It’s been a fair few months since I’ve collected my thoughts from the notes I keep on my phone. Today I decided to pull the best ones together and share them with you as a way of updating the Brain Dump series from last year. I hope some of these interest you! I think there are a few solid ones worth exploring.

Only two categories this time – games and story ideas. The creativity is flowing but I’ve been mostly concerned with these two types of ideas lately.

Games

A game where you are trying to get away from enemy encounters. Avoiding detection and fleeing are the priority. You are an animal trying to avoid being eaten. Single player or asymmetric 2 player. Stun enemies, but near impossible to kill them. Survive by getting food.

A game where you play as a cosmic dust cloud and you manufacture stars. Managing heat, elements, and natural forces are the primary focus.

A game where you try to move away from a black hole, but you keep getting pulled inward between your turns. You are rotating within a maze-like ecretion disc. Thinking ahead to try and use your moves to get further away is the focus.

A game about speed running. Play as a runner, glitch hunter, TASer. Glitches take time out of the run, goal is to complete the run as quickly as possible. Different games are new decks of cards with new splits and glitches (expansion content). Runners push time down with good rpg stat rolls, TASers have perfect rolls every time but have very few turns and only serve to set the potential path for runners through a game – kind of like scouting. Execution is a stat that helps runners get better rolls. Anyone can do a run, but VP can be gained by finding glitches or TASing. Multiple categories for runs, like single segment, any%, etc. Game unfolds by filling out a speedrun history chart similar to how documentarians visualize world record progressions. Run the game by rolling dice for splits. Get ‘consistent’ to lock in the best die result on a given split. Maybe old glitches or a certain number of successes make you consistent.

Horror game idea. Life spread across the galaxy but is blinking out. A small number of messages are trickling in but the senders are going quiet. Engage a research system based on clues from the messages to stop your own demise. A few decks with a few cataclysms. A plague, a change to physics, a cosmic cloud that destroys proteins, etc. Observational horror and isolation and sci-fi. Single player. You draw cards from a communication deck giving you information about the apocalypse. You spend resources to research potential solutions, but clues overlap and you aren’t always sure what you need. If you take resources out of something you started researching, you lose that progress. The deck eventually runs out and at the bottom is a card that tells you what the apocalypse is, and the requirements you must meet to survive it.

Idea for a game where you’re on the clock to try to ‘pick’ resources in a warehouse. Player two cannot see the board but can call out coordinates in the warehouse like battleship. These call outs start fires that player 1 must avoid. Player 1 must complete their shift before the fire spreads too far and they lose access to the resources they need to finish. Concept is like reverse battleship, where player 2 is trying not to kill player 1.

A trick taking card game where players grow their character by increasing stats and gaining levels based on how many tricks they catch and how many 4-of-a-kinds and large straights they can lay down from their hand.

Decline – a game where each player gets a nice product to start with. Each round, to increase profits, you must make the product worse. Blender goes from 5 speed to 3 speed, glass to plastic, 4 blades to 3, etc. Last player to maintain a functioning product wins.

Stories

A story about planet-sized computers who can only network during certain windows of time. They’re trying to create intelligent biological life. One is using a method of forced evolutionary selection. Maybe others have different methods that are commentaries on ethics, morality, philosophy, etc. One is facing an existential threat and contemplates whether to work on extending its life after its environment changes (dead star?), but takes the opportunity to die instead of solving the new mortality problem. One succeeds in creating life, and then fails to network during a window. Then another, which hadn’t succeeded, also fails to network – they were neighbors. Who created these planet computers? It is unclear but some assumptions can be drawn from their construction.

A sci-fi story about an interstellar war plays out similar to island hopping in the pacific theater of ww2. Soldiers travel between planets by shooting themselves in the head – the only faster than light travel method.

“Excerpts From Anywhere” – a book of scenes I’ve written for different stories that I’ll never finish but wanted to write a portion of.

The Great Attractor – a horror story about an entity that attracts and collects human victims. Converts some victims into attractors that gain their own victims and grow the network. Acts like a drug addiction.

History by Proxy – have my wife tell me about her historical studies and then try to reproduce what she told me in my own words. Focus on humor and misunderstanding, then have her annotate it/redline it as part of the final product. Reader gets to see me getting confused and her correcting me in the margins

I must have been thinking about horror and sci fi a lot these last few months! Do any of these feel more interesting than the others? I have my favorites but I’m curious what stands out.