At the End of last month (January 2025) I released Seven Kisses, a card based RPG/card game with Role Playing elements depending on how you'd like to play it, for the 1929 Jam. I had a blast making it, and it really pushed me in the process. Lately I've been kind of blessed to work on several games that have pushed me as a designer past my previous skills and it's been a very rewarding process to feel that joy after crunching through another game design knot. And there were...plenty of knots in the process of designing Seven Kisses.
Devlog
"The Kiss" (1929), "Madame X (1929)
"Seven Footprints to Satan" 1929 "Spite Marriage" inspo for a character
Elements: drama, altered timelines, court drama, love angles, murder, adultery, jealousy, money
Format: accepting TTRPGs, larps and board games and card games
I’m feeling card game bc also I could design a custom deck
When drawing cards what’s the longest streak you can connect via number OR suit, bit of a gamble no jokers, royals can all connect, numbers can go up or down
[from my original notes on Seven Kisses]
When I saw the poster for The Kiss 1929 it was love at first sight. Aesthetically I felt immediately inspired and the plot only heightened that. I'd watch The Kiss 1929 now with the same rapt attention as I currently cling to every cliffhanger in S2 of Why Women Kill 2021, over 100 years later. Quickly that became a deep dive into what I in the game referred to as the proto- erotic thrillers of the 1920s, which led me to Madame X, a title I'd come across in film studies before but never engaged with before, as well as Her Private Affair and Big Time, both from 1929 as well. I decided to check out other genres as well, just curious what I'd find. Spite Marriage, though titled to fit the erotic thriller types is actually a Buster Keaton comedy (though having read the plot...girl, that slapstick stunt shit must be load bearing as hell), though the idea of a working class lover pretending to belong to a higher social class became one of the character archetypes in the game so it still lent inspiration. I also noted quite a few films with 'seven' in the title around that time and I thought 'seven kisses is certainly enough to wreak havoc in someone's life', so there was the title.
As you can see in the quote I started with more elements to the game and fine tuned it down to focus on infidelity, jealousy, money and murder and deciding to challenge myself to designing with a card deck for the mechanics, something I had been recently getting into since starting work on We Were One for the ParryJam, which I'm still working on, with the focus being on a mechanic where you gambled in a Blackjack-top trumps-war inspired way trying to make a card chain, which then became:
“Same Suit, Match, One Up, One Down, Break”
[from my original notes on Seven Kisses]
Meaning cards can connect by having the same suit, being equal in value, being only one card away in value not connect, which 'broke' the chain.
Initially, because of the title Seven Kisses I started designing the game to center around building the story around seven kisses you had witnessed or partaken in that led to your ruin.
Seven Kisses
Round 1 is the first kiss
Round 2-6 are kisses in between that led to where you are now
Round 7 was the kiss that sealed, at least seemingly, your fate
[from my original notes on Seven Kisses]
From there I decided to have 7 rounds of play per game, but first I had to mess around with the mechanic, especially since at this point I was trying to make this game multiplayer for 3-6 players. So I dealt to myself and 5 players alone at my desk to see if and when the mechanic broke down.
It broke down a lot.
At first I had everyone start with a 3 card hand, then 4, then 5 per test round. I tried a go-fish like card stealing mechanic. I tried backwards hands (that broke immediately lmfao)
I took notes on how many cards were in a chain being dealt randomly before they broke over and over just to get a better feel for possibilities in play:
Test 3
2 cards
3 cards
5 cards
3 cards
2 cards
3 cards
3 cards
2 cards
2 cards
2 cards
2 cards
2 cards
2 cards
5 cards
2 cards
4 cards
2 cards
2 cards
2 cards
[from my original notes on Seven Kisses]
One test hit 7 cards close to the end of the deck and I realized I had to add a rule to cap the chain just in case, and I started messing with the number of players and adding a dealer to replace the card-stealing mechanic.
