Today’s newsletter is Show and Tell, but I brought three things instead of one! That has to get me extra credit with Mrs. Frankfurter. After my last math test, I need it. Ho boy…
Today I officially begin my “Zine Quest,” after nearly a decade away from crowdfunding. Join me on my journey!
I just hit the launch button on ALL-CARDS, a 1-2 player strategic storytelling game you play with YOUR trading cards! It’s a perfect opportunity to give new life to your old trading cards and playing cards gathering dust in boxes. (I’ve been playing with United States of ALF cards. You might say America is even stranger than Melmac!!) For years, I’ve been backing rad games during Zine Quest, a month long celebration of game zines. After all these years, I finally launched a game zine of my own for Zine Quest. Woo!
My quest is off to a good start. Yesterday, I received this in my inbox…
Kickstarter selected ALL-CARDS as a “Project We Love!” That’s very exciting! Hundreds of projects submit for this badge, so I’m honored ALL-CARDS was selected. 💖
How do you play ALL-CARDS? I’m glad you asked.
1. Build a Deck. Start by building a deck with cards you have lying around the house. Pokemon, Tarot, Garbage Pail Kids, even greeting cards will work.
2. Choose Your Hero. After drawing a hand of cards, you’ll choose one to be your Central Character. You assign that character a story goal, like world domination or opening an Outback Steakhouse in the local mall. Meanwhile, your opponent has a Central Character whose goals are directly opposed to yours. Uh oh! Conflict!
3. Play Out the Story. All the cards in your deck are given special abilities. Use the special abilities of your cards to help your hero achieve their goal, or thwart the goals of your hero’s rival. As you play, you and your opponent are creating a story together.
4. Win Your Perfect Ending. After six scenes (rounds of play), you’ll tally up your hero’s achievements throughout the game. Whoever has the highest tally wins and gets to say how the story ends!
My wife Amanda and I shot and edited a 1 minute video for the Kickstarter last weekend. It was a lot of fun and took me back to my college film school days of shooting comedy sketches the day before a live show. Check it out!
I’d be thrilled if you gave ALL-CARDS a look today! You can back the project for as little as a dollar.
As an Equip Story reader, you know how much love, care, and thought I put into my games. I’m hoping to fund a quality print run for this wacky game I’ve spent the last year perfecting and give you a great game for your shelf.
Gwen Katz and I made another entry for the public domain game jam!
In Gaming Like It’s 1930, our task was to make a game based on work entering the public domain in 2026. Last year, we made the first fully licensed Marx Brothers game, a hotel simulator based on their first film The Cocoanuts. This year, we decided to create a scavenger hunt mystery for Nancy Drew called The House Hunter Mystery. It’s a point-and-click mystery game where you help Nancy Drew win a competition by solving riddles in a house. Don’t let your high school rival Eugene win! He sucks!
The reaction from players has been good so far. A nice mix of complements and 5 star reviews on Itch. I’ll write more about the creation of The House Hunter Mystery next month. If you play it, let me know if you managed to win and on what difficulty.
Here’s a look at my hologram ghost project in the flesh reflective acrylic surface!
I’m proud I was able to get to the finish line on a working, voice-activated Pepper’s Ghost video player. It’s still very much a prototype, but if nothing else happens with it, at least I can cross that idea off my creative project bucket list. Happy hauntings!
🎲 Your Turn: Did you back ALL-CARDS? Play Nancy Drew? Watch Hologram Ghost? Do you have something you want to showcase? I want to hear about it! Reply directly to this email or leave a comment with the orange button below.
7 responses to “I’m Going on a Zine Quest”
Remember ALF? He’s back! In ALL-CARDS: The Trading Card Storytelling Game form!
Finally, a use for all your Steve Allen trading cards!!
Backer 11 on all cards… I like 11, it’s the first repunit prime(a prime made only of the digit 1 in decimal) and the smallest n for which a regular n-gon requires a neusis construction(3-6, 8, and 10 are possible with compass and straight edge alone, 7 and 9 are possible with compass, straightedge, and angle trisector).
As for something to show off, they’re on the smaller side, but my two most recent pieces of programmatic art are two versions of the classic Yin-Yang symbol, on version static with each half colored with a circular gradient from black to primary to secondary to white, the other an animation with flat color where the colors shift from black-and-white to red-and-blue, with colors inverting with each cycle… at least that’s the intention, I’ve posted these elsewhere, but haven’t gotten any comments, and downside to doing this stuff blind(aside from having to generate such seemingly simple shapes programmatically instead of using drawing software) is not being able to tell when the images don’t match intended results… Anyways, the folder on my website is:
https://sightless-sanctuary.net/Graphics/Programmatic/YinYang/
Hope to use similar techniques to make a few different heart images for Valentines.
Thanks for being my #11! 💖
These are cool images! I like the shapes and colors. They don’t animate for me on my phone. The file format says PNG. Would they animate as GIFs?
Huh, no idea why the animation isn’t working, animated PNG’s been a thing since before I went blind back in 2012, so I would have thought it’s support widespread enough that there wouldn’t be much point to using GIF, which has lower color resolution(GIF is limited to 256 colors(would be an issue for the separated color channels, but some of the full color images would end up with less smooth gradients if converted) and 1 bit of transparency(not an issue since the format my code writes that I then convert to PNG doesn’t support transparency at all), png can handle millions of unique colors and 255 levels of translucency)… is it just the animated yin yang images that aren’t animating or does nothing in the graphics/programmatic folder animate? Granted, not everything in there is supposed to be animated, but a lot of the bigger files are animated… Note to self, I really need to update the readmes to explain what’s in the various folders under my Programmatic art… And figure out what web browsers actually support animated PNG… and perhaps figure out how to convert pngs to web safe gif as a just in case.
Wow! These are all awesome impressive projects. Super cool!
Thank you so much! Your #1 Backer status is equally impressive! 😁