[Need Catchy Contest Name] - Brrr! It's Cold Sports!

There seems to be a large amount of contests that are going about the place. You've got Game Chef which should be starting up in a couple of months. You've got the Ronnies, which I still think is one of the most masturbatory titles in all of game publishing, which happen ... well whenever it seems. The key thing is that they get the creativity flowing and some really cool things happen from them. Heck, someone hijacked my almost empty lets tell a story thread to tell me that Fall of Granada was going to be turned into a real live book.

All this is cool.

However, what I see that is lacking is a sense of diversity. They all try to kind of do the same thing, here are some keywords and some stuff and here's your time frame and then we'll see what comes up. This is good, again there are plenty of cool games that come out of this. What I'm going to do is start my own contest, in honor of The New Toy selling The Licensed NHL Hockey Guys from Kaskey Kids. Let's see if someone can come up with a game, and I'm not going to limit it to RPGs, but a game that can take a sport and turn it into an RPG, Boardgame or Card game? That's right, I'm going that route. AMAZING.

Now, for the limitations. Because limits are what make things challenging.

1. It has to be a winter sport. By that I mean something that would get played at the Winter Olympics. Here is a handy, dandy list:

1. Alpine skiing
2. Biathlon
3. Bobsleigh
4. Cross-country skiing
5. Curling
6. Figure skating
7. Freestyle skiing
8. Ice hockey
9. Luge
10. Nordic combined
11. Short track speed skating
12. Skeleton
13. Ski jumping
14. Snowboarding
15. Speed skating

2. Mutant League XX - This is also inspired because I got the urge to do a version of Blood Bowl. That means there has to be some sort of mayhem attached to the game. Now I know someone is going to make a, "well I just have to do hockey normally then, don't I?" joke. That's fine, you can make the joke but I think it could do with some over the top violence there.

How do I enter?

1. Well, post here expressing your interest.
2. When your game is done, post it in the completion thread over at the "What's been done" post with a link to the game.
a. If it's an RPG, a link to the PDF is fine.
b. If it's a card game, a link to the rules and a PDF of the cars works.
c. Board game see above, though if you have specialty pieces you're gonna wanna tell us how to make them.

Deadline
I think this should give people plenty of time to think about it. Let's say September 31st because that's con season plus 1 month. I'm flexible on this, if you think it should be shorter, that's fine. If you want to submit early, that's fine.

Judging Criteria
Me and a panel of me will be the judges on this one. Not because I think I'm overly qualified for this, but because I think it'd be kind of cool to judge this. We're going to do it, a la dancing with the stars kind of judging. I'm going to give each game a rating, based off of the criteria below, and then we'll use that as the base point value. Then we'll have a vote off to determine the winner.

The Criteria are:
1. Completeness: Can we play the game, or does it feel like it needs a lot more work.
2. Fun: Is the game fun to play? Does it do the things that make you want to play it again, or continue the campaign.
3. Mayhem: How much mayhem is there? Blood all over the ice, or does it feel like too goons tweeted to stage a fight?
4. Look: How good does the game look? Is it pretty, is it awesome looking? Does it inspire the crowd to riot when their team wins?

Each is based out of 10 and that will provide the base score.

I'll make one too, it just can't enter the contest. There may be something cool at the end, I don't know. I may not have the power of an OGB behind me, but maybe a gift card for IPR, or Drivethru of undetermined value would be up for grabs.

That's right, I'm not cool enough to get people on my own. I'm going to have to bribe them with piddly sums of non transferable cash.

Blog Game - Let's Play Story Time

Okay folks. I'm gonna try this every so often, just to see if people are interested in playing some blog games.

This week we're going to do story time. I'll start with one sentence, after that let's get the next line in the comments and we'll go from there.

Opening Line:

This was the last time that Ella would ever let Jacob play a mean practical joke ever again.