You Need 7 players total, 6 character players and 1 Dealer of fate
OR is that just the MAX you can play with? That might be too many actually for the cards without a clear time to reshuffle
NO okay, FOUR PEOPLE
Everyone starts with FOUR cards
You WANT five cards that connect each to the next (by one up, One Down, Same Suit, Match)
Pick a player to draw first from any player they’d like One Card from their hand
After one round the first repeating player pulls 1 card from the deck
Nope
What if you start with 3 cards, four players
You cant steal from someone who just stole from you or the same person two turns in a row
Nope breaks down when the first player and one other is left, something else has to introduce a new card to the table per round, took 3min of straight card playing for two ppl to win
There’s only one loser that’s the patsy
Five players, one dealer
Start 3 cards each
Hide from others and use these to tell your tragic tale of woe (table fml fml fml per archetype? Fml fml)
[from my original notes on Seven Kisses]
I was, as you can see, about ready to lose my mind. Whenever I wrote 'nope' it's because I tested something by myself with phantom player and it broke the game. About at this point of writing I was hours into my day again, shuffling and reshuffling cards to think, with 'Make Me Over' by Lifehouse on repeat for the last 30 minutes straight. (I have a habit of needing the repetition when I'm stuck on a problem And when I've solved it and am writing it out and this manifests as playing whatever song was on when I got stuck at first on repeat until I'm fully done with the problem. Pretty much every game I've ever designed as its own 'make me over').
I took a deep breath and remembered advice I'd received from a trusted advisor a decade ago, that I'd since given to countless others and constantly tell myself. Stop. Zoom in. Pick one thing to focus on, be as specific as possible. Build from there.
This advice was actually about how to design a research paper or scientific study, but I've found it to be incredibly helpful in many fields of writing and creation.
So I scaled down. You are telling a story. Whom to? The dealer. A Bartender. The dealer is the bartender. You're telling your tale of woe at a bar to the Bartender/Dealer, and another poor soul sharing their own tale. Add an element of intrigue, a twist at the end. This brought me to:
Girl help
7 kisses
“Same Suit, Match, One Up, One Down, Break”
Two player one dealer storytelling card game
Start 2 cards each, Dealer draws one card they keep a secret from everyone including themselves that they keep covered by their side
You meet in a speakeasy. Is this a place you frequent or not so much? Maybe what’s normal for you is changed for good.
The 2 cards tell the bare bones of who you are .
Ex.
King of hearts and 2 of clubs, you are the married party of an affair and you are grieving the untimely death of your spouse
or
Jack of clubs and 6 of diamonds, you were the illicit lover, jilted and broke as hell
[from my original notes on Seven Kisses]
Sure, I may have started with another 'girl help' but to me that's already a rallying cry. Girl help, because I'm handling this shit.
This is where the prototypes start more heavily resembling the final game. This is what became pulling one card to see who you are, from a much simpler table that this would have called for. At this point though the storytelling was still based around literal kisses in a way that was making me want to pull my hair out. I also added Jokers back into the deck.
Story is told in chains that tell the story of how 7 kisses ruined your lives while the dealer listens to your sob stories
P1 goes first, the dealer deals them two cards. They uncover them to see if there’s a chain.
If it immediately breaks you interpret only the first card, and the second goes to a reserve pile
If there is a chain you can choose to stop there or keep going.
If you choose to stop (with x amount of unbroken chain) just interpret the cards meanings from the table and then tell the story of a kiss you had and how it reassured you at the time.
If you push the chain until it breaks, interpret the cards and tell the story of a kiss you had and how it hurt you at the time.
That’s kiss 1
[from my original notes on Seven Kisses]
The repercussions for breaking a chain/the boon for pulling back with a big chain before it breaks but still getting more out of a longer chain, thus making it worth the risk were NOT vibing with the literal kiss thing, and it was making it harder to design around it. Designing the character archetypes had to mesh with any possible combination of events in the 52 card chart, had to mesh with any order of these events, had to mesh with the possibility of Jokