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Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Letters To Cthulhu

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

And here we are! We’ve arrived at the end of our series of posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and Deep Cut winner Solar Storm 1928, and Best Digital Game winner Millions of Cats, and today we’re looking at our sixth and final game, Best Analog Game winner Letters To Cthulhu by Lucienne Impala.

A small tabletop roleplaying game is an excellent project to undertake for a jam like this, as putting one together requires nothing more than a clear theme and some written rules, but that doesn’t mean making a good one is easy. To stand out, such a game needs to shine in at least one way whether that’s highly engaging written content for the setting and characters, or rich and interesting rules that suggest gameplay depth, or — as is often the most impressive, and as is the case with Lucienne Impala’s Letters to Cthulhu — a creative and clever core mechanic that brings the entire thing into focus.

The game, which is based on the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name and the broader mythos of his works, puts players in the shoes (or robes) of Cthulhu cultists trying to communicate with their dark god. There’s a thematic core that’s essential to this kind of Lovecraftian story and setting: a roiling mixture of ambition, avarice, fear, power, awe, and madness. Lovecraft explored these themes through dozens of stories, while the game takes them on in a mere ten pages of rules.

The game is simple: one player takes on the role of Cthulhu, and will serve as the judge of the outcome, while the rest are tasked with composing the letter that will be judged. The group’s goal is to bring Cthulhu forth into the world, but each cultist is also randomly assigned a secret desire of their own, and each contributes just one sentence to the letter as it’s passed around the group. And there’s a twist: each cultist also has a specific way in which they can alter the previous sentence.

How they use this power (and if they use it at all) is up to them — will they try to manipulate the letter to ensure their own desires are fulfilled, or try to stymie the greed of others and keep the group on track towards its shared goal? Perhaps both, or neither. It becomes a monstrously corrupted game of telephone, where every link in the chain matters. The balance of desires in the final letter will determine the outcome, as the player representing Cthulhu uses a few simple rules (and a lot of freeform narrative creativity) to decide the fate that befalls the group and each individual.

The game is designed to move relatively quickly so it can be played more than once, each time with different players taking on the role of Cthulhu and different desires for all the cultists, and it’s best played with a larger group of 6-8 people. The tense, paranoid, conniving dynamic the game creates is subtle and specific to its source material, and is successfully established by just a few pages of rules that anyone can learn in moments. That kind of design elegance is always worth of note, and earns Letters to Cthulhu the title of Best Analog Game.

Congratulations to Lucienne Impala for the win! You can get everything you need to play Letters to Cthulhu on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut!

And that’s a wrap on this year’s winner spotlights. A huge thanks to everyone who submitted a game this year! We’ll be back next January, as always, with Gaming Like It’s 1929 — and whether you’ve entered the jam before or are thinking about doing it for the first time, it’s never too early to start exploring the many great works that will be entering the public domain in 2025.

Filed Under: copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Millions Of Cats

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

We’re closing in on the end of our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and Deep Cut winner Solar Storm 1928, and today we’re looking at the winner of Best Digital Game: Millions of Cats by Javi Muhrer, Chris Muhrer & McCoy Khamphouy.

Most of the submissions we receive in these jams come from solo designers, but this game is a powerful demonstration of what a small team can accomplish. By splitting up the tasks (Javi Muhrer did the programming, Chris Muhrer designed the levels, and McCoy Khamphouy created the art) were able to achieve something fairly rare in the jam: a complete video game, built from the ground up with all original elements. Based on the early American picture book of the same name by Wanda Gag, Millions of Cats is a classic puzzle platformer that offers everything you’d expect from such a title: a clever core mechanic that’s easy to understand and seems simple at first, but which must be used in increasingly creative and thoughtful ways through a series of increasingly challenging levels.

As the player, you control the character described in the original book only as “the very old man”, who is plagued and/or blessed by avid followers in the form of unlimited cats. With a button press, you can spawn more and more cats to trail behind you and copying your actions, and though you can’t control them directly, with some clever movement you can maneuver them to press buttons and help you reach the end of each level. Your score can be increased by using as few cats as possible, adding a great “find the true solution” challenge that gives puzzle games like this more replay value.

After a couple of levels, it quickly becomes clear how this mechanic can easily serve as the engine for all kinds of puzzles. That alone would be a satisfying prototype and more than enough for a game jam entry — the kind of thing a solo developer could pull off too. But this small team didn’t stop there. By having a dedicated level designer, they were able to include a pretty full slate of levels (I’m not quite sure of the final count, as I didn’t get to the end!) that explore several aspects of the core mechanic. Level design is so critical to puzzle platformers like this, so it really pays off. And while all this could have been presented with placeholder graphics or something generic, instead we get handcrafted original sprites and backgrounds, and even a custom title treatment for the game.

