Dead Winter Minicomics Batch #14 (Patreon)

Hello and happy new year!  These past two weeks have been restful for me, but between last week, this recent page update and this week it sort of adds up to one normal week of posted content, so thank you for your kind patience and support.  This week I have two new minis to share, but they each have a bunch of words attached to them so let's see what we got!

#046: Early on in our game planning we made the decision to design a game that doesn't have levels, stats or gear.  We did this mostly because we wanted to build something that players of all skill levels can enjoy together, and if someone puts more time into the game and accumulates higher stats and stronger gear, they either can't use their favorite character to play with their friends anymore or if they do the damage output they produces eclipses anything the newer friend can ever hope to keep up with.  This strip, like the DLC outfit one a batch or so ago, sorta touches on that aspect of game development that we committed to not pursuing.

This strip was written down in my notes as "someone steals van, Alice shoots out engine".  In the game Alice is the character with the longest-reaching ranged attacks to compliment her being a crack shot, so in a hypothetical gear-upgrade level-up scenario she would have a bigger rifle that shoots farther and does more damage, essentially Counterstrike's AWP.  When fleshing the idea out I wanted to make the stakes and the concept as outrageous as possible.  The pairing here is Alice and Lou because while Alice could pop the engine out of "the Orphanville delivery wagon", Lou could put it back together again afterwards.

#047: This one was written down in my notes as "playing cards with incomplete deck and made-up rules" and I had a lot of fun fleshing it out.  I also picked the first panel of this one over the previous strip just because I thought it had a bit more pop as a promo panel.  The premise here is that the crew may not have a full deck of playing cards to play with, but they're always out and about running errands in the city so they have plenty of opportunities to find and collect random cards of all types in their travels, assembling a weird Frankenstein deck of sports cards, drivers licenses, tarot decks and pieces of other trading card games.  There's an internal set of rules to their game that all the characters in the strip are in tune with but we the reader may find impenetrable, which was the heart of the original joke, but I got to thinking a little bit and decided to actually write down an actual set of rules to "Reckless Hold 'Em".

- It is played using the partial bicycle supplemented by random other cards.
- The structure is similar to Texas Hold 'Em, where each player is dealt two cards before the flop, and betting on hands works the same way.
- The key difference here is due to the weird assembled deck, rather than trying to assemble the best possible hand from the community cards, those cards are "the posse" and each player bets on their hand doing the best job at beating the posse.  It starts with the flop, a three-card posse, and players can fold if they feel like the turn or the river produce cards that would prevent their hand from beating that posse.
- In order to get more than two cards players can "buy" cards into their hand, up to a maximum of five, by paying the current bet into the pot (i.e. Monday bets 50, Lou raises to 60, Alice can buy cards into her hand for 60 each, in addition to betting 60 to stay in the hand).  Buying cards early in the hand is more economical, but you risk the turn or the river countering the new cards and spoiling what would have been a cleaner hand.  Going "all-in" allows you to draw to a maximum of five cards regardless of how much you paid to buy them.
- The table agrees based on a rolling set of criteria which hand is "the best" at beating the posse, and the winner takes the pot.
- Players may "play a card from up their sleeve", but that card will become a permanent addition to the Hold 'Em deck.

For example, Lou's two kings and a holographic Yankee are strong, but Alice has assembled Exodia, who would normally automatically win but only in the context of a 1v1 duel, and since the posse is five strong that term doesn't apply.  Lizzie's hand combines Dio's stand "The World" as interpreted from the tarot card with a surfing Pikachu and a red 5man mahjong tile, which grants an extra yaku and combines with The World to give her a "dora dora dora dora dora" hand, which one-ups Exodia's one-dimensional power.  Monday plays his hand of five aces, a hand famous across many worlds which itself is an ascendance beyond the laws of its native system.  We don't know what the posse in this particular hand was but five aces are a strong contender for defeating it, and so Monday wins the hand.

I think this strip was funny both as an impenetrable game that the characters internally know and also within the context of this rule system I patched onto it.  The crew probably have weekly games going, and other Tombstone townsfolk may join them and either be completely confused or pick it up right away, sometimes contributing cards they found in their travels as well.  In hindsight, now that I've written up rules to this I've technically created a game in a comic about a game about a comic, a new record of recursion for me.  Nice!

That's about it for today's work report.  Next week I should have comic page progress and some more minis to share with you.  Thank you for reading!  Happy New Year and have a safe and restful week!