At OMEGA, we're passionate about helping new designers develop their games into fully fledged designs
A number of designers have provided a copy of their rulebooks, and some have even annotated them to explain how the game worked, what their design process was and a discussion on how they wrote their rules.
Zane Gunton (original game), adaption by OMEGA team
The world just ended. What comes next?
Funny how no one really thinks about what comes next.
Something happened, and the world turned upside-down. No one really knows what it was, this event – you could go mad speculating, and I know a few people who did. One or two others went looking for answers... we never saw them again. Good people, the kind we couldn’t afford to lose... but it ate them up. What does it matter, here in the aftermath?
Benjamin Kanelos, based on As Thou Commands by Peter Nixon
As Thou Commands is a rules-light mass player experience (megagame) where the players procedurally generate and run fictional feudal Duchies. These Duchies comprise an entire medieval Kingdom, and players’ decisions will have impacts both near and far. Play alternates between drafting narrative elements and participating in council sessions where players attempt to negotiate beneficial outcomes to thorny issues bedeviling the Kingdom.
While the narrative elements created by the players will be edited by moderators to enforce tonal homogeneity between the Duchies (in a collaborative manner with player input), players will have a large say over the broader narrative universe in which the Kingdom exists. As Thou Commands aims to be a collaborative storytelling experience as much as an emulation of medieval power politics.
Steph Rothman
You are a demigod, a child of one of the Olympian Gods, invited to London to compete in the Gods’ Wars. With what you assume is a little bit of divine intervention, your dream job and lodgings are conveniently available there for you to easily relocate and participate.
The Gods’ Wars - a competition among demigods in which the winners become Gods themselves- have been run countless times across countless worlds, with countless themes. Demigods have intervened to rig elections, intercede in succession crises, start wars, and more! This time, the Olympians of the Greek pantheon are hosting it and the theme is love.
Andrew Shiel Dods
A century after the colonization of Mars, disaster struck, and the survivors of the once-great colony now vie for supremacy amongst themselves.
Patrick Rose
In the near future, Britain is facing economic ruin. Following the success of the “Megacorp” experiment in the United States they attempt to do the same – they offer several multi-billion corporations the chance to buy a large part of the British landscape and create their own city state, where they can make their own laws if they wish.
Stuart Martyn
Tempest is a play by e-mail game set in an ocean wracked by impossible, immobile storms for as long as mortal memory. The few who have braved it bring back treasures and strange rumours of what lies beyond are whispered throughout the world. Cities of the living dead. Unspeakable creatures that live beneath the waves. The unnatural storms receded a few weeks ago. Cautiously, the powers that neighbour this tempestuous sea sent ships to explore. What waits out there in the dark? What caused the impossible storms, and why have they stopped now? A game of exploration, politics and horror.
OMEGA Steering Committee
Steering has developed a rubric with which they evaluated pitches for Play-By-Email games for the first half of 2023.
OMEGA Steering Committee
With permission from the designers who have submitted pitches, Steering released some of the successful pitches for the first half of 2023.