Don't Get it in the Poop

(photo taken during an actual game of "Don't Get it in the Poop")

Yes, this game looks and sounds terrible, and I assure you it is.

What you will need:
1 hackey sack
1 dog turd, found on the ground

the game plays like regular hackey sack, except you pass the hackey sack back and forth around a dog turd, and if it touches the dog turd, the last person who touched the hackey sack has to lick the dog turd.
That's the whole game.

Magic Briefcase

This is an oldie, but I never posted it on here. This is a briefcase I made for carrying magic decks. It has slots for dice, 6 decks, a trade binder, and pen and paper. I made it over a weekend. It's made of vinyl, foam, and a briefcase I got from Staples. I sold the one and only version for $90. Pics after the jump.

Bums revamp...

Working on tweaking the Bums and Bindlesticks cards. It's pretty clear at this point that the cards posted before will not be the names of the cards and there will be significantly fewer in the final version (there were about 100 before, but we found that was unnecessary).

I'm also not cool with the cards being nouns. The issue is that there is only so much you can do with a brick for instance, however, when you change the card name to "throw" (he's throwing the brick in the picture), it opens the storytelling up to whatever you want it to be. You can throw a brick, some sand in their eyes, throw yourself at them, throw them into a pit, etc. In a test game, someone knocked off the top of the empire state building and jammed it in someone's ass like in Cartman Gets an Anal Probe. It was pretty cool. How do you do that with a brick?

Anyway, I will be uploading the new versions of the cards soon.

Bums and Bindlesticks

I just finished a new game a couple of days ago, and would like your help playtesting it if you can print out a copy or proxy one up, it would be awesome if you could let me know what you think. It's called "Bums and Bindlesticks" and it goes like this:

You and a group of friends play the role of unruly hobos, beating the shit out of each other and stealing each others' money to buy a bottle of Captain Alcohol's Fortified Wine. 

The game can be bought for $10 by contacting me, or printing out a copy of the game for free by yourself. All you'll need is some card sleeves (available at any hobby shop), some heavy card stock (available at Staples), a paper cutter, and a color printer. Note that the sheet with all "block" cards on it is to be printed twice.

The rules are as follows:

The player that goes first is the one with the most change in their pocket.

Each player starts the game with 10 life.

Shuffle the deck and place the cards in the middle of the table.

All players agree on a location to set the new game, for example an alley or a boxcar or a busy intersection.

Each player draws 5 cards to start the game. At the end of each round, anyone with less than 5 cards must draw from the deck until they have 5 cards.

Attack cards can only be played on your turn. You may only play one attack card per turn unless stated otherwise.

Every attack card and defense card played must be accompanied by how the action on the card is being done, and must pertain to the area that your bum is currently in. For instance "well, Marie, I get super mad at you because you hit me with the back of a toilet seat and then ejaculated on me, so I get up, handcuff you to the same toilet, and tear out your tongue with my BARE HANDS!" (you then play the "Bare Hands" card)

Defense cards may be played at any time, including right before you are about to die.

Instead of attacking on your turn, you may instead "rummage" and discard as many cards as you like (you then draw up to 5 at the end of the turn). Note that even this action must be accompanied by what you are currently doing at the time you are rummaging. For instance: "I'm getting sick of seeing all this violence, so I go to the nearest McDonald's and rummage through their bathroom and see what I can find."

You may be as loose with the definitions of the cards as you like. For instance, you may use your Stick and Bindle to pry loose a muffler from a car and hit someone with the muffler. Or, you may use the brick or bat to smash open a convenience store window and use their products to inflict pain on your opponent (the player will still only take damage equal to what is written on the card that you played).

You lose the game if you have 0 life or less.

The last person to die is the winner, and wins the bottle of Captain Alcohol's Forified Wine.

This game is not a competitive one. It is one that simply facilitates some fun. If you focus someone out of the game and kill them much faster than everyone else, you are a dick for reducing the amount of fun they had.

There are blank cards that you can use to make up your own attacks too. When I get a working copy printed out I'm going to make a YouTube video showing it in action so people can get a better idea of the instructions. Printable game after the jump.

Schoolyard Format

So I'm a pretty big fan of a game called "Magic: the Gathering." I love the intricacies of the game. It is one of the few games I know of that you can actually get better at the more you practice and not hit a wall. I have been playing in tournaments for 3 years now and I'm not even close to being as good as I know I can be at it.

This can serve as a bad thing though. As you may not know, when people start playing the game, it is a totally different animal. So much so, that I would say with no amount of uncertainty that I, simply as a player of the game on a tournament level, could win 99% of matches played against a person who is not a tournament player. This can cause an issue because my brother, who I enjoyed playing the game with long before I was a tournament player, has never played in a single sanctioned tournament.

I remember playing games from 200 health for fun to see how well we did in the long run. I remember bashing face with Crash of Rhinos, a common that would never see play in constructed. I talked about this with my friends on my local tournament scene and to my surprise they agreed! They actually knew what I was talking about! They recalled decks that were so bad they would never play them again, but they all recalled them fondly. They remembered their first card they bought. Their first rare. They remember the worst card they used to play with, but one other thing was common among all of them: they all agreed that once you reached a higher level of play, you can't un-learn the things you know. You can never go back to schoolyard magic. I wanted to find a way to recreate the schoolyard magic way of playing without worrying about who won or the more advanced rules like phases and the stack.

The more I thought about ways to fix this, the more I failed. I tried pauper - a format that only allows commons, but it was too different. I tried EDH, a format that in its nature almost forbids combos, and does its best to make every game different, but it was still very competitive (there are tournaments based around it and Wizards has embraced it as a real format now). None of these really felt like what it felt like when I used to play casual schoolyard magic with my brother.

Al makes things, right?

I decided to make my own format. I wanted one that really felt like schoolyard Magic and could bring people back to that way of playing. I give you... the Schoolyard Magic format:

The rules are the same as Vintage format with a few exceptions...
1. You may only play cards that you clearly remember playing before you played in a sanctioned tournament
2. No crazy manabases (mostly nonbasics)
3. There is never to be a tournament of this format. The second people start playing this format to win, it is ruined. The purpose is to play like you used to, not like you do.
4. If you had less than 4 of a card because your collection wasn't great, you may only play that number of that card in a deck
5. If you can play with the same exact card you used to have, play it
6. If you don't have the exact card, try to find the same version of the card and play it
7. There is no stack
8. Instants and abilities can only be played at sorcery speed (this means no counterspells)
9. Burn spells are only to be used on players, unless they can only be used on creatures

Yeah, we're going THAT far back. This format isn't for everyone. If you're a competitive dude that is looking for a format to break, this isn't it. Back off. The point of this is to show off what crazy stuff you came up with and get all nostalgic with your friends about cards you used to love but are terrible now. Here is my deck I'm going to play:

3x Lightning Bolt
4x Shock
2x Disintegrate
4x Crash of Rhinos
1x Maraxus of Keld (my favorite rare back then)
4x Shanodin Dryads
4x Kird Ape (the first card I ever bought)
2x Firebreathing
4x Incinerate
1x Deathcoil Wurm
1x Panther Warriors
1x Blanchwood Armor
1x Fireball
1x Spined Wurm
1x Craw Wurm
1x Anaba Shaman
2x Volcanic Hammer
4x Viashino Runner
2x Viashino Sandscout
1x Wall of Razors (first strike was SO GOOD!)
2x Panther Warriors
2x Blistering Barrier
12x Mountain
12x Forest

So that's it. As with all untested things, it's a work in progress. Let me know what you think.