Overall, this is probably the most ambitious video game project we’ve had as an entry in these game jams, and it absolutely lives up to that ambition. That’s a testament not just to the skill and talent of the individual designers, but also to their ability to organize and coordinate a development project like this while each focuses on their area of expertise. It’s no surprise that Millions of Cats is this year’s Best Digital Game.

Congratulations to Javi Muhrer, Chris Muhrer & McCoy Khamphouy for the win! You can play Millions of Cats in your browser on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with the final winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Solar Storm 1928

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

We’re past the halfway mark in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, and Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, and today we’re taking a look at the winner of Best Deep Cut: Solar Storm 1928 by David Harris.

As you probably know, David has been a repeat winner in this jam ever since his first entry, and Solar Storm 1928 continues his track record of submitting games that blow our mind with their creativity and uniqueness. It’s a tabletop game that forges a connection between two very different works from 1928: Buckminster Fuller’s design for the Dymaxion House (a futuristic home design that sought to “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input”) and a huge collection of sketches from astronomers at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, documenting solar storm activity. Some of Fuller’s sketches just scream out to be used as game board, so that’s where things begin: with each player designing their own Dymaxion House by placing the walls and furniture on the floorplan, already outfitted with some futuristic fixtures.

Next, the true game begins, as the players subject each others’ houses to acute damage caused by solar activity across a series of rounds, while struggling to keep their own houses together by making repairs, rearranging doors and furniture, installing reflectors, and utilizing special tools like the bathroom fogger and vacuum pump. This is already enough for an extremely cool game about Fuller’s design — you could have players rolling dice or using some other simple source of randomness to determine the amount of damage. But this is where Solar Storm 1928 goes a step further, and reaches for a true deep-cut public domain source. The amount of damage that players must contend with is instead generated by having each turn represent a day of the year (players can begin the game on any date they choose), then pulling the actual documented solar storm activity for that day from the collection of Mt. Wilson Observatory sketches. A simple analytic process laid out in the rules translates each sketch into a number of damaged tiles for the round.

As play proceeds, the player grids fill up with damage and alterations, until one house fails entirely at which point all the houses get scores based on how they held up.

As with all the designer’s past winning games, Solar Storm 1928 isn’t just mechanically interesting, it’s also a thoughtful and playful reflection on the works it draws from. This time, the game also includes a full separate booklet of Designer Notes, discussing and explaining the origin and nature of this reflection: inspired by visits to old observatories and a fascination with their handwritten records, leading to the discovery of the sunspot sketches which in turn sparked thoughts of architecture and engineering. The game then emerged as a way to explore “the tension between the idea of the universe being difficult, and humans trying to make up for it.” For succeeding wonderfully in this reflection while offering fun and engaging gameplay, all grown from the seed of some technical drawings in an observatory’s archives, Solar Storm 1928 is this year’s Best Deep Cut.

Congratulations to David Harris for the win! You can get everything you need to play Solar Storm 1928 from its page on Itch. plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Burden Of Creation

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

It’s time for another entry in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, and today we’re taking a closer look at the winner of Best Remix: The Burden Of Creation by Menéndez Guerra.

Although Steamboat Willie gets all the attention, there were actually several early cartoons that entered the public domain this year, and what better way to compete for the Best Remix award than by using a whole bunch of them in a game? That’s exactly what The Burden of Creation does, using images clipped from several 1928 animated shorts including and especially the early appearances of KoKo the Clown from Fleischer Studios, alongside multiple Disney releases, and putting them all together in a mysterious and moody walking simulator.

It’s tough to capture good screenshots of the game, as its pixelated low-res aesthetic only really work in motion, and the exact quality of graphics seems to vary for different players — but some animated GIFs provided by the designer convey the feel:

The game starts with the player outdoors, moving towards a strange building, and soon you’ll find yourself wandering its gloomy gray hallways and encountering various characters and tableaus clipped from cartoons. Some scenes have intriguing dialogue, some doors are locked, some hallways have strange signs on the walls, and soon it becomes clear there’s a mystery hiding in this place.

The player can unravel that mystery by engaging in some light puzzle-esque gameplay, which will result in some surprising revelations and striking changes in scenery — but I don’t want to give too much away, as it’s best experienced firsthand at the game’s slow and thoughtful pace, underscored by period-appropriate music that seals the dreary atmosphere. For those who don’t want to play but would like to see it unfold, two different commenters on Itch linked to videos of their own full playthroughs.

