One of the sessions I played at IndieCON was for Edoardo Cremaschi’s Marks on the Skin (you may remember him from Little Katy’s Tea Party in Consulting). I am wondering whether it is really good for a person to play several Cremaschi and Pettersson games in a short span of time, as each designer quite likes his Bleed and apparently wakes up each morning with a new idea for invoking it. I like that sort of thing myself but am feeling pretty well-used at this point. You’ll see more Pettersson fun slash madness when the Lincon videos start appearing.

Anyway, this game first appeared as an entry for Mapemunde 2019, basically, create a game that emphasizes or is centered on maps, and rather than boring old geography, the idea is that you are mapping a life via the experiences of and the images upon a person’s skin.

The video explains things pretty well, but to get you to watch it, the group builds the biography of a warrior through their acquisition of scars and tattoos. The system involves red and black pens for those purposes, respectively, and features – as I see it – a fairly intensive randomizing mechanic that may not look like it at first glance.

I didn’t mention it in the video, but it also occurs to me that this game fits very well into the Monday Lab we did about creating stuff before/for play, Boiling Pitch.

For more info, see Nuclear Manatee at Itch.io, and since the documents are available there, I think it’s OK for me to include the current rules draft in English and the Warrior silhouettes here. Please keep in mind that this is a game in very early design and does not need editing or rules-stressing attention, and that input about play at the Itch site would be greatly helpful to the author.

One last thing, one player is Manu, which is a perfectly ordinary nickname for her name, and of course I borked it in the recording.