Golf Quest Sneak Peek (Patreon)

Earlier this month I put out the mysterious image you see above to Twitter, Discord, and other platforms as a form of "ominous marketing". Well, while the cat remains firmly embagged for most folk, you lovely lot get a sneak peek of what that mysterious marketing was about!

GOLF QUEST

A couple of weeks ago, my partner Shanice showed me a game that her friends in work were playing with a piece of paper. They called it Paper Golf and dear reader, I was immediately hooked. The premise is simple: You draw a course, take a pencil, and by balancing your finger on the end you try and make strokes until you reach the hole. Pure simple joy that is made better by various course hazards and different pencil sharpnesses, lengths, etc.

After playing it, I couldn't get it out of my head so I started designing Golf Quest around this public domain core game and I'd like to share a bit about what we're doing with you all.

First Up

Weird and wonderful courses based on the Apothecaria locales and hopefully some other places as well if the Zinequest Kickstarter does well.

Shanice, my wonderful partner, put together this little test course for us to see how the game would work on coloured paper. 

Apologies for the bad camera quality, the lighting in here is rubbish and I'm using an old mobile phone.

And I'm happy to say they worked out well on both coloured courses and our blue and white courses (both of which will be supplied as printable sheets with every purchase).

Our other courses are going to have things like exploding swamp gas bubbles that grant an extra shot, cable cars that move the position of the ball, angry goats that launch the ball in random directions, as well as more fantastical takes on things like water hazards, trees, sand banks, and more!

We're also going to be including a few dungeon crawls that introduce a lives mechanic and require you to golf your way to the heart of a dungeon and defeat the boss by hitting them with golfballs while avoiding their attacks.

Secondly

As I love solo RPGS, Golf Quest is going to be split into two modes of play:

Competitive which will be a purely mechanical game focused on beating each other's score on the courses. We're toying with the idea of Mario Kart style powerups on the green for this mode but we'll see how that pans out.

The other mode is the Story mode which can be played solo or with friends. In this mode you generate rival golfers with their own personalities, quirks, and dramas and each course is interspersed with the Club House section. Here you'll get a chance to interact with other golfers and may incur some boons or busts for the next course. Maybe Baron Von Schwing has hired disreputable gnomes to hide in the long grass and steal any of your balls that end there, forcing you to take your shot again from your previous Stroke.

The idea is to have a Tournament, Dungeon Crawls, bombastic characters, unexpected twists, and interesting Courses that take the core mechanics and really turn them into something new.

And Finally, For Now

Golf Quest is in the sort of ideation and first design stages while I plug away at For Small Creatures Such As We but the goal is to get something playable out in time for Zinequest 2023 in February. Even if that is just the test course above and our interpretation of the rules.

Thanks for reading and please, let me know what you all think. We're really excited about this idea and would love to hear your feedback :)