MY NAME IS OZYMANDIAS
A downloadable PnP game
A game by Harley Working and Keytar Bard (@Keytar_Bard)
Ages: 8+
Players: 2-4
In this game you play as one of the last citizens of a dying empire, ensuring that their proud legacy lasts well into the future for all to see. You work to protect your cities proudest monument, a statue of its most famous leader, from the cold, harsh and unforgiving passage of time. Can you ensure that you are not forgotten by history?
This game was made for the Extra Credits Game Jam #5 where the theme was “Passage”. We interpreted this as the passage of time. Percy Bysse Shelley’s famous sonnet Ozymandias encapsulated the loss of a legacy to the sands of time perfectly and provided the inspiration for this game.
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
- Percy Bysse Shelley, 1818
Download
Install instructions
Recommended paper size: A4.
Print single sided with no margins.
(It's a larger file due to the ambient music included in the .rar file)
Comments
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Thanks for the game!
I really liked the theme of time as a force of inevitable destruction and how it was conveyed through the chipping mechanic and events cards pile. As we played, a feeling of inevitable decay and desolation crept in: first the resources pile dwindled, then the shop got closed. I especially liked how after the shop was closed, all unused gold in my inventory has essentially became useless. This deprecation of a previously valuable resource made me feel a little melancholic.
I was not expecting the events deck to end so quickly, though. We had a setup for two players and I followed all the instructions step by step, and yet we never got to the 'endgame' phase, when you're supposed to resolve other person's events. In the end, none of us lost any statue parts, and that felt somewhat disappointing, considering one of the main themes of the titular poem being that of futility of man's actions in the face of time. I didn't felt that our preservation actions were all that futile. I guess if we were farming resources more aggressively from the shop and from the resources cards pile, instead of stealing them from each other, we could have depleted them earlier and that would have added us 2 more turns. But then again, this was not enough to evoke the kind of 'clinging to the edge' feeling that I was hoping for.
Special thanks for the soundtrack! It was a nice addition to the experience. I also like that the game was easy to print and setup, and rules are clear and simple. This all made game very accessible and helped me overcome my initial doubts regarding the format (I usually play digital games and never tried pnp before).
Hi there.
Thanks for playing it and giving your feedback. I think you found a bit of an unintended glitch in the game. We intended for every player to have a set number of turns (6) before getting to the endgame which would happen, if no stealing happened as a player would take a card every turn. However stealing was a very late addition to the game to force interaction between players and I completely missed the gamestate where the event deck could be depleted before the resources if people actually played the game as intended and stole from each other. One of the things I wanted to hit was watching your statue crumble before you, which is what the endgame stage was supposed to force so when that never happens it does make things feel anticlimactic.
Official hotfix ruling is when there are no event cards left, endgame is triggered. However the event deck is then shuffled, placed face down and each player has one more turn following the endgame rules with this newly shuffled event deck. I'll add this when the ranked bit of the jam is over and entries can be edited on their page.
The shortness of the games was us trying to make a slice of a game that got the theme across without keep people there for ages. In the future I'd love to flesh it out to a full board game though. Who knows?
Again, thanks for your feedback, it really is appreciated.
Harley Working
Your hotfix sounds very effective. So in the initial design of the game players were not interacting directly until the endgame? Interesting!
Thanks again for the game! I wish you best luck in the follow-up work on it!