Board Game Travel Kit

I condensed some of card games into one box:

Left to right: Doomlings, Star Realms, The Mind, Chrononauts, FitzIt, Are you the traitor?, Are you a werewolf?, Hanabi, Set, Icehouse/Zendo rules, regular playing cards

I’ve noticed that board game boxes tend to be a little big. I combined five into one box:

Azul, Settlers of Catan, Clank, Concept, Nuclear War
This is “portable” if you have a car trunk, maybe! It’s heavy as heck.

D&D Spells: SRD vs 5e Player’s Handbook

I’ve been working on a spell guide for D&D games. During the process, I researched the differences between the Dungeons and Dragons 5e Player’s Handbook (PHB) and the 5e System Reference Document (SRD).

For those that don’t know, in 3e Wizards of the Coast released the core rules of the game for free. They’ve continued to do so for 3.5, 4, and 5e. The 5e rules were released under Creative Commons recently (thanks!), in response to some community backlash over proposed licensing changes (eek!).

There are 361 spells in the PHB, but only 318 in the SRD. Which are missing?

Here are the 43 spells in the PHB but not the SRD:

  • arcane gate
  • armor of agathys
  • arms of hadar
  • aura of life
  • aura of purity
  • aura of vitality
  • banishing smite
  • beast sense
  • blade ward
  • blinding smite
  • chromatic orb
  • circle of power
  • cloud of daggers
  • compelled duel
  • conjure barrage
  • conjure volley
  • cordon of arrows
  • crown of madness
  • crusader’s mantle
  • destructive wave
  • dissonant whispers
  • elemental weapon
  • ensnaring strike
  • feign death
  • friends
  • grasping vine
  • hail of thorns
  • hex
  • hunger of hadar
  • lightning arrow
  • phantasmal force
  • power word heal
  • prayer of healing
  • ray of sickness
  • searing smite
  • staggering smite
  • swift quiver
  • telepathy
  • thorn whip
  • thunderous smite
  • tsunami
  • witch bolt
  • wrathful smite

Why are they missing? Well, the official WoTC answer is:

In general, the criteria for what went into the SRD is if it (1) was in the 3E SRD, (2) has an equivalent in 5th edition D&D, and (3) is vital to how a class, magic item, or monster works. For example, the 3E SRD has the delay poison spell, but in 5th edition that’s handled by the protection from poison spell, so protection from poison is in the SRD.

Wizards of the Coast, SRD5.1 FAQ

Looking at the actual list, every single spell missing was (1) not in the 3E SRD, (2) was added in 5E. I was curious what fraction of new 5E spells got added to the SRD vs. not, but it looks like no one has a list of new 5E spells, so I couldn’t easily check.

The following are renamed but present in the SRD, presumably for trademark reasons:

  • drawmij’s instant summons, evard’s black tentacles, leomund’s secret chest, melf’s acid arrow, mordenkainen’s faithful hound, mordenkainen’s magnificent mansion, mordenkainen’s private sanctum, otiluke’s freezing sphere, otiluke’s resilient sphere, otto’s irresistible dance, rary’s telepathic bond, tasha’s hideous laughter, and tenser’s floating disk are all shortened. They become instant summons, black tentacles, secret chest, acid arrow, faithful hound, magnificent mansion, private sanctum, freezing sphere, resilient sphere, irresistable dance, telepathic bond, and floating disk.
  • bigby’s hand becomes arcane hand
  • mordenkainen’s sword becomes arcane sword
  • nystul’s magic aura becomes arcanist’s magic aura

Hack-A-Day: Hack-An-MMO

It’s november, and I’ve decided this month that I’m going to do 30 projects in 30 days. It’s an all-month hack-a-thon!

This is November 30th, so this will be the last project.

Today’s project is Hack-An-MMO (demo, source). It’s a small collaborative art RPG. You can draw people, places, and things to populate the tiny world. Have fun!

Hack-A-Day: Hack-A-Farm

It’s november, and I’ve decided this month that I’m going to do 30 projects in 30 days. It’s an all-month hack-a-thon!

Today’s project is Hack-A-Farm (demo, source). It’s a simple tile-based RPG. You can walk around as a chicken, admire your house, and plant and harvest two types of crops.

My main goal with this project was to work with spritesheets or animation before, which I had never done. Showing off the individual tiles is deliberate. Also, the game should respond well to smaller and larger screens, I hope.

I had a good time with this one, and I’m happy with how much I got done in a day. I originally planned to do more fluid walking (it was called Hack-A-Walk), but it was more fun to add crops instead.

I re-used some of the logic from Hack-A-Minigame and Hack-A-Snake. I’ve been finding d3 to be mildly useful, if a little annoying.

Hack-A-Day: Hack-A-Snake

It’s november, and I’ve decided this month that I’m going to do 30 projects in 30 days. It’s an all-month hack-a-thon!

Today’s project is Hack-A-Snake (demo, source). Yesterday I wrote a game where an AI plays snake. Today I thought, hey, I should release that with keyboard controls so people can just play Snake.

Hack-A-Day: Hack-A-Line

It’s november, and I’ve decided this month that I’m going to do 30 projects in 30 days. It’s an all-month hack-a-thon!

Today’s project is Hack-A-Line (demo, source). Hack-A-Line is a 5-in-a-row game for two players. You play online against each other by sharing a link.

I’m okay with this one, except that there’s one really bad display bug that kind of ruins it. I’m starting to develop a list of projects where I might want to go back and fix something after this month.

I skipped yesterday because I needed a break.

3 new games: Deadly Education RPG, Logic Potions, Emperical Zendo

  • Emperical Zendo, a semi-competitive game for 3-8 players based on the icehouse game Zendo. Vaguely based on rants by Bayesians.
  • Logic Potions, a competitive game about deductive logic and making new rules for 2-4 players. Actual gameplay quickly gets complicated as players add more rules about brewing potions. Inspired by “Imaginary Go Fish” and “Emperical Zendo”.
  • Deadly Education RPG, a traditional pen+paper RPG game based on Naomi Novik’s “Deadly Education”. Reading the book is not required.

All three are untested as of posting.

See also: List of all games

3 more Games

I’ve added a central games page https://za3k.com/mygames.md to my website, with all the games I designed. The new games:

Loot Boxes. Untested. Easy storytelling game for 2-4 players. The players have an inventory of absurd random items, and must solve challenges using each item in turn.

Stupid Russia. Tested. Party game for 10+ people. Each player is a spy director at the Stupid KGB, and must report as many codenames to the Inspector as possible, swapping secret information with other players. The players had fun, especially adopting bad accents. The rules were too hard to understand, and it was too much work and no fun for me as the Inspector. Overall I’d just recommend Stupid Conspiracies instead.

Stupid Conspiracies. Untested. Party Game for 8+ people. Each player tries to recruit the others into their conspiracy, for about half an hour. It’s a re-write of the core idea in Stupid Russia. Overall, big party games are just too hard for me to organize.

I also playtested “No this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!”. It ran about 45 minutes prep (not fun) and 45 minutes playtime, which was the main problem. Overall the play time was fun. I rewrote it to have MUCH easier prep, and for the game to be generally easier. I also re-wrote the rules of “Ninjas Ninjas Ninjas” without a playtest. I don’t think it will ever be too popular but it has a soft spot for me.