Tabletop Games (Student Work)

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Santa Marina Beach Boardwalk - Playable Adventure for Kids on Bikes

Santa Marina Beach Boardwalk is a 3-shot playable adventure module written for Kids on Bikes, a rules-light and narrative focused tabletop RPG system. It takes place in a fictionalized, 80s version of Santa Cruz, CA (specifically the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk) interspersed with Stranger Things-inspired horror and adventure, and is part of a larger collaboration with students who were writing modules for various other locations in the Santa Cruz area.

This was a collaborative project between me and four other students. We went through roughly six weeks of writing with regular playtesting sessions with fellow students. All project members were involved in ideation, design, and playtesting; I wrote most of the introduction and the descriptions for the first and third locations, polished the writing on the whole piece, and also acted as a facilitator/coordinator for meetings and shared resources when needed.

Scrap Metal Survivors - Experimental Tabletop RPG

Scrap Metal Survivors is a 4-page experimental tabletop RPG focused on collaborative storytelling. Players become patchwork robots in a post-humanity world where the Earth has imploded and reduced to flying islands dotting the sky and must work together to achieve mysterious directives sent from HQ, or simply survive by replacing their parts and obtaining more energy. Players build a patchwork robot by drawing on different parts, and update their robot as need be, with paper, glue, and scissors, as their robots gain and lose parts. The robots also contend with energy being a limiting resource. A hidden counter ticks down as the robots take actions, and the game ends if all robots run out of energy and can no longer move.

This was a solo project written in roughly six weeks, with regular playtesting sessions with fellow students to get feedback and exchange ideas. I decided to focus heavily on the aesthetics of the game, which included both the physical process of creating a patchwork character with drawing, cutting, and gluing, and the narrative element of trying to survive in a post-apocalytpic world with said patchwork robot.

Conflicts Near and Far - mod for The Deep Forest

Conflicts Near and Far is a modified version of Avery Alder and Mark Diaz Truman’s collaborative worldbuilding game The Deep Forest. In our modification, we upped the stakes by adding sources of interpersonal conflict with predefined traits and a system whre other players pick your weaknesses and shared objectives that players are invited to compete over, as well as providing an alternative narrative ends where the monsters can either overpower the humans or choose to make peace with them.

This was a collaborative project between me and four other students and was written in around two weeks. Our writing process involved lots of playtesting and consensus-building during ideation sessions. We ended up including various ideas that we had, and achieved our original goal of making a game that has a totally different objective from the original.

Hapless - Digital Card Game

Hapless is a print-’n-play digital card game that combines Minesweeper, party games, and Mystery Dungeon-like tile generation. The players take on the role of different wizards (represented solely by their hats) and explore a graveyard full of hazards (represented by a square grid of cards). The wizards, understanding the risks, take turns becoming an exploratory spirit medium for the others to control. Will you help the other wizards collect all the artefacts and run off with the win, or will you march them right to their death? Foul play is expected.

This was a solo project where I tried to make a card game in ten weeks. But due to COVID, I was taking classes from Korea, and had to adjust my plans to create a digital card game instead. I wanted to explore the procedural generated square grids of Mystery Dungeon but also the competitive environment and chaos of a party game, so I settled on a concept where players take turns trying to walk each other over hazard tiles. This was also my first foray with Illustrator, vector graphics, rules writing, playtesting, and design iteration.