I’m working on playtest kits for some card games right now. It’s not my first time doing so, but I think it’s my smartest time. Here’s some notes on how to build playtest kits more easily.

What are the goal of playtest kits? Playtesting the game, of course! You want to spend as much time as possible playing and analyzing that play, and less time building and rebuilding kits.Here’s some priorities when breaking that down:

Playtest kits should be:

1. As easy to make as possible.
2. Quick to modify on the fly.
3. An accurate representation of the current state of the game rules and all card text.
4. A factual representation of the physical game item (correct colors, rough icons, etc.)

Here’s the game-specific stuff you need to build a playtest kit:

1. A spreadsheet or database that contains all the necessary information for each card.
2. A list of how many of each card you need to print.
3. Printable cards, 9 per page. There are a million ways to turn your spreadsheet/database into a printable page like this. As you can probably guess, I use InDesign for this. Data merge is hot!
4. A copy of the rules to be printed. These rules should be in a state where a group of people who have never played the game can lean the game from them.

Here’s the stuff you’ll need from your Game Designer’s Toolkit:

A whole bunch of excess cards from dead CCGs. Go to your local game store and say “Hey, I need a 800-count box of the absolute worst, dead, totally terrible CCG cards you can get me, from a variety of terrible CCGs.” Your game store clerk will say “Are you serious?” and you say “Yup! What do you want for them?” You should be able to get this box of cards for 10 bucks or less—many game stores have boxes of these cards that haven’t sold in years. If the store offers to sell you more and you have the storage space, go for it. You want the games from a variety of CCGs to make your different playtest sets easier to tell apart if you use clear sleeves.

A smaller bunch of CCG sleeves. There are two routes to take with this: the cheap clear sleeves that Ultra Pro sells for a penny each, or the nicer colored/opaque/textured sleeves that typically run about 5 cents each, retail. Advantages to the penny sleeves: they are cheap and you can use different CCG cards in them to easily distinguish between different types of cards in your game. Advantages to the more expensive sleeves: they typically shuffle better, slide around less, and can take more wear and tear. I prefer the Ultra Pro matte sleeves, as they’re quite durable and don’t get marked very easily. You’ll need a few different colored types of sleeves to distinguish between different types of cards (or different games, or different versions of games.) If you want the nicer sleeves but are on a budget, ask your local game store to sell you all the sleeves that, for whatever reason, have not sold well to the local player community. If you’re willing to take those slow-moving sleeves off their hands, they may well cut you a bargain. They might also have a bunch of used sleeves that they’ll sell to you cheaply—many people who sell off their CCG collections leave the cards sleeved, and so stores end up with boxes of these used sleeves (if they don’t just throw them away.)

Cheap printer paper. This paper will be going inside a sleeve and against a card, so it doesn’t need to be sturdy. I think I paid $16 for 2500 sheets last time I bought paper: if each of those sheets turned into 9 playtest cards, that’s 22,500 playtest cards you can build before you need more paper.

A printer. I have a HP 2605dn color laserjet. Being able to do color is very useful in playtesting, and the cost savings over time for a laserjet printer are very clear over an inkjet.

A paper cutter or scissors. You’re going to be cutting a bunch of paper, and a proper paper cutter will make your life better. A paper shredder for all those scraps is great too, if you’re not a recycler.

A bunch of counters. Most games require counters of some sort, for life or other resources. During playtests, poker chips usually do a great job of this. If you’re getting fancy, print out graphics and glue them to both sides of a poker chip.

Sharpies in a couple different colors for annotating cards during play or between sessions. Reprint them when the annotations become more confusing than the lack of them!

Print all the cards, cut them out, fill every sleeve with a CCG card, and then add the paper cards. Double-check the proxies with your list of cards, and you’re good to go!

One final word on organizing this stuff: make sure all of your playtest files have dates on them, and keep all the physical components in a single bag/box/container, with a list of everything that should be in it and the playtest kit date/revision number. There are some large deck storage boxes designed for Magic: The Gathering that are big enough to fit 100+ cards and some other components, or you can simply use the smaller white 400-count card storage boxes.

This may seem like a lot of stuff to buy and have kicking around, but you can get it all for under $50, and most of it is reusable!

