Announcing The Winners Of The 7th Annual Public Domain Game Jam

It took us a little longer than usual this year (we’ve been swamped with other projects including the Kickstarter for our new card game) but the time has finally arrived: we’ve chosen the winners in our seventh annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929!

There were so many great entries this year, and it was so hard to narrow it down to just six that we’ve decided to include an honorable mention in each of the categories. So without further delay, here are the winners of this year’s jam:

Best Analog Game — This Is Not A Game About A Pipe by gtmac

The analog submissions are dominated most years by a variety of creative roleplaying and storytelling games, and this year there were several fantastic entries along those lines. What’s much rarer to see is a full-fledged original card game, much less one with a cool mechanical hook and a tremendous sense of humor, but that’s exactly what we found in This Is Not A Game About A Pipe. As you can probably guess, it’s inspired by René Magritte’s famous 1929 painting The Treachery of Images, and designer gtmac did an amazing job of bringing the painting’s surrealist wit into a trick-taking card game with a ridiculous set of suits (one of the suits is “Cards”, if you can get your head around that) and a core mechanic of marking whether a card “is” or “is not” the thing that it… well… is or is not. The game is weird, smart, fun, funny, and beautifully original, and for all that it’s this year’s Best Analog Game.

Honorable Mention: Red Harvest by fuzztech, a compact mystery TTRPG that entertainingly transports a 1929 Dashiell Hammet novel from Montana to Mars.

Best Digital Game — Cocoanut Hotel by Geoffrey Golden & G.C. Katz

In 1929, the Marx Brothers began their film career with the release of The Cocoanuts, in which they play the staff and patrons of a resort hotel. To quote Wikipedia, “the somewhat thin plot primarily provides a framework for the running gags of the Marx Brothers to take prominence.” That makes sense — and it also makes a great opportunity for a game adaptation. Cocoanut Hotel is a classic management sim game, in which the player must manage the daily income and expenses of the titular resort. Doing so successfully is a tidy little puzzle that constitutes a complete game in itself, but as befits the source material one might say it too “primarily provides a framework for the running gags of the Marx Brothers”, as your best laid plans will be ruined by the demands of your boss Mr. Hammer (a.k.a. Groucho) and unforeseen losses due to U.H.A. (Unexplainable Harpo Activity). It all adds up to an amusing little experience and the winner of this year’s Best Digital Game.

Honorable Mention: Thrall by Kanderwund, an awesomely stylish piece of Twine interactive fiction that grabs your attention with its captivating art and music remixed from public domain sources.

Best Adaptation — Calder’s Circus by David Harris

Maybe there will come a year when there’s nothing entering the public domain that inspires returning winner David Harris to submit one of the most thoughtful and unique entries in the jam, but this is not that year. Calder’s Circus is the latest game from Harris that explores the work of a well-known artist, not just with its theme or its rules but with the physical and tactile actions of the gameplay itself. Kinetic sculptor Alexander Calder presented his 1929 work Cirque Calder as an improvised circus performance, with choreographed acts played out by wire figurines, and Calder’s Circus brings a group of players together to put on a performance of their own — not by simulacrum, but by breaking out a spool of wire and doing exactly what Calder did, helped along by some simple procedural rules inspired by his creative process. Calder once said “I think best in wire”, and the game quickly gets players to think the same way. For that, it’s this year’s Best Adaptation.

Honorable Mention: DIY Dalí by haunted-jug, a meditative art remixing game that invites the player to tinker with some of Salvador Dalí’s iconic imagery and includes some great presentational touches.

Best Remix — Accoutrements by Nora Katz

Some entries in these jams choose a single work as their defining foundation, while others pull from as many sources as possible; but what about a game that does both? Accoutrements by returning winner Nora Katz starts out as an adaptation of Lynd Ward’s 1929 book Gods’ Man, turning its wordless story of a Faustian bargain into a character-focused roleplaying game in which players design a powerful arcane tool to acquire in exchange for their souls. Then you dig into the accompanying materials: a custom designed deck of 52 cards representing the various “hilts”, “centers”, and “points” from which you will build the instrument of your undoing, each of them illustrated by a photo of a historical artifact from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These date as far back as the second millenium BCE and, okay, that’s really public domain and not exactly a 1929 work like Gods’ Man. But that’s what the remix category is all about: bringing unrelated things together in surprising ways that cast them both in a new light. That’s what Accoutrements does, and that’s why it’s this year’s Best Remix.

Honorable Mention: Eleanor by Micah McFarland, a short piece of interactive fiction with multiple endings that remixes public domain works from over a dozen artists to tell a compelling story.

Best Deep Cut — A Pocketful of Peril! by Perrin Ellis

The deep cut category is all about games based on unexpected source material, such as works that are forgotten or underappreciated, but this year returning winner Perrin Ellis has gone a step further and made a game based on works that are entirely lost to history. A Pocketful of Peril! is based on four adventure film serials from 1929 which, like many films of the era both great and otherwise, have no known existing copies. But here’s the extra clever part: adventure serials were a highly formulaic genre with a predictable structure, and we do know the evocative titles of these serials and their individual chapters (in fact that’s just about all we know, along with a few still images). That sounds like the basis for some great collaborative storytelling! The game chops up these clues and marries them with story-generating mechanics that draw on the established tropes and formulas of the genre, and thus somehow manages to adapt a film that doesn’t exist. For that seemingly impossible feat, it’s this year’s Best Deep Cut.

Honorable Mention: The Last Tower by Zee Ham, a tabletop dungeon crawl full of puzzles and environmental storytelling, based on the 1929 architectural floorplans for the Chrysler Building.

Best Visuals — A Warning by DigNZ

A warning about A Warning: it takes a while to load. That’s because our game jam rules require digital games to be playable in the browser, which creates some technical limits that DigNZ decided to push to their breaking point — and it sure paid off. A Warning is one of the more graphically ambitious entries we’ve seen, a delirious audiovisual puzzle game about finding hidden messages in 1929 Disney cartoons, after being tasked with doing so by President Herbert Hoover. The game combines its source material with a variety of video and lighting effects and a full 3D-rendered interface to create an experience that’s visually striking from the moment its amusing film-reel introduction begins. The puzzle itself is challenging and plays up the mystery by giving the player minimal instruction, so you must experiment with the jaunty animated puzzle pieces and figure out how to decipher the secret. The game quickly sucks you in with its distinct aesthetic, and for that it’s this year’s winner for Best Visuals.

Honorable Mention: Benten Pond by cutegamesclub, a simple sidescroller game that recreates a 1929 wood block painting with beautiful original pixel art.

The winning designers will be contacted via their Itch pages to arrange their prizes, so if you see your game listed here, keep an eye on your incoming comments!

A huge thanks to all the designers who submitted games to this year’s jam! Stay tuned for our series of spotlight posts taking a closer look at each of the winning entries, and for an episode of the Techdirt Podcast where we’ll be discussing them. In the mean time, go check out all the great entries on Itch!