As we continue to see works from the era of early American animation enter the public domain each year, there will always be some entries that capture the lion’s share of attention, none moreso than Steamboat Willie. So it’s great to see a designer casting a wider net like this, shining a spotlight on some other great cartoons, and putting them all together in such an intriguing way. For that, The Burden Of Creation is this year’s Best Remix.

Congratulations to Menéndez Guerra for the win! You can download or play The Burden Of Creation in your browser on Itch. plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Mickey Party

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

It’s time for the second entry in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station, and today we’re taking a closer look at the winner of Best Adaptation: Mickey Party by Benjamin Gray.

Best Adaptation is probably the subtlest category in these jams: it’s reserved for the game we think did the best or most interesting job of truly “adapting” a newly public domain work by bringing its original spirit into the medium of games, rather than just being inspired by it or using material from it. Personally, I didn’t really think about Steamboat Willie as a prime candidate for that kind of adaptation, but then along came Mickey Party — a tabletop party game unabashedly inspired by the famous Mario Party video games, and embodied with the spirit of the cartoon it’s based on.

So what is the spirit of Steamboat Willie? I’d sum it up in one word: antics. Like other cartoons of the era, and like the works of Buster Keaton and other silent comedians that inspired them, the plot exists to take the characters from one amusing antic to the next, with each scene sporting its own comedic premise and jam-packed with action and visual interest. Mickey Party does the exact same thing: players roll dice to move along the board trying to collect enough “notes” to earn a “song”, and enough songs to win, in the course of which they stumble into a series of fast-paced minigames for the whole group to play. Each minigame is directly based on one of the scenes from the cartoon: it’s a series of animated antics, in game form.

And oh yeah: it’s a lot of fun. Players will be making paper footballs, peeling oranges, stacking cups, and more. They’ll be engaging in a few other layers of gameplay too, all equally centered on material from the cartoon, such as buying a variety of ludicrous items from the shop to gain different bonuses.

So there you have it: a cartoon, in game form. What more can I say? Pulling that off is more than enough for Mickey Party to earn the title of Best Adaptation.

Congratulations to Benjamin Gray for the win! You can download everything you need to play Mickey Party (minus the aforementioned dice, cups, and citrus fruits) from its page on Itch. plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Flight From Podunk Station

from the gaming-like-it's-1928 dept

Earlier this week, we announced the winners of the 6th annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! Now, as in years past, for the next few Saturdays we’ll be featuring spotlight posts taking a closer look at each of the winning games (in no particular order). Today, we’re kicking things off with the Best Visuals winner, Flight from Podunk Station by onamint.

Based on Steamboat Willie, this year’s big entrant into the public domain, Flight from Podunk Station is a short RPG that puts a dark twist on Mickey Mouse and his pals, casting them as gangsters on a midnight run aboard their boat. Of all the entries in the jams so far, this probably has the most original artwork we’ve ever seen. Right off the bat, you’re introduced to the main cast of characters, each sporting a beautifully drawn portrait.

And as you can see, it’s not just the portraits: the background and the text and the whole interface looks fantastic, immediately coming together to set the tone of the game, helped out by the simple and striking color scheme of greyscale art with red accents. Pretty soon, you’ll be having violent encounters on the river, and getting introduced to a variety of wonderfully twisted enemy designs:

The mechanics of the game are straightforward, consisting of a little bit of resource management and plenty of classic turn-based combat. By the designer’s own admission, the gameplay needs more refinement and balance, but that was a worthwhile sacrifice on the game jam timeline since it let so much love go towards the artwork. In a comment on Itch, the designer explains a bit more about the process for the artwork: the characters were all drawn from scratch then gussied up by digitally applying some paper textures, while the background uses a heavily-modified photo, and the interface combines original elements with a few modified third-party icons. The result of this combination is a huge success, and goes to show how smart use of various assets is almost as important as artistic ability when trying to make a good-looking game as a solo developer. Just one look at almost any screen from the game (and there are plenty more that you should go play to see for yourself) makes it obvious why Flight from Podunk Station is this year’s winner for Best Visuals.

Congratulations Onamint for the win! You can play Flight from Podunk Station in your browser on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it's 1928, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle DECODED

from the gaming-like-it's-1926 dept

We’re nearing the end of our series of posts about the winners of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926. So far, we’ve looked at The Wall Across The River, The Obstruction Method, Dreaming The Cave, and Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn! Today, we move on to the winner of the Best Digital Game category: A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle DECODED by Anna Wu.

