Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Accoutrements
Today, we’re kicking off our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ll be going through all six winners in no particular order, starting today with the winner in the Best Remix category: Accoutrements by Nora Katz.
Nora Katz is one of our returning winners this year, having previously won Best Analog Game in 2022 with Nude On A Yellow Sofa, as well as receiving some honorable mentions since then. Accoutrements, a roleplaying and character-building game using a deck of cards, was a tough entry for the judges to place, as there were good cases to be made for it in several different categories. But ultimately we decided that the one were it stood out most against the competition was Best Remix, as it certainly draws from a wide variety of works to build on its core foundation.
That foundation is 1929’s God’s Man by Lynd Ward, a wordless “novel in woodcuts” that is considered a kind of precursor to the graphic novel. Its story of a Faustian bargain provides the narrative foundation for Accoutrements: a group of one to six players take on any roles they desire and engage in this bargaining process, to receive an otherworldly boon in the form of a magical implement, be it tool or weapon or talisman. Using simple procedures and a deck of 52 custom cards, they will choose the Hilt, Center, and Point that comprise their boon — and it is in this deck of cards that the game’s source material opens up far beyond God’s Man.
The cards all feature photos from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access Collection, depicting artifacts that are extremely public domain, what with most of them being hundreds or in many cases thousands of years old. These are carefully paired with prompt words and questions for the roleplaying process in a clean, photo-forward design.
As mentioned, there are 52 of these cards, each of them unique. The gameplay process has players engaging in the remixing themselves, choosing and combining these elements to describe their patron and build their boon, fleshing out its meaning and its impact on their character and the world. As noted in the rolebook, while Accoutrements can stand alone as a group storytelling game, it would also make a fantastic minigame for players in another, larger tabletop RPG campaign: a way to advance their characters and develop magic items and new story directions.
Although only one of its sources is a 1929 work, Accoutrements does a beautiful job of combining a vast selection of artistic works into a new and unified whole, while also incorporating the act of remixing into the gameplay, and also being a game that could itself be mixed into other games. For that, and for a beautiful deck of cards that will make you want to give each and every one a closer look, Accoutrements is this year’s Best Remix.
Congratulations to Nora Katz for the win! You can get everything you need to play Accoutrements from its page on Itch. That’s the end of our series of winner spotlights, but don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1930.