NaGaDeMon Update #1: Prognosticators, the Spark

I mentioned in my last National Game Design Month post that I would be working on a game codenamed "Prognosticators" during the month of November. Here's what the game is about.

I don't know if any of you remember last year's World Cup. No, not the actual soccer matches. What caught my attention was the curious bit about Paul the Octopus, who accurately predicted the outcome of Germany's matches in the 2010 World Cup as well as the final. Paul, regrettably, died later in the year, before he could predict for 2011 March Madness.

NaGaDeMon: An Experiment in Futility?

The Twitter board gaming community has been abuzz the past few days about "NaGaDeMon," that is to say, "National Game Design Month," which is an attempt to design a board game during the month of November. The clipped moniker is a take on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), a foolhardy exercise whereby people pull out their hair in an attempt to spew 50,000 words on paper within a month.

Yes, I spoke disparagingly of NaNoWriMo. The reason? I'm jealous. I'm a several-time participant. That is, I've signed up to compete several times, but I've never crossed the finish line. I put a real effort in one year and wrote 18,000 words of a novel before I realized it was a Douglas Adams knock-off, and not a very good one at that. Since then, I've had several false starts, but nothing that I could be proud of.

NaGaDeMon has me intrigued, though, mostly because I see it as an opportunity to finish off some designs I've had floating in my head for a while. I make no promises that I'll have anything worthwhile to show at the end of November, but I will try, and I'm anxious to see what comes out of others' work in this time.

Without further ado, the game I'll be working on this month is codenamed "Prognosticators." More details anon.