Throughout these jams, we’ve seen so many different ways of utilizing public domain works. There are direct adaptations (with varying levels of parody and commentary), remixes of individual elements, games designed to foster a deeper understanding of the original work in the players, and more. But there’s also one very direct and personal approach that can be extremely effective in the hands of a good game designer: telling the story of your own engagement with a work. Anna Wu (a.k.a. LadyOrTheTiger) does exactly that in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle DECODED, a straightforward interactive story built in Twine that captivates the player with its subtlety and simplicity.

As the title suggests, the game is about “decoding” Hugh MacDiarmid’s 1926 poem written in the vulnerable Scots language. The title caught the designer’s eye while perusing lists of 1926 works for game inspiration, but preliminary investigation revealed that it would be no easy read: though a sister language to English and full of recognizable words with meanings that can be intuited, Scots is still very much a foreign language to English speakers, and not one readily translated with Google or other tools. But rather than move on to other source works, Anna decided to make a game about the process of understanding this intriguing poem, or at least its first few verses.

I won’t spoil the details of the story, which starts with some self-interrogation about the reasons for wanting to explore the poem and then moves through the difficult steps of trying to do so. It’s mostly told in text, but makes excellent use of audio and visuals that elevate it, as well as some basic interactivity that has the player revealing the definitions of individual words just as Anna did using a translation dictionary.

By the end, you’ll be surprised just how immersed you are in what started out as a very simple and somewhat arbitrary story. The game showcases many things: the creative potential of pacing and structure in an interactive story, the way moments of interactive freedom can subtly enhance a linear narrative, and of course the beautifully recursive nature of art and culture, where one’s engagement with an old story can become a new story of its own which also breathes new life into the original and encourages players to experience it for themselves. It’s also an example of one of the reasons we love these game jams, as it was the search for eligible public domain material for the jam that not only inspired this game but inspired Anna’s curiosity the poem in the first place! For all these reasons, but above all because it is a narrative experience that simply succeeds in drawing the player in, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle DECODED is this year’s Best Digital Game.

Congratulations to Anna Wu for the win! You can get everything you need to play A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle DECODED from its page on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with the sixth and final winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like it's 1926, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn!

from the gaming-like-it's-1926 dept

We’re now past the halfway point in our series of posts about the winners of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926. So far, we’ve looked at The Wall Across The River, The Obstruction Method, and Dreaming The Cave. Today, the spotlight falls on the winner of Best Visuals: Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn!by Josh from Dirtbug Games.

There were quite a few entries this year that did ambitious things with their visuals — always a bold challenge to undertake in a 30-day game jam. That’s just not enough time to make something graphically polished, but it’s plenty of time to do something graphically creative, and that’s just what Josh from Dirtbug Games did with Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn! The game mines what is increasingly one of the richest veins of visual assets and inspiration that can be found amidst the material entering the public domain right now: American animation. This art form, burgeoning as it was in the 1920s, had an unmistakable style and irresistible charm, and was most potent when used for comedy. And this is a very comedic game.

You take control of the titular Mr. Top Hat, and must navigate a series of set-piece “challenges” (which are not really challenging, since that’s not the point) built with footage from 1926 cartoons, all under the guidance of an omnipresent AI-generated narrator voice with a cheeky and charming accent. The controls are janky, the art is far from pristine, and the game as a whole is unfinished (ending after the first three sections) — but the style? The style is rock solid, a wonderful celebration of the works it draws from.

As the player guides Mr. Top Hat through each stage, the narrator chimes in with comical encouragement, instructions, and commentary. The actual gameplay is minimal, which frees up the player’s attention to spend their time in each screen taking in all the visual elements and listening to the endless string of jokes.

The game has a surprise or two up its sleeve, too. Just when you think you’ve got an idea of what each scene will be like and how the pieces of 1926 animation will be used, it throws a curveball at you — but the less said, the better. It’s a short game and the best way to enjoy it is to just go play it without knowing where it’s going to go.

From start to finish, Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn! is fun to look at and funny to play, and when you hit the current cutoff point of this unfinished game, you’re sure to wish there was another scene. Josh plans to continue development, and we hope this much-deserved win for Best Visuals offers some encouragement so we all get to find out what Mr. Top Hat is going to do next.

Congratulations to Josh from Dirtbug Games for the win! You can get everything you need to play Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn! from its page on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like it's 1926, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Obstruction Method

from the gaming-like-it's-1926 dept

Last week, to kick off our series of posts about the winners of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926, we took a look at Best Adaptation winner The Wall Across The River. Today, we move on to the winner of the Best Deep Cut category: The Obstruction Method by Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games.