©2012 Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

It’s been interesting working on a sci-fi game that is so different from Eclipse Phase, and also working on such a setting-light game. I think we did a sweet job of showing the setting style through art, captions, and examples without being too heavy-handed.

This is the first new release for James Maliszewski’s Grognardia Games, and I’m excited to see it live!

There is a nice preview—including the first chapter and the entire Table of Contents—available via OneBookShelf, so check it out!

It is a time of wonder.

Humanity has reached the stars and created a society of glittering sophistication and diversity on hundreds of planets. Poets declaim, lovers rendezvous, and rakes duel with wits and monoblades. Colonists settle virgin worlds, merchant princes vie for emerging markets, and free traders hawk their exotic wares. The Navy rules the jumplines, putting down pirates and charting new star systems. Scientists uncover startling new truths on long-dead worlds and posit revolutionary theories dizzying in their implications. Technology advances at a rapid pace, each year improving the lot of all who accept its boons. None dare deny the bright destiny Man has seized for himself.

It is a time of upheaval.

The inhabited galaxy-the Thousand Suns-teeters on the brink of chaos. Half a millennium since the Concord, and a generation since the bloody Civil War, the dynamism that ended the Age of Warring States is sorely tested. Diplomats try new gambits, shifting their ground for an unknown future. On dozens of worlds across known space, the lights are going out again and the process of decivilization begins anew. Despots and tyrants who would rather lord it over benighted backwaters than bend their knee to even a distant authority, arise once more. At the edges of explored space, rivals-both human and alien-watch and wait.

It is a time of glory.

Victorious fleets smash enemy armadas in distant star systems. Soldiers parade through liberated planets to alien cheers. Sector governors draw up breathtaking visions of terraforming and orbital cities. New jumplines open to the heart of unex- plored space, daring the bold to venture into the unknown for profit and peril. Surveyors stumble upon lost colonies and puzzle out the mysteries of inscrutable clades. Captains with blazing eyes save worlds from barbarism-and rule them as gods. Daring thieves turn new technologies to unexpected ends or sell them to shadowy cartels on the fringes of known space.

Meanwhile, bold operatives seek out these criminal plans for reprisal. Everything is possible with enough beauty, brains, or blasters, and it’s all within reach of a single jump.

It is a time of adventure.

©2012 Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

James describes Thousand Suns thus: Thousand Suns is basically Poul Anderson and H. Beam Piper the Roleplaying Game, but with 21st century special effects.

The PDF and POD editions (hardcover and softcover) of Thousand Suns will be rocking out soon, and when more preview material is available I’ll be sure to let you know!

©2012 Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

Each of the texture packs is $5, and they contain at least four graphics each, at 18″x12.6″, 240DPI.

Battered and Blasted:

Dead Television Explosion:

Something Died:

These three packs are all kind of grungy; I’ll hit other themes and tropes in later packs.

©2012 Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

Her words are below:

Dear friends: I’m writing to you today to ask for your help. My name is Rae Deslich, and I got stabbed in the neck at FYF Fest.

It’s pretty much what it sounds like. Labor Day weekend, I was standing in the crowd at FYF during the last band of the night- Death From Above 1979. I had gotten separated from my friends in the rush of people, but that was fine because I had a good spot and the crowd was tight around me, but not rowdy, just dancing. I was center left-ish, behind the mosh pit.

About two songs in, a giant metal spike came flying through the air and landed, point down, in my neck. It embedded itself about an inch in. You can imagine my shock, dismay, pain, etc. I staggered out of the crowd, attracting some attention, and ran into some friends, who guided me to the medical tent. The EMTs there put me in an ambulance, where I was taken to USC-LA County Hospital. I received an x-ray and a CAT scan, and the spike was surgically removed. The final cost: 5 hours in the hospital and $2,000 in medical bills. The ER doctor told me that I nearly died, and if an ER doctor says that, it’s serious.

I filed a police report at the hospital, the spike (I believe it was a tent spike, the kind used to secure shade structures and canopies at FYF) was turned over to LAPD as evidence. As far as i can tell, someone threw the spike: I was in the middle of an open field, not near any structures or scaffolding, nothing nearby exploded, etc. Someone just picked up a spike, said to themselves, “fuck it”, threw it into the air, and it nearly killed me.

