Shoots, & Leaves
The Game
You play as a team of scholars, defending the Oxford comma from all of its detractors! Descend into the darkest annals of academia to discover the Apostolic Order for Serial Clarity and join their esteemed ranks. Fight the forces that look to steep the world in chaos over chamomile! Clad yourself in tweed armor and battle against the dreaded Red Pen!
What I like about this one:
Role-playing games are a linguistic and semantic pursuit. The shared imagined space that we create when playing a role-playing game is built on nothing but words - the descriptions given to us from the GM, the actions declared by the players, and assumptions that fill in the details. Sometimes that shared imagined space becomes confused when something was unclear, or if one of the participants describes something in a way that another participant incorrectly interprets. Role-playing games are almost entirely built on language and communication, so it's kind of funny to me that we don't engage with language more directly.
The fact that I got to name a mechanic "Syntactic Collapse," thrills me.
Having your skills named after other punctuation is also a unique joy to me.
What I would do differently:
I got real in-the-weeds on this one, conceptually. It’s a really abstract idea, and considering that it’s a game ostensibly about communicative clarity, I think I donked up the communication and the clarity on this one. Also, I make a disparaging note about the art on this one, but it’s not as bad as I thought it was, and with the next couple mocked up, the art is getting an upgrade. This one made me realize I should probably pay more attention to the graphic quality of the thing, and I’m starting to see what I think is going to be a more prominent format going forward - centered graphic, two or three columns of text. Noah’s Yacht really threw me for a loop…