Best Deep Cut is probably our favorite of all the six categories, highlighting games that make use of 1926 works that are obscure, unexpected, or just plain unusual. For the second time in these jams, the winner mined a particularly big but easily-ignored source of material: scientific studies. The Obstruction Method is based on a behaviorist experiment by Frances Holden, entitled A Study of the Effect of Starvation upon Behavior by Means of the Obstruction Method, in which 803 albino rats were variously starved and put through an electrified maze. You can probably already see the potential for a game based on this study, but Jason Morningstar got even more creative than you might expect.

The Obstruction Method is a live-action roleplaying game in which players take on the roles of Holden and the other people involved in the study and her life in general. What follows is a roughly two-hour play session that sees this crew of scientists and associates bounce off each other, with their interactions proving to be just as much of a study in behavior as the one they are conducting on the rats. The game materials include slips of paper describing the responses of the rodents, which serve as inspiration for the actions of the characters. It’s all presented in a simple, beautiful design that evokes the style of old scientific research papers:

But it’s not just up to the players to make things interesting: Frances Holden’s network of associates includes people with fascinating connections to the world of early 20th century poetry and more, with one of the players even taking on the role of Robert Frost. Their relationships with each other are full of drama, envy, competition, and romance, with each character’s sheet providing plenty of intriguing material to work with:

The game is a perfect example of just how much value the public domain holds. It’s not just cultural touchstones like Winnie The Pooh that are locked away for decades by copyright: below that obvious surface, there is an astonishing wealth of material that is all but forgotten outside specialist circles. By taking one such artefact — a study with a verbose name, by a scientist who doesn’t even turn up much in the way of Google results — and exposing the rich story it conceals, then putting it in the hands of players to explore, The Obstruction Method demonstrates exactly why the Deep Cut category exists.

Congratulations to Jason Morningstar for the win! You can get everything you need to play The Obstruction Method from its page on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like its 1926, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Wall Across The River

from the gaming-like-it's-1926 dept

This week, we announced the winners in all six categories of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926. For the next few weeks, we’ll be taking a closer look at each of the winning games (in no particular order). Today, the spotlight is on the winner of the Best Adaptation category: The Wall Across The River by Seth Ellis.

There are a lot of ways to make a “good adaptation”, and it doesn’t just mean telling the exact same story. When you’re making a game based on a novel — in this case, a game based on Hope Mirrlees’s 1926 fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist — the real accomplishment is to go beyond window-dressing and bring the spirit of the source material into the gameplay itself. That’s what The Wall Across The River accomplishes with its combination of competitive storytelling and a simple, attractive game board:

Lud-in-the-Mist is about the push-and-pull between the rational, down-to-earth inhabitants of the city of Lud and the fantastical land of Faerie that sits right next door. The game puts two main players at the heads of these two sides, with additional players taking on a judge/audience role. As play proceeds, the Mayor of Lud will try to build a wall between the city’s lands and the encroaching mist of unreason (by playing “bricks” onto the border between the two), while the Duke of Faerie tries to overwhelm the city and turn it into an extension of his kingdom (by expanding his fantastical influence over Lud, piece by piece).

But in order to do this, players will have to win a war of stories: in each round, they play cards against each other, representing the imaginative Fancies and intoxicating Fruits of Faerie, or the rational Rules and rock-solid Bricks of Lud. To use a card, a player must describe a scene; to use another card in response, the opposing player must offer a counter-scene that challenges the first. It’s then up to the remaining players, the “Citizens”, to judge the winner as they see fit. The game also supplies an excellent page of optional story prompts — not so long and dense as to be overwhelming, but robust enough to provide lots of inspiration.

The tension between the “normal world” and the fairy-folk is a rich old tradition in fantasy and folklore, and Lud-in-the-Mist is a seminal novel within it. At this tradition’s heart are powerful themes about the potency of storytelling, the conflict and balance between the rational and the fanciful, and the pervasive sense that only a thin and porous wall separates reality from a world of wonder that is both beautiful and terrifying. By immersing players in these themes, making them act out this contest and pursue the goals of both sides, The Wall Across The River shows how games can capture the essence of an existing story and explore it in new ways — and for that, it’s a well-deserving winner of Best Adaptation.

Congratulations to Seth Ellis for the win! You can get everything you need to play The Wall Across The River from its page on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like its 1926, public domain, winner spotlight