Nothing is ever finished.

Splintercard was my testbed, my "hey, does this system I've come up with actually work at all?" moment.

More importantly in the end, it was also the "oh wait, everyone else already had the same idea" moment.

But, crucially, it's also the "yeah, but I think I've improved on it" moment.

So many things could be done differently with splintercard.

• What if the nuke could be used against any territory, not just the city?
• What if you can't just choose any card to play, but have to draw 2 blindly and choose one?
• What if to claim a nuke you needed a majority on the relic, not just someone alive at the end of a round?
• What if owning a nuke meant you could draw 3 and choose instead of 2? And how would I rationalize this in lore?
• What if the two sides weren't symmetrical, with different unit values?
• What if the whole game was asymmetric, with one side defending and the other attacking with nukes?
• What if the cities were 2d6 health and took longer to kill? What if the whole game was a bit longer?
• What if the tank was better at city defense instead of the plane?
• What if a command card could be spent to defend?
• What if bombing a city required rolling the doom value against a city defense rating, which is modified by the defenders there?
• What if you couldn't redeploy a unit until the round *after* the one in which it dies?
• What if....

• Well, what if there was enough room on the back to fit all these rules!!!

And that's the rub, really. The hardest thing about the #pftf2023 challenge is the lack of space. You've got about 600 words max, total, to play with. It's not easy. That's exactly why it's so good though - for every rule you add, you need to simplify or remove another in order to keep the whole thing intelligible.

I think I'm going to leave splintercard where it is. Things I've learned:

• Keep the main thing the main thing
• Use better fonts that are easier to read
• Use better icons that are easier to read
• Use simpler art that prints ok at this scale
• GMT exists and is a company
• David Thompson exists and makes a game with some eerily similar ideas to my own
• Playtest way more than you thought you'd need to
• Proofread way more than you thought you'd need to
• Make the indesign file the final file - not photoshop! Too hard to change the rules that way...
• And much more

Oh, and randomly, posting a couple times in the print and play gaming group on facebook is enough to get (so far) 165 downloads!

Many, many thanks to HissyCat for running this. It's been a revelation, and has changed many things in the way I think about wargame design. Going forward I may or may not ever actually *publish* anything (who cares, I love designing games as a hobby), but if I do, I'll put #pftf2023 down as a key part of the journey.

-Rob