Building DIY Pen & Paper Based “Video Games”
This article will be a big departure from most of the other stuff I’ve written. Rather than a detailed walk thru of building things in code, I thought I’d share a few resources for making pen & paper based “video games’’ and showcase (being the proud parent that I am) some of the stuff my own kids put together.
Being a Gen X-er myself, I distinctly remember the days before PC-s and mobile devices where imagination powered RPG-s like AD&D were popular and the time and $$$ I sunk into Lone Wolf Gamebooks, MTG and Warhammer 40k figurines.
Now that I am a parent myself, I thought that I’d try to wean my own kids off their digital games by indulging in some pen & paper games that try to capture the same ‘video game aesthetic’ they have gotten used to.
1. Paper & Cardboard Based Side Scroller
The example above used Mario which isn’t as popular with most kids these days, so we turned it into an Among Us side scroller instead.
2. Paper Based Dungeon Crawler
This was not a direct copy of any particular tutorial but more a kludge of a bunch of different ideas we found online.
We wanted something a bit simpler that didn’t need dice or cards so we improvised…
It may be worth noting that after we invented that game, someone released a sudoku like solo dungeon crawler game too.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brintown/tiny-paper-dungeons
3. DIY “Collectible” Card Game
One my kids was already acquainted with the paper version of Pokemon Trading Card Game and therefore quite curious about online TCG-s like Hearthstone that he heard from his friends.
Rather than get him started on the digital version of Pokemon TCG , we explored a few videos on “DIY” TCG-s and he got hooked onto something called Chaos Galaxy that inspired him to make his own TCG using an adapted set of play rules.
As the photo below shows — he made a WHOLE ALBUM of these DIY cards and even tried to sell them to his classmates (Which earned me an awkward conversation with his teacher 😂)
In practice though, I think he got a bit too excited about the thematic and artistic elements of the game. The rules of the game itself got a bit muddled and from a game design angle — he learnt how power creep can break a game as he kept making ever more over-powered cards. (In retrospect this I should not have been surprised given that Pokemon TCG itself is pretty bad at this)
4. Two-Player Book Based RPG
You may be familiar with the choose your own adventure genre, but this takes it a step further. As the below video demonstrates — it’s essentially two players synchronizing their page turning where the logic map for both books are ‘mirrored’.
Unfortunately, this one proved to be a tad too complex :( as my kids eventually abandoned it after trying to map out the first few story choices so I don’t have an example to show for it.
However during our research online we stumbled on a random but cool article below that while a bit of unrelated may still be of interest for anyone keen on taking on this challenge.
Conclusion
From a game design perspective, almost anyone with a great idea can develop a pen and paper RPG, card game or boardgame more or less by themselves — as opposed to having to first learn a whole bunch of technical skills to code it up if they started straight off trying to make it digital.
Aside from having them flex their creative muscles in developing the aesthetics and artistic themes, as the complexity of the game rules increased, it was fun to watch my kids try to design the mechanics, figuring out what the ‘win’ conditions and then logically working all the consequential interactions from these elements to make their games actually fun to play.
Well, that’s more or less it (**) but before I wrap up, here are a few more links if you are looking for some non-screen time related fun:
If you are feeling confident — you might be able to even market your own game !
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**I know I said we wouldn’t be talking about programming but since this article does mention card games, here is a shameless plug for a video I recently posted where I built a Tarot Reading “App’’ using Microsoft Power BI. (I will eventually get around to writing up an accompanying Medium article if the video gets enough interest)
