On the off-chance that there are publishers looking for a new card game reading this blog, I just thought I’d mention that I’m now shopping around for a publisher for Skullduggery. For those who don’t know, here’s the skinny on the game, straight from my proposal:

Skullduggery is a card game in which the players assume the roles of thieves in a medieval city. Their job is to collect the tools that they need in order to perform heists of varying difficulty, while simultaneously making life more difficult for their rivals. The goal of the game is to become the most infamous thief in the city by performing the most heists (or the most daring heists) and fencing the most (or best) loot by the time the game ends.

In short, it’s a heist-based card game, it’s got a total of 204 cards divided amongst four decks, and it takes about an hour to play with three or four players (or about 15-30 minutes with only two). I have a prototype, and I’ve been playtesting and tinkering with it intermittently for the last eight months or so. If you’re a publisher, and you’re interested, feel free to respond to this shameless self-promotion for further information. My email is on the sidebar to the right.

Addendum: I just got done with a back-and-forth email conversation with Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games. He liked my proposal, but is unfortunately booked for the foreseeable future. He encouraged me to keep trying, and to check back with him in a year or two if I hadn’t already found another publisher. He also gave a lot of really good advice, and was generally just an awesome, really nice guy. If their games weren’t enough reason for me to like the company already, Mr. Jackson certainly just gave me several.

Some of you may recall that, a while ago, I was working on a card game called Skullduggery. Well, it’s still under construction, and I had a playtest session with my friends Tad and Chris on Friday night. It went pretty well. There were some unclear rules and some things that needed to be shored up, but overall I was pretty pleased with how it went. It seems like I’m starting to get it to where I want it to be: fast-playing, easy to learn, easy to play.

My intention is for it to be more a casual, beer ‘n’ pretzels kind of game than a hardcore game; as such, there’s a fair amount of luck involved, and you don’t necessarily have to pay attention to every little thing that happens. There is some skill involved, mostly involving good timing of a heist and minimizing your risk before attempting one. I’m also thinking of introducing an element of gambling to the game, allowing you to wager Infamy on a heist in order to reap greater rewards (but at the risk of greater penalty for failure, and greater potentiality for your opponents to screw you). I’m not completely sold on the idea yet, though.