A few days after the incident, I contacted the FYF organizers. I told them, via email, that I’d like to talk to them about an assault that happened at their event. They told me, in about two sentences, that I should talk to the LAPD and that they are not responsible for anything that happened at the festival because it was held on state property. (This is categorically untrue.) Mostly I was just amazed that they didn’t even want to know what had happened at their event. I have spoken to both a lawyer and a detective, but neither can do much for me because we don’t know who threw the spike.

That’s where you come in. I need a way to reach everyone that was at FYF and might have seen something happen. There was a person who threw a spike into the crowd- and they were surrounded by people, thousands of people. Someone had to have seen it; I need to find that person, and my best bet is by having them read something online- and tell their friends, and they tell their friends, until someone says, “Wait, really? ‘Cause I saw a guy throw something…”

So that’s what I’m asking for. please help me spread the word. Because what happened to me was stupid and horrible, and if nothing else, people need to understand that something they think is funny and drunk-fucking-around could possibly kill someone. Please repost this, re-tweet, blog, tumblr, etc. And if anyone saw anything, or has any information they think can help: please email me at zapevaj at gmail.com. Thanks.

©2012 Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

I kissed a troll.

©2012 Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

I wrote way too much text for a five minute speech, but I had fun and got a lot of nice reactions to it from a crowd of people largely unfamiliar with roleplaying games and their particular publishing niche.

If you were at PepCon and want to chat about the things I said or toss ideas around, there are a ton of ways to get in contact with me!

©2012 Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

Lady Gaga’s new album, Born this Way, is available on Amazon for $0.99 for a limited time. iTunes has the same album for twelve bucks. This is a financial no-brainer—but I can’t buy it with my Canadian Amazon account (even though I’m sitting here in the USA right now…).

I think discounting something over ninety percent on one venue and not another is awkward and foolish. As someone who likes buying things from the iTunes store (now that it’s no longer DRMed!) I would be perfectly happy to buy it there, but I am not willing to pay such a premium.

But there’s a nice workaround: From my Canadian Amazon account and spending Canadian dollars on my Canadian credit card, I can buy Lady Gaga’s album—they’ll take my money!—and give it as a gift to someone with a USA-based Amazon account. They’ll take the money but still don’t think I should have the rights to the files!

There are numerous ways to transfer MP3 files between individuals once they are retrieved from Amazon, of course.

As a bonus, my subterfuge rewarded me with a free upgrade to 20GB of cloud storage at Amazon. I have no idea if I’m ever going to use it, but free is free.

©2012 Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

I have a large number of extra BattleTech books. Books that I worked hard on, books that I’m proud of. But, they are extras, and I need some cash and space in my office more than I need them.

So here’s the deal&mdashlpick a book from the list below (all full-color hardcovers, except for the coveted FedCom Civil War):

Total Warfare
TechManual
Tactical Operations
Strategic Operations
25 Years of Art and Fiction
Fedcom Civil War

Email me — adam@adamjury.com (subject line: “BattleTech books” please), telling me which book you want from that list. I’ll reply to confirm that it’s still available. You then zap me $75USD via PayPal. I’ll send you the book and three other softcover BattleTech books. North American shipping included. You can send me a list of softcover books that you would like, and I’ll do my best to fill them, first come, first served.

Don’t want additional softcovers? Want more books? Make an offer!

And here’s a list of the softcovers I have:

Masters and Minions: the Starcorps Dossiers
Starterbook: Sword and Dragon
Starterbook: Wolf and Blake

Blake Ascending
Jihad Hot Spots 3072
Jihad Hot Spots 3076
Jihad Conspiracies

Record Sheets: 3039
Record Sheets: 3067
Record Sheets: MechWarrior Dark Age
Aerotech 2 Record Sheets
Aerotech 2 Revised

Handbook: Major Periphery States
Handbook: House Marik

Field Manual: Periphery
Field Manual: Updates
Field Manual: Mercenaries
Mercenaries Supplemental II
A Guide to Covert Ops
Combat Equipment
War of 3039
Miniatures Rules

Combat Operations
Interstellar Players
Brush Wars
Classic BattleTech Companion

Map Sets:

Solaris VII
Map Set 7
Compilation 2

Technical Readouts:

3039
3050
3055 Upgrade
3057 Revised
3058 Upgrade
3067
3075

©2012 Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.