Yesterday, I locked myself out of my Android phone with the Application MobiLock. MobiLock is designed to lock your phone down to only a set of allowed apps and nothing else. It's fine when you want to hand your phone to someone you know for an extended period of time for a particular purpose. The starter version is free.

I had used this app to leave my phone as a remote for my ChromeCast so that our babysitter could watch some shows while we're gone. I set the PIN, gave it to her and unlocked it, when I got home. Nice and easy.

This is my contibution to this year's Game Chef competition. It's a role-casting game.

I am not a native speaker. What could possibly go wrong?

This might be a strage idea. I guess, I've had stranger ones.

Liber Unobtaniæ

Multiply missing books, philosophical challenges between Sages and stick resolution!

(EDIT: Ok, I admit, that's just my attempt to recreate the original cover. I couldn't find anything on the internet.)

Today I want to tell you all about a gem in early roleplaying history that recently came to my mind again. While this game has been revolutionary at its time, it never took off. And all its influences seem to have been lost in the stream of D&D'esque games after it.

So how early is early? We're talking 1984 here. It was published by Repulsor Labs, a one-man venture that – maybe deservedly so – went bankrupt after just two published games. Maybe their naming wasn't the best idea after all and people actually got repulsed by it.

This set of cards has been sold and given away to caring hands (I hope).

[Ich verfasse diesen Text auf Englisch, da die Karten Englisch sind und ich so konsistent bleibe.]

I have a full collection of StarWars CCG cards for the Dark Side (MWHAHAHAHA!) for the following sets:

Somebody grabs you by your squishy end and draws you out of the comfy sticky goo that you were submerged in. You wind yourselves in fear of being crushed. You vaguely see a few worms, winding themselves in the fingers of surprisingly unremarkable humans. You must yourself be such a worm, captive between the fingers of another human, or Norm. The Norm wears goggles and over-sized gloves. Of course, you don't know what that is, now. But you will soon understand. He smiles at you.

While the goo is still dripping off of you, he carries you over to another Norm. Your captor sets you – your little head with its grinding teeth first – onto the neck of this poor fellow.

This year's Game Chef analog game design competition is already halfway through and I thought it could be interesting to share some of my experiences with it and the current status of my design in this episode. A lot of this is quite preliminary, but the basic foundations are likely to stand until the end of the competition.

I have no hopes of winning, but I will certainly submit my game and hopefully find the time to develop it further after the competition. We had a playtest, last night, and everybody had fun with the concept. Also, the rules (as far as we got testing them) seemed to make sense and enrich play. So, I do not need to scrap those entirely.

This year's Game Chef competition has just started. Its theme and four ingedients have been unveiled today. And - surprisingly enough - they are not words but rather pictures. This will complicate my brainstorming session, but is a nice deviation from other contests.

The contest runs from May 17th and 26th 2013, which is the time you have to produce a fully playable (and readable!) analog game of sorts. I encourage you to take part, if you can spare some hours this coming week.

I will be participating and documenting my progress here (maybe in audio form). I already have a playtesting session scheduled. Let's see, what comes of it.

I totally forgot to mention this … anywhere … at all.

I October there was a contest over at the RPGGeek for 24-hour RPGs. I decided to accept the challenge and in turn produced my second contest RPG ever.

This is its name:

Us, our settlement, the AI and the quantum information field, here, at the end of the world

(Postrocky, I know.)

For reference purposes, I submitted it as "Quantum Settle End" which destills the most prominent information.

Hey everyone,

I am pleased to inform you that I completed (for now) building an RPG pitch database website. It goes by the most imaginative title of RPG Pitches.

It was inspired by me collecting a long list of pitches of games in private for a regular one-shot game night. I would like to make this useful for everyone.

The concept of the site is simple, depending on what you want:

I want to inform you that Ryan Macklin's Master Plan podcast will be back for another season of 10 episodes. He is doing a kickstarter to bring it back. I really like the idea of having this (most of the time) awesome RPG design podcast back for more input.

So, if you liked his podcast, feel free to back this Kickstarter project to maybe even unlock another additional season. That would be awesome!

If you do not know his podcast, please be referred to here to check it out. If you are at all interested in RPG design, you will love this!