Held With Hope!: An Intro Game’s Flow When I was younger, I was terrified of flow. When I’d write games, I’d desperately try to avoid thinking about flow. I’d build […]

What’s the Word?: Using Verbs to Make Better Flow Points Written by Milo Duclayan 5/2024 Imagine you’ve just written your first adventure game. The world is awesome, the characters are […]

Mailbag We wanted to know what you our readers were interested in knowing more about. Here are the first (of hopefully many) questions answered. Do you have a question you […]

Campaign Style Play At Wayfinder, the majority of our Adventure Games are written as One Shots. We imagine worlds that we visit only once, stepping into them to shape the […]

Always Coming Back Home To You In all of the Where Are They Now interviews the interviewees (members of our community who have been away from the physical space of […]

Life is an Adventure Game This is a transcript of a speech given by Trine Boode-Petersen at The Woodstock Day School on 5/30/18 for their senior presentation week: Life is [...]

Steering Made Clear: Play Style and its Theory We play Adventure Games because we want a specific experience. We want to cry, we want to laugh, we want to look […]

Three Ways to Cut a Cake: Game Mechanics Part 1 Game Mechanics are one of the most complicated aspects of writing an Adventure Game, and it’s not because of the […]

You Win Or You Die: Political Games and You I’ll be completely honest – in my opinion, Game of Thrones is not a very good TV show. That doesn’t stop […]

Environmental Storytelling It’s tough to judge games. So much of it can be determined by where in the game you are, who you interact with, and what happens to you. […]

Spooky Scary: How Horror Games Tick Late at night, JJ Muste and myself were staying up late after a Living Legend event I ran, and we were talking about horror […]

Drawn With Courage…: Starting an Intro Game Intro games are, far and away, the most common form of game we run at Wayfinder. Of our 14 unique games run in […]

Camp’s Magic Circle Recently I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about play and what it is. I’ve been taking a class on play theory (one of many reasons my […]

Location, Location, Location: How to Create Your Setting Every story, whether it’s a novel, a movie, or an adventure game, has a setting. Maybe that setting is a whole new […]

Choose Your Character How to figure out who the PCs should be in your game So you’ve got an idea for a game. Cool! You’ve got a setting, you’ve got […]

Flows for Algernon What actually happens in your game? Tonight we’re talking about the structure of an adventure game. The individual scenes that compose it must spring from your imagination. […]

Why We Write Games Did you enjoy your holidays? Because the Story Board Blog is back, and will continue to post thought-provoking and helpful essays, hints and tirades about the […]

Theme in Adventure Games What is a “theme”? What is a “thesis”? A theme is an idea that comes up a lot in a creative work. A thesis is the […]

Three Character Sheets to the Wind Since we just had a conversation about characters, now seems like a good time to talk about character sheets. Character sheets are useful for […]

Casting a Mold for Empowerment If you’ve read the previous entries here on the Story Board blog, you’ve already heard about empowerment, why and when it’s important, and even how […]

Making Magic (Or, Specifically, Making Magic Work For Your Game) Let’s talk about the Magic System! When our founding fathers laid out the Wayfinder magic system, they had a number […]

Storywriter’s Guide to Dealing With Production Being a storywriter is a crazy, exhausting, and magical experience. The magic lies in seeing a world and characters who have previously only existed […]

The Gamewriter’s Glossary Wayfinder games can be very abstract, especially since we all tend to develop our own jargon when talking about them. So, here follows a massive listing of […]

A Good Tease So this year we’re bringing back teasers as a requirement for game submissions, which means it’s time for a crash course in the whys, hows, and which-end-ups […]

Lists, Lists, Lists! Do you want Production to like you? Of course you do. They’re the people who make your game beautiful, and make it even possible. Without them, you’re […]

The Big Finish: ending your game “GAME!” The shout goes up and everyone cheers and collapses into hugs, eager to tell their friends stories of their epic adventure. But hold […]

Game Submission Samples Sample Intro Games The Blood Moon by Michael Phillips and Eamon Burdick (2013) A dark fantasy about an uprising against a long-reigning vampire lord. While this isn’t […]

Take It Home With You Closing circle at camp almost always includes a specific message and call to action: the things we do at camp can be brought out into […]

A Day in the Life: Survival Camp August 21st-27th We ended our summer season with an exciting new program: Survival Camp. This camp featured a close knit group of participants […]

A Day in the Life: Advanced Camp August 14th-20th Advanced camp came and went with a flourish. We played three Adventure Games in six days, and while everyone was a […]

Day in the Life: Immersion Camp and High Meadow 2 Aug 7th-13th The first week of overnights for the summer was a blast! An amazing, and immersive game and plenty […]

Seeing the World with Kyle Perler This week’s entry into the Where Are They Now series is centered on Kyle Perler. While Kyle is another creative type who came through […]

Living Through Stories with Nick Marini For this week’s Where Are They Now we had the chance to sit down with Wayfinder alumnus Nick Marini who is now living in […]

Transformation While there has been a lot of discussion of “creating space” on this blog (and generally is at any Wayfinder event), little focus has been given to what kind […]

Finding Confidence With Max Friedlich For this week’s entry into our Where Are They Now series I had the opportunity to talk with Max Friedlich, yet another creative type who […]

Where Are They Now: Molly Ostertag Molly was a joy to interview. She moved from upstate New York to LA just over a year ago, where she is a full […]

Always Coming Back Home To You In all of the Where Are They Now interviews the interviewees (members of our community who have been away from the physical space of […]

Life Lessons with Brennan Lee Mulligan This week’s Where Are They Now features another Wayfinder alum who finds themselves immersed in a creative life in the world. We sat down […]

Trust in Adventure Gaming Obviously deep, intensely emotional, trusting relationships exist outside of LARP communities. The point here isn’t to claim that Wayfinder has some unique ability to provide participants […]

Finding a Home with Jenna Bergstraesser Being structured around an adventure game Wayfinder naturally provides skills that lend themselves to a wide variety of creative pursuits. In the last Where […]

The Benefits of Friendship Community is a funny thing. We talk about the Wayfinder community as if it was a living entity when really it’s a web of interpersonal relationships […]

Building Worlds with Marika McCoola Wayfinder has always lived in the written words of its community members. Any world we create and explore starts with someone hunched over a computer, […]

Communal Trust There are a lot of words that get thrown around (both at camp and outside of it) until they become so called buzzwords and lose any semblance of […]