Oh hi there! You know, we here at the Gamecraft organisational hive mind have been thinking recently that, with all the fancy digital tom foolery and electronic doohickeys going on in game development these days, we’ve lost touch with what it’s like to do some pure game design. You know how PopPop used to make games? Little bits of paper. And a stick! And sometimes he’d get so involved in what he was doing that he’d wander off and we’d find him standing in the neighbours paddling pool. Without his clothes on. Ah PopPop!

So with Gamecraft Unplugged, we’re going to try something different. Leave your Three Dimensional Studio Maximum, your fancy text editors, and your noise machines at home, and come along with just your mind and some pen and paper. And maybe a stick if you’re so inclined. Some dice might also be useful. The rules are simple. We’ll announce a theme, as per usual Gamecrafts, and you’ll then have 6 hours to design a board game, a card game, a pure numbers game, anything you like really, so long as it doesn’t require electricity to run it.

Similar to previous GameCrafts, a theme will be announced at the beginning, form teams, make games, panic, rush to finish the game… and BOOM! It’s the play and judging part of the jam.