No One Will Play This

Tetromino Brawl is an equally beloved and reviled pastime favored by glory hounds and fans with a penchant for violent spectacle. Two rival teams compete to carry the rock into the opponent’s end zone. Brawlers use all gear, weapons, and magic available to them, and both teams manipulate the terrain with basalt blocks called tetrominoes.

Colorful, onion-domed towers loom high over the arena. The unseen spectators within want to know: Will you leave it all on the field?

That’s the introduction to my submission for the Shadowdark 8-Bit Game Jam, hosted by Baron De Ropp. The jam asked creators to take inspiration from classic NES-era games. Each creator received three randomly assigned retro titles to use as they saw fit. This was more complicated than the previous Weird Tales-inspired jam from the prior year. In peer ratings, my submission fell one slot short of the finalists. While a bit out of left field, Tetromino Brawl turned out as well as I could have hoped.

See the adventure on itch.io ↗

8-Bit Retro Inspirations

The three assigned titles for Tetromino Brawl were Techmo Bowl, Tetris, and Donkey Kong Jr. I challenge you to come up with your own idea combining these three! As a kid with an NES who loved Jerry Rice of the 49ers and grew up playing pee-wee football, I was familiar with Techmo Bowl. Tetris is, of course, Tetris. While I had played the original Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. was a title I had to investigate.

From Techmo Bowl, I wanted to create a sport heavily football-inspired that would pit the player’s party against rival crawlers, a concept straight out of the Shadowdark RPG rulebook. But rivals at what? Is the objective one-sided with offense and defense?

From Tetris, I took the shapes (Tetrominoes) as pieces to fit on and manipulate a battle grid. Should this be set up initially like calling a play? Or should it be dynamic like moving Tetris blocks?

From Donkey Kong Jr., I wanted to include a little extra something to spice up the game if things got stale. But what? Hazards? Enemies? Verticality?

The result is like a game of rugby in an arena of shifting 10 ft by 10 ft blocks that change the field as characters use armor, javelins, magic missiles, iron spikes, and oil flasks they bring. The Stage Boss, a caged stand-in for Donkey Kong, causes disruptions every few rounds. “The Winged Yeti” is a nod to a character from my previous Shadowdark game jam entry, The Last Waltz.

Designing a Sport for Dungeon-Crawlers

I worked hard to craft a "sport" that worked within Shadowdark’s rules for crawling, combat, and spell-casting without overcomplication or contradiction. I want it explained and played by players at a table during a single session, and thematically fit into a typical Shadowdark campaign.

Housing Metagame Mechanics. To carry the weight of an extra layer of rules, I tactfully—if I may say so— used Special Items with the Benefit and Curse format native to Shadowdark. The Rock (ball) contains winning states and allows football-like moves: throw, catch, and fumble. The Play Collars, one per team, grant the ability to manipulate tetrominoes and therefore the arena itself.

Minimal Rule Conflicts. The adjustments to typical crawling rounds (called “brawling rounds” here) were minimal. First, the Brawling Clock tracker counts down to the Stage Boss, who causes a glitch that mildly shakes up circumstances. Second, spells have a caveat that their durations may only be tracked in rounds, not days. We wouldn’t want a brawler charmed for the entire match. Lastly, via Injury Protocol, I inverted Shadowdark’s dying rules to make the violence more sporting and non-deadly.

Rival Brawlers. Your party needs to face a roughly equivalent opponent in number and composition. Expecting GMs to build their own team from Shadowdark’s Rival Crawlers tables seemed tedious. I wanted to provide a quick way for GMs to populate a team with some dimension. To that end, I included pre-cooked combos of humanoid stat blocks from the core rulebook that match the player party level and size. This makes your rival team multi-dimensional but familiar from Shadowdark. Also, taking a note from Techmo Bowl, I suggested turning one rival NPC into a “key player” from one of three Rival Teams: Da Bears, La Raiders, and the Gold Grubbers.

Mini-Retrospective

I suspect Tetromino Brawl will not see much play beyond my own table. But it turned out exceptionally well in the odd NES game manual-sized booklet I produced. The pixel-art, retro-stylized layout, and combined use of the inspiration games worked phenomenally. I only wish it had landed in the Top 8 to be featured as a finalist; it placed #9. It scored high in Inspiration usage and overall vibes but slipped in usability. Understandable. Interestingly, a frequent comment said the two-page Example of Play really helped show how the game should run.

I used Tetromino Brawl as a stand-in for the unspecified Trial of Seven Pillars mentioned in Cursed Scroll VI as the path to enrollment in the wizarding university. Happily, the game includes seven Tetrominoes. We had a blast, but there are many opportunities to tune the game further with more playtesting.

Concern one: Brawls may tend towards a slog and tug-of-war at the end as players and rivals cycle between 1 HP and 0 HP while crowding one end zone.

Concern two: I played with four Play Collars, two per team, in my playtest (for story reasons). This was highly fun, but once one side got the momentum, it became overpowered. So the intended single Play Collar per team may be the right pace, but it would need to be tested.

Other highlights

As usual, post-submission of my entry, I perused numerous other entries in the jam. Allow me to share a few of the ones that stood out to me:

Rumble at Ramlaat Ridge. A point-crawl chock full of colorful locales, characters oozing with personality, and a few unique torches with special effects! Full of good ideas and excellent NES vibes.

Cairn Climber. A vertical "hex-climb" with plenty of keyed locales and a random encounter table incorporating features and hazards. Charming pixel art and layout.

Oh Shit, Ninjas! You might actually be able to play with the Ninja components offered by this supplement. But this is a module whose setup steps include buying a katana at the local flea market along with two ancestry options: Raised by Ninjas and Ninjas Killed Your Family. A very fun read.

See all the submissions ↗