Reject Squad Design Blog

This week was the week we attended GenCon. We only had a day to drive to Indianapolis, test Reject Squad for 8 hours, and then drive back. It would be grueling, but we had counted on that. What we hadn't counted on was the hour we would lose crossing time zones! Still, skipping breakfast would have allowed us to arrive on time - had we not come across two pretty nasty accidents on the road. We lost our first two-hour block of testing, but we were able to catch some lunch and see the convention a bit before pressing on. We returned to the First Exposure Playtest Hall and dove into six full hours of testing and feedback. All of our testers had a great time, and hero creation continues to shine as the best part of the game. That means our next big hurdle is to improve the crisis solving part of the game. Right now, it's too often the case that either a hero's restriction, the opposition, or the location is more or less irrelevant to the crisis at hand. It's also uncomfor

This week we finalized some changes we made to our card file by printing out the new cards and swapping them in for the ones they replaced. Here are some power cards we took out, and how we replaced them: "You can manipulate the weight of anything and everything" became "You can manipulate the weight of anything you're holding." Reject Squad used to be a competitive game, where having an absurdly powerful hero was a little bit of a liability. That's not true anymore, so we have to be on the lookout for powers like this which need some toning-down. "You can accelerate or reverse the age of things" became "You can accelerate or reverse the age of nonliving things." Same deal here. "You have Wind Breath" became "You have Tornado Sneezes." This was a phrasing issue. Tornado Sneezes gives a better visual than Tornado Breath. Also, sneezes are more peculiar and more specific, and that's the tone of reject s

This week was all about getting back on track with our GenCon to-do list. We still needed a logo, we still needed to make changes to the card file, and we still needed to write up a rules sheet. Oh, and we needed a company name. The FEPH (That's First Exposure Playtest Hall, where you can go to show off your game that hasn't been published yet) registration form requires you to fill in a company name "if applicable." I wrote in "none applicable" which, I found out later, made us "Jacob Games." The president of Double Exposure (who run the FEPH) suggested we come up with another - and to make it something we could potentially use for other games. After talking it over, we landed on "Smiling Mythos Games." A positive, non-serious-sounding name that also gets across that we both care a lot about story. We also realized (thanks to Billy's girlfriend) that we ought to have, you know, contact information. And business cards. In case we

Introductions Hello readers! We're Smiling Mythos Games, and this is the Reject Squad Weekly Bulletin, where we detail the week-by-week development of our game, Reject Squad! What's Reject Squad? Reject Squad is a storytelling card game where you and your friends create offbeat superheroes and then have to band together to solve a crisis. Creating your heroes is done by combining powers, like "You have super strength" or "You can turn into a truck" with restrictions like "But only with your eyes closed" or "But you're also a dog." The crisis you have to solve is randomly generated, and once it's revealed, everyone has to secretly decide what part of the crisis their hero should solve. If everyone chooses a different crisis, the day is saved. If not, well... There's always next time. Who are Smiling Mythos Games? We're a team of two people who have enough free time to meet once a week and work on this funny game ide