to circumstances outside their control, so it never surfaced. I think it’s great though. One of these days it will appear…)