Tr3ptych Studios

The Bilgewater Buccaneers: Escape From Cannibal Island

Planned as a 'small side project' while working on the other games, this is a fun, brutal card game about a group of pirates shipwrecked on an island full of cannibals.

The impetus behind this game was to try and design a 'fighting' game where a player could be eliminated but then re-enter the game and still have a chance of winning.

Current Status: This game is going to be published by Johan Forsell of Gottick Games and is currently being illustrated by Josh Cappel.

Zombie Run

Zombies are always a fun subject, so I have been working on a card game similar to the game 'Bang!'. Each player is a survivor in a group trying to make their way across a small town to military bunker. But some of the survivors are infected and amy endanger the whole group...

Current Status: Just about to be prototyped and playtested.

Viriconium Nights

Loosely based on the Viriconium sequence of stories by M. John Harrison this is a boardgame set in the capital city of a dying earth. Players represent families struggling to gain control of the city through political, mercantile and violent means, as wel as harnessing the artefacts scavenged from the surrounding wastelands.

Current Status: I am still working on the design for this game.

Apocalypse Farmers

This was my second entry to a monthly competition held at the Boardgame Designers Forum. Set in an Apocalyptic Wasteland, players take the roles of farmers trying to eke out a living in order to bribe their way into the Metropolis - the last surviving bastion of civilisation. The world is now a very strange place, with Zombies tilling the soil and annual migrations of Giant Mutant Penguins leaving behind valuable eggs which players can pickle and gather in order to get into the Metropolis...

Current Status: I have a full 4-player prototype made and have had half a dozen 2-player playtest games. It works pretty well so far and I will keep developing this.

Cryptic City

This was my first entry to a monthly competition held at the Boardgame Designers Forum. Players take the roles of shadowy organisations recruiting Agents to undertake various missions. Players only have tentative control over Agents and so need to try and outwit or outguess how the other players are going to focus their actions in any given turn.

Current Status: I have put together a set of cards and done some solo playtesting. Went well but need to work out an interesting way to do conflicts, and some way of not using so many numbers.

Fantasy Empires

This game is very different to the Fantasy Boardgame below. One of the design ideas for this is to create a 'Fantasy Empire Building Wargame' that has a different board setup each game, and which is expandable. So my design considerations include keeping the 'base' rules as straightforward as possible.

Another major design factor is allowing players to follow Military, Trade, Diplomatic and religious routes to win the game.

Current Status: The rules and design is currently in a Mindmap format, and I am currently still working on the design stage of the game.

Colour Line Game

This concept for this game came to me while in Italy, after reading 'The Player Of Games' by Iain M. Banks. It is an abstract wargame played with lots of nice chunky colourful wooden bits on a map made up of different coloured lines.

Current Status: I have started playtesting the game and it is working well, but still has a lot of balancing to do. One of the major things I am working on is the winning conditions.

Fantasy Boardgame

Foiled in my desire to hunt down a satisfyingly epic fantasy empire-building wargame, I have teamed up with Tim Gordon to develop our own game.

This game was originally about communities re-emerging into their world centuries after an empire-spanning cataclysm. Through various design stages, the game has now been redesigned and is now set in a fantasy city, where each player must assert their influence over the various people, groups and organisations within the city to fulfill their own individual goals.

Current Status: We are currently still working on the design of this game, but have already started prototyping and playtesting the game. We are currently working on the victory conditions, after which I will be running some serious playtest sessions here in London.

Lords of Necropo

Originally planned years ago as a pbem (play-by-email) game, this is a multi-player wargame set in a dark world of Vampire Lords.

Current Status: Currently in its eighth draft version of the rules, the game has gone through a lot of playtesting. I have a full prototype of the game made but after discussions with Johan late 2006, I am planning to rework the entire game system, though I have put this project on the backburner for now...