Ursula

I bought my eight-year-old niece copies of Bandido and Bandida for Christmas. These are card games that play like cooperative tile-laying games: the object is to prevent (Bandido) or aid (Bandida) the underground escape of a notorious criminal by constructing a maze with as many dead ends as possible.

I thought this worked really well as a game to play with both kids and adults. You can deal in a new player at essentially any time, which means it's easy to accommodate little sisters or grandparents who wander over and get curious about what you're doing, and since the cards are all segments of tunnels, the ability to read is not a prerequisite. (Bandida adds a few special cards that require a bossy eight-year-old or an adult rules reader for interpretation.)

However, these are not easy games to win! An ideal strategy would involve lots of coordination between players to block tunnels quickly. If you're pursuing a more casual "let's just figure out how to use this card" mode of play, the game turns unwinnable due to combinatorial explosion very quickly. The nieces and I got enough partial successes from blocking individual tunnels to keep ourselves entertained, but I'm curious about what an adults-only playthrough of this game would look like.

I posted my Twine game, Eyes of Tree, to itch.io!

You go outside near twilight or near dawn. You lie flat on your back in the bracken and look up. You can see the edge of the sun's disk, falling below or rising above another hill. You look straight into it. It cannot harm the person you are now.

Loving the Lady under the Hill has a steep price. This game is about what happens after you have paid it.

In the process of formatting for publication, I learned some css and scanned some linocuts I made in grad school: self-publishing is a game of many crafts!