Held With Hope!
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?
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: Your Questions Answered
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
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
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
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
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 Cake
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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 […]
Survival Camp: August 21st-27th
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 […]
Advanced Camp: August 14th-20th
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 […]
Immersion Camp: August 7th-13th
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 […]
Kyle Perler
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 […]
Nick Marini
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
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 […]
Tigre Bailando
Transcending Reality with Tigre Bailando The path from Wayfinder to the work our alumni do in their respective creative fields can often be an easy one to see. The connections […]
Max Friedlich
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 […]
Molly Ostertag
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
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 […]
Brennan Lee Mulligan
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
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 […]
Jenna Bergstraesser
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
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 […]
Marika McCoola
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
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 […]