I. Spotlight
The IGDN announced their list of nominees for the Groundbreakers, their awards. It’s a very cool list with lots of nominations going to The Time We Have, a two-player game of brothers losing each other during the zombie apocalypse. It picked up 5 nominations and if you want to learn more, I spoke to designer Elliot Davis about the game on the podcast a while ago.
And on that note, I’ve also spoken to nominee Asa Donald about Spine as well as Aaron Lim about What Will We Have Tomorrow (well, mostly we talked about the role of communities in game design). Spine is a solo game about reading a weird book where gameplay is reading the weird book and responding to prompts in the endnotes. What Will We Have Tomorrow is a solo journaling game about cooking food for your loved ones.
The other nominees are ChainxLink designed by Ethan Yen and Little Wolves by Dinoberry Press. ChainxLink is a semi-cooperative fantasy game of incarcerated prisoners escaping a dungeon. Little Wolves is a whimsical game about shapeshifters going on adventurers, but you craft a mask to represent your Wolf form as a part of play.
The “make your mask” aspect make Little Wolves the third game here with a physical component as a part of play. In The Time We Have, it is the door. In Spine, it is the book. A neat little design trend.
II. Media of the Week
- Nothing this week!
- You too can support the newsletter on patreon!
- If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.
III. Links of the Week
- Knutepunkt released its annual larp anthology and the new book has essays about larp in Malaysia, ten years of messing with Vampire the Masquerade larps, and more. As always, the PDF is free.
- Geek Native has a nice piece about the discovery of dice among women in the Ice Age communities of North America: “Robert J. Madden’s identification of 12,000-year-old dice across the American West has done more than just reset the clock on tabletop history. It has effectively unearthed the forgotten “founding mothers” of gaming.”
- For Rascal, I wrote about how Wizards of the Coast almost published a Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG and wrapped up in there is the story of the person who had the idea who’s in a bad situation right now.
- And on a similar note, it was nice to read that designer Owen KC Stephens has beaten cancer and has joined Green Ronin.
- I also did another crossword for Rascal, themed around cyberpunk games.
From the archive:
- On Githyanki Diaspora, Judd writes about his favourite page in ultra-minimal World of Dungeons and it’s the page with just a list of names. (First shared on December 2022)
IV. What am I playing?
With PsiRun/Gradient Descent wrapped up, I had to pitch my group on what to play next. They wanted to play a fantasy game set in a city and after doing some day dreaming and then spelunking into the old itch library, I pitched them three games through a series of texts.
I made this post on bsky but the list ended up being:
- one game that I’m not sure anyone outside the designer’s circle has played and never got out of beta,
- one game that people seemed to be excited about before the crowdfunder but I’ve not heard a sound since the release, and
- Daggerheart
I thought it was a pretty funny encapsulation of what this hobby is like sometimes. My players picked Daggerheart which may sound unsurprising but I genuinely didn’t see them leaning one way or the other. I think the idea of playing “Critical Role’s game” and maybe even returning to D&D after a long time away was appealing. It’s not really been that long. Our last D&D game was 2019 but actually, now that I say it, nostalgia for that time is probably understandable.
Regardless, I have the funny problem of deciding what we actually do in the campaign. I’m a bit too overworked right now to conjure strong opinions and design anything (none of the game’s default frames work) so I think we’re going to do an adventure-of-the-week thing. I’m going to break out Sunmirror, which was a free setting supplement that some friends made for Blades in the Dark, and use that as the sourcebook for the city. It has more than enough ideas for jobs, quests, and the like. We’ll start small and see. Maybe we’ll end small too, who knows.
V. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
- Honest Dice Kickstarter! Beautiful, limited edition, hand-poured dice 🔥 Engineered to increase fairness with mathematically balanced numbering. Tested w/15,000 rolls. Already made, ships right after the project ends!
- BATScon 2026 is a free, indie-focused tabletop RPG convention in the Bay Area, bringing together players, GMs, and creators for a day of games, panels, and workshops. Join us for scheduled, drop-in games, workshops, panels, and a welcoming, community-driven space. It’s free to attend, and you can follow our BackerKit now to get updates on how to attend and support when we launch.
This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:
- Voidrunner’s Codex, the sci-fi expansion from EN Publishing for D&D 5e
- Land of Eem, the colourful fantasy game pitched as “Lord of the Rings meets the Muppets”
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.
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