New Year, New World!

Hi everyone, and happy new year!

I'm excited to announce that the full version of Odd Little World is officially out! This is a quirky tabletop civilization builder that can be played solo or with friends. There's no combat, so the game focuses more on exploration, trade, and solving problems. It's also more imaginative than competitive, so while you can technically race to build the first Wonder, the real point of the game is to tell the story of your civilization, its cities, and its heroes.

This is also a 'zine-game', so along with the digital rulebook, there is a printable version that can be folded into a 16-page minizine--the perfect pocket worldbuilding kit!

I'm also putting Odd Little World on sale for the month of January! The normal price is $3, but if you buy it this month it'll just be $1!

-- Nash

(some reflection on the game's development process below)

Development Story

This game started as an entry to Flyover Indies' Zine Game Jam 2021. I told myself before the jam that I was going to do something simple & easy, and then as soon as the jam started I though, "why don't I make a zine civilization builder game". That was NOT quick or easy!! But it was an extremely fun challenge...

After Zine Game Jam ended, I pretty much overhauled original. It only took a couple of test plays to realize that the jam version is just way too complicated to play. But some aspects of the game were really fun, and I wanted to find a way to hone in on those!

To force myself to really streamline the good parts of the game, I decided to throw in another challenge: fitting the rulebook into a 16-page minizine format. (The jam version is 22 full-size pages.) It wasn't easy! Minizine pages are a lot smaller than full or half-size, and even a couple sentences can quickly fill up a whole page.

It took a lot of reworking & fanagling, but I finally managed to squeeze the game down to fit the new format! After a few tests and some tweaking, it really seems to capture the fun parts of the game (the silly story aspects), without as much hassle!

I also spent a few weeks creating an automatic prompt randomizer for the various people, places, and things in the game. Normally, you write up a bunch of cards at the beginning and draw from those to name things, but since that's a lot of extra work right at the beginning, the randomizer is a good option if you want to just dive in and start playing!

Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy exploring some odd little worlds of your own!