Come Out and Play: Sleuth and Quoto

Sunday, September 24, 2006

coap.jpg

Coming out all over.

So the Come Out and Play big games festival is happening this weekend. If you’re in New York and into this kind of thing, I’d really recommend coming and checking it out. Looks like it’s going to be a big deal in the big games world (and hopefully the start of a regular thing).

I mention, as well, because I’ve got two big games appearing in the festival that you might consider checking out! (They’re both currently fully booked on the site, but if you just come, you can probably participate.)

Sleuth

Sleuth is a game I developed with Josh Klein with assistance from Steve Bull and Kalin Mintchev. We wanted to design a game that rode on top of our awesome (and nearly-launched) Sugarcandy (Sgrcndy) mobile group chat application that we’ve been developing. So we came up with this idea based on the board game Scotland Yard that I used to own back as a kid. A Master Criminal will be roaming around Chelsea in Manhattan, trying to evade detection. Teams of players use clues and geo-locating tools to hunt the Criminal down! It’s that easy. And then everyone meets up at the Chelsea Brewing Company for beers. (The first group to find the Criminal gets free beer!)

We’ve been having troubles with Dreamhost — the company providing us with hosting — but otherwise, everything’s ready to go and we’re very excited. I’ll write up a brief report about how the experience goes.

Quoto

And then I’ve got Quoto, the Big Photography game. Developed with Ran Tao, Avani Patel, and Chris Paretti.

Quoto’s quite easy to explain: Each team gets some quotes. They have to go out and photograph those quotes on the streets on Manhattan rebus-style. That’s about it. Read more on the Quoto site, if you’d like.

We’re hoping that people will stick their resulting photos up on Flickr with the tag “quoto” so we can all enjoy the Quoto-joy later. There are already a few shots up from our playtests.

So those are the games. Awesome!

Also: Next week I’m going to Manaco to participate in the Nokia Games Summit in Monte Carlo. (Yeah: Holy shit. I’ll be staying at this dive.) More on that soon.

Oh, and since it’s trendy to say these days: Sorry for the slowness with blogging. Going to try to pick up the pace a bit this year!