Monday, September 24, 2012

A diceless RPG about eating chicken wings and pretending to be a dinosaur in New York

Dinosaurs didn't go extinct, they live in New York, just like normal warm blooded Americans.  Sure, they knock down a building or two, or eat a bus, but they are generally normal. They avoid attracting too much attention, hold down their dino-job, go on dino-dates, celebrate dino-holidays, get in wacky dino-situations and dodge being exposed by Jack Horner, famous paleontologist.  Jurassic Central Park is a roleplaying game where you take on the role of one of these prehistoric titans.  Jurassic Central Park is different from your run of the mill dinosaur simulator in two very distinct ways.  
1. The game has no dice and the base mechanic revolves around eating chicken wings and celery.  Jurassic Central Park is being written as part of the Something Awful Traditional Games August Game Design Challenge, where in we are tasked to write a game that does not include dice.  This game forgoes dice for you counting as your friend attempts to eat a chicken wing or a piece of celery.  
2.  Jurassic Central Park is timed. A game lasts exactly thirty minutes, no more, possibly less.  Jurassic Central Park is supposed to be played as part of lunch or dinner.  Cold wings are not as good as hot wings, so a time limit is needed.  Jurassic Central Park is a comedy game, and steals many tropes from sitcoms.  Things should be wrapped up in an episodic manner, in 30 minutes.  Dinosaurs don’t have time to sit for three hours, moving in a gridlike manner down 2nd Ave.  Play is frantic but controlled, much like a herd of gallimimus flocking to get to their job downtown.  



So if you are ready to enter the wilds of the Big Apple, distribute pamphlets about how how Barney is setting back relations twenty years, try and get a duemila ice coffee with one-hundred sugars, or fit on the Subway without derailing it, welcome to Jurassic Central Park.

Jurassic Central Park was conceived as part of the August Something Awful Game design contest, in which in won third place. You can see the other games, which are all awesome here

Basic Rules
A Sample Story
Some GM Advice
A Cheatsheet



Creative Commons License
Jurassic Central Park by Brian Murphy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.