Castelia City - A One-page RPG About Games
The Game:
The Glass Bead Game is the most important, beautiful, perfect game that has ever been created. It is the ultimate expression of humanity’s artistic drive - harmonious, strategic, elevated. The game is everything, and mastering it will elevate you to heights beyond your wildest dreams.
What I Like About This One:
The Glass Bead Game comes from Hermann Hess’ novella Das Glasperlenspiel or Magister Ludi, and it’s sometimes seen as a kind of a Holy Grail of game design. The game itself is never actually laid out for us in Das Glasperlenspiel, the rules are never really expounded upon, but it is often described as being an abstract, formalized interdisciplinary pursuit that pulls from art, music, history, mathematics and more. Players utilize symbols and forms that create elegant, harmonious connections between seemingly disparate concepts, making it something between a game, an art, and an intellectual subject of intense study.
So I turned it into Yu-Gi-Oh! I love me a Serious Business milieu.
What I Would Do Differently:
Get the name of the city right. I didn’t dig out my copy of Magister Ludi to reference, and I ended up using the name of a city from Pokemon?
There’s gotta be a way to make a Serious Business game multi-player, but I didn’t, so everyone else gets to be Joey on the sidelines yelling “You got this Yoog!” while someone else is battling it out with little shiny rocks.