Aaron's Experiments

On this page, I'll be sharing a selection of in-development, prototype, and/or experimental card and board games that I am currently working on. These games are all in early stages of development, and much will likely change as they are playtested and updated. Check back here for the latest versions of each. These might not look fancy, and they may play a bit wonky while being refined, but the priority here is to find the fun in the gameplay, and hopefully we'll find out how much fun each game can be!

Each game will be available as a PDF or image or text file that you can download, print, and play at home by yourself or with friends and family.

If the playtests, feedback, and improvements of these games go well, these games may get art, polish, and even an itchio page of their own... but that'll be something to consider a bit later on. Some may end up being made into more complete games, but some might not. Some might just remain as experiments, but that's ok too! So, please feel free to share any comments you have in the forums below.

Enjoy! 😊

Experiments

• Colour Experiment - Bad Press: A small game playing around with the discourse between article headlines and the subjects they are written about. This is a game, but it is also an experiment in using/layering multiple colour channels on top of one another—seeing what this overlay looks like in print, and how much design can be squeezed into a single page. (Use red/blue lenses/glasses for this one!) I have also included a text-only version if you simply want the text.
• Tiniest Tokens: Inspired by Matt Sarnoff's Subpixel Text Encoding article (2008), this is an experiment to see what can be done with subpixels on a computer monitor. I've brought in the text from my Tiny Tokens game system, re-wording and adjusting it a bit to fit an 80 character-wide text block. All in all, the game fits in a very tiny image, with an image resolution of 162x79 pixels! This experiment is not very accessible, unfortunately, because it so strictly relies on the RGB subpixels that make up a computer monitor's pixels, and pixels are very small, so it's hard to see even with great eyesight. Zooming the image in will show you the colours, but the text relies on subpixels being viewed at 100% scale). The text file included is the text that is in the image, which is a minor adjustment of my Tiny Tokens game. See Sarnoff's article, and the screenshot attached here for an example, and download the game to see for yourself! This image truly contains the tiniest tokens!

Coming Soon...

• Raid Leader: A tactical dungeon crawler with a narrative twist. Take command of your champions' power and lead them to victory in the name of the Iceweald. Fight back the darkness. Save us all.
• Terrarium: An environmental tug-of-war for two players each seeking their own shade of equilibrium. One player plays as the environment, struggling to survive against unwanted change. The other plays as a desperate, invasive threat. Which will thrive?