Solo Gaming Appreciation Month starts November 1st, 2020! You can check out last year’s mischief here, and information for 2020 is below.
In 2017, we dedicated SGAM to the memory of the late Zach Best and his contributions to solo gaming through his publishing company, Conjecture Games. While we hope you’ll remember Zack again this year and try out UNE or CRGE in your solo game, for 2020 Todd Zircher has compiled the challengess for the month.
Table of Contents
Do we have any themes or challenges?
As usual, we have four weekly SGAM Challenges lined up for your solo gaming and community involvement. These can be done in any order with as little or as much focus as you desire. The charter for SGAM has always been to have fun and spark new and interesting ways to expand the hobby. Sharing your experiences is desired, but not required.
Week 1: Solo Game Chef 2020
This one might need the whole month so we’ll start with Solo Game Chef 2020! The theme is hindsight/foresight and spiced up/inspired by some image dice. [Zero Dice])(https://tangent-zero.com/zero_dice/zero_dice.htm) is suggested since you can make easy links out of it or integrate the images into your project. While it is listed as a game jam, I would like to see oracles and such as well if you’re not keen on writing up a whole new system or hack.
The jam has already started!
Week 2
Try something new, break out that new solo game or game engine that you have been wanting to play with. Of course, sharing actual plays is encouraged, but if you want to challenge yourself in private, that’s cool too.
Week 3
How about something that’s analog for this year’s community project? Make a mini-map on an index card and send it in (digital, scan or nice photo) to be part of a collection. Perhaps something with just a title, author so that it can be used for a wider range of situations. It could be anything, space ships, camp sites, villages, creepy tombs, etc. I’ll post some blank images later if you want to work on something digitally with your favorite graphics art program.
I’ll volunteer to be the editor so folks know that they will get collected and curated into a PDF. I’ll monitor MeWe, Discord, and Reddit for entries and/or you can e-mail them to tzircher -at- yahoo.
Week 4
A reading and review assignment, grab a new game, oracle, or other solo tool and give it a good read. Let the community know what you do and do not like about it and how well it can be adapted to solo play (if it is say a more traditional multi-player game.) Perhaps this is a follow up to the week two play something new challenge?
Have a great month of gaming and trying new things.
Rule One
Have fun. We do this for the love of the game. If you want to do the challenges out of order or you’re not inspired by a topic, that’s cool. You don’t even have to share if that’s not your thing. Of course, any format on any platform is acceptable. Heck, if you’re playing Sea Dracula and you want to film yourself doing a silly dance, I’d LOVE to see that.
Lastly…
Last, but not least, help get the word out about SGAM by sharing it on social media! #SGAM2020