Wednesday 30 March 2016

Betrayal at House on the Hill: Rerolled, pt.2


There are a lot of games out there with their own customised dice, which is fine for the game they are designed for, but what about using them in other ways? 'Rerolled' is all about re-purposing custom dice to get more game play out of them, focusing on dice included with board or card games rather than those designed for promotional purposes or for use with a specific role-playing game.



In the last Rerolled article, I used the unusual dice from Betrayal at House on the Hill to create a game about space marines with a variation of Otherkind dice. In this article, I'll show you an entirely different game using a different property of the same dice: their capacity to create a pool of points with a sharply controlled progression.

Wednesday 23 March 2016

Betrayal at House on the Hill: Rerolled, pt.1


There are a lot of games out there with their own customised dice, which is fine for the game they are designed for, but what about using them in other ways? 'Rerolled' is all about re-purposing custom dice to get more game play out of them, focusing on dice included with board or card games rather than those designed for promotional purposes or for use with a specific role-playing game.



Betrayal at House on the Hill is a board game that casts the players in the roles of a mismatched group of teenage rebels, small children and dabblers in the occult, who all get drawn towards an old abandoned house one dark night, only for one of them to turn against the others... It's a great, fun emulator of haunted house stories, with the added twist that there are 50 stories to tell, each of which has one of the players turning against the rest in the second act of the game, as well as adding new rules & goals for both the traitor and the other players after the dramatic reveal occurs.

Wednesday 16 March 2016

Liar's Dice: Rerolled


There are a lot of games out there with their own customised dice, which is fine for the game they are designed for, but what about using them in other ways? 'Rerolled' is all about re-purposing custom dice to get more game play out of them, focusing on dice included with board or card games rather than those designed for promotional purposes or for use with a specific role-playing game.



Liar's Dice is a well-known, globally popular game that you can play with any set of d6s, but some of the commercial sets have a special feature: they use a symbol in place of the 6-face, to enable the 'wild face' rules, where the wild symbol adds to the number of any face bid, e.g. if you bid "Five 4s", then all the 4s and all the wild faces count as part of that bid. There are also a lot of promotional dice produced by game companies, role-playing groups and game conventions that have the organisation's symbol take the place of either the 1-face or the 6-face. All these work as regular dice and you can use them in any game that uses d6s, but you do have to remember which number is indicated by the symbol or just check the die every time it's rolled.

Tuesday 15 March 2016

Diagnostic Ward

This is a short game that could make a great ice-breaker or filler for 4-6 players; it's partly inspired by the mechanics of Bring It but rather than being a high-octane action-adventures, this is a game of pseudo-medical mysteries taking place in a very unusual hospital.


The Ward

This is a storygame taking place in a realm of myth, fantasy and legend, where all our fairy tales are true: in this realm, there is a place that treats those who are sorely afflicted by magic and cannot turn to any mundane healer or physician for the help they need. In this story, you the players will take on the role of the patients and doctors confronted with hexes, curses and bad mojo, seeking a cure within the magically-protected environs of The Ward.