Ober Dicta

12:38 PM

Order a copy of Sketch!. We're only 4,000 copies away from royalties...

A trip down memory lane for Brian (the other Brian, the one who rarely posts on the page that link points to), who is probably reading, and a little bit of history for the rest of you.

Sketch! was most likely conceived while gaming at the Schomburg house; I distinctly remember the phrase "I wish there were a game where the better your character was drawn, the tougher they were," and it's likely that came from the mouth of a Schomburg, fantastic artists that they are.

But it wasn't until the spring of 1994, when I went out to visit Brian while he worked at West End Games, that the game was actually born. Actually, the birth came like a bad sitcom plot somewhere on the interstate between Honesdale, PA and Atlantic City, where Brian and I had decided to visit. The Atlantic City trip was a bust (literally, if you're talking about the pencil holders we saw in the Boardwalk Gamblers' Gift Shop), but the journey produced four pages of handwritten notes that formed the nucleus of a new game where characters were created by drawing them.

It would be another five years before Jon was crazy enough to suggest that Corsair acutally publish the game, but that night after returning from Atlantic City the first game of Sketch! (then called C.H.A.O.S.--"Captain Hero's Adventures On Sketchworld"--if I remember correctly) was played. And that's what picqued this bit of reminiscing, for last night I uncovered the first two characters drawn by Brian and myself. You'll note that my character won the Popularity Points for that fight; even then the game showed that though the better artist would have a better character, anyone could win. (In the final version of the rules, there are some basic rules that build that into the system, but that night I can only take credit for lucky rolls on the dice...)