Bryan Fischer, game designer / publisher (Nevermore Games: Chicken Caesar, Mars Needs Mechanics) and Darrell Louder, game designer (Compounded) came up with a great idea for an unofficial design challenge that ends at Unpub next month in Delaware. Sometime at (or after) the event the designers will each get a chance to see each others games in person and try them out. This has given me the creative spark I was looking for, and also is detracting me from a lot of other work that needs to be done before Unpub, but whatever... You should make a game too!

Here are the details from Bryan's site (http://fischer.tumblr.com/post/38952460903/gdc):

We’re having an unofficial UnPub3 Game Design Challenge! By “unofficial” I mean it has nothing to do whatsoever with the official UnPub3 event. Basically, a few game designers are creating games quickly (deadline is UnPub3 in January) using very limited quantities of components. We will meet up at UnPub3, likely in the evening, and play these games and award a winner. You are invited to take part!

The Rules:
Your game must be a complete game playable by 1+ players. It is limited to containing up to the following components, but no more:
20 cards
4 dice (d6)
15 cubes
Rules
30 minutes or less game time 

The cards need to be a standard size: Euro, American, or a mini-version of either. No giant sized cards that double as a 20x10” board, cheater. The dice need to be six-sided, but may contain blank sides or have custom symbols. The cubes should be standard cubes, about 8mm or so in size, whatever colors you want. The rules should be printed out, but don’t worry too much about diagrams unless they are super necessary. Pencil drawings count! This is all about the gameplay, which btw has to be 30 minutes or less.

Rules update: At least one sets of components (cards, dice, or cubes) must have multiple uses in the game.

The Spirit:
This challenge is about the fun of designing a game with limited time and materials. Notice the bolded fun because you should definitely keep that at the forefront of your mind while making a game. Make it strategic, make it funny, make it whatever you wish, as long as it is fun!

The Venue:
Like I wrote above, this is an unofficial challenge, aka, it isn’t associated with UnPub3 in any way. We’re figuring out where/when we’ll play the games and enjoy our creations and will get back to that soon!

Players will both roll one or both of their dice over and over, trying to get combos that are higher than their opponent. Once a player has a die combo that they are happy with, they will yell "hit!", and the opponent must leave his/her dice on the table as-is. A quick evaluation will show if the hit succeeds. Each player has a red and black die. Both dice will each need to be higher than both of the opponent's respective dice. If so, the defender receives a point of damage. And if not, the hit fails and the attacker receives a point of damage. There are also blocks (any die with a result of 1), healing (both dice with results of 1) and special moves (specific die rolls that always win).

Once a player receives 8 hit points, they have to flip their player card over to the Last Chance side. Once flipped, they have 8 more hit points left before the game ends. And now, they receive a Fatal Flaw, which makes it harder to land the best hits. 

Those are the basics. There are still a few flaws (ha) that I need to work out. But it's quick, light and we've been having a lot of fun with it here in the last 2 days. Hopefully people will enjoy it (unofficially!) at Unpub.

Here's an image for now. Marty Cobb (Pixel Lincoln: The Deckbuilding Game, Paper Route) is killing it with the art. And I have been killing myself with the layout.