Game Over

I love playing games. As a kid, I’d play a lot of board games, until one Christmas, my parents gave me a copy of Dungeons & Dragons. From then on, I pretty much only played role-playing games. Years later, I’ve gotten back into board games with a vengeance. I love the social aspect, the puzzling challenges, the joy of winning and the frustration of having well-laid plans crumble to dust. I even love my shelf of shame. But one thing I don’t love, is the feeling I get after having played a game, whether I won or lost. It’s a sort of luke-warm sensation of futility, or at least, that’s the best way I can describe it. It’s the Game Over feeling.

No matter how hard you fought or how great your success, everything is washed away once the game has ended. But in a roleplaying game, when the game is over, your character has improved in some way and you can reuse that character in a new game. That feeling of achievement and continuation was a big part of what drew me into rpgs way back when. These days, awesome board games do exist that tap into this, but still I want more. I want a character that I can reuse across different board games, and this was one of the major motivations for creating Bastardium.

The second bit of inspiration for Bastardium came from the freedom of rpgs. In a role-playing game, you’re not bound by premade cards or other game components but can create and add anything you can think of to the game. All you need to do is write it down on a piece of paper. Sure, you lose some fancy art, but you get creativity and imagination. I want players of Bastardium to feel like they’re creators, inventing fun items and cool powers for their personas. This extends to the games themselves and I can’t wait to see what sort of designs people will come up with.