My new game is called Fortune Tellers. It’s about predicting the future.

The idea started as a friend told me he wanted to make a game about Nostradamus. He is a great designer with several published games, but he didn’t know how to turn it into one – just found the theme appealing.

A lightbulb lit in my mind!

A while ago I sketched out a game where you combined words to make stories. While interesting as a concept, it’s too vague for a game. I needed something to narrow these stories to something relevant to the game, so this made perfect sense.

I thanked him, he said “I can take the Nostradamus idea”, but I said it’s still his. I don’t want to get stuck with a historic theme. All I needed was the bit where you predict stuff, because shady fortune tellers sound a lot more fun to me.

So that’s it: a game where you’ll predict what the other players will do during that game. You can get more verbs to predict new situations, and more assistants to do more things every turn. In short, two games at the same time!

I was invited to the latest Arcádia meeting two days beforehand. I didn’t want to wait a whole month to try it out, so I hurriedly made the first prototype. Some parts were improvised, I just wanted to check if it was fun to play – and it is!

The players liked it a lot. The “Aha!” moment when a prediction you made happens is a lot of fun, and something I haven’t felt in many games. Of course, it needs a lot of tweaks, like fixing the game’s economy, making matches shorter and even more types of possible predictions. I’m working on that.

Stay tuned! I predict it will be a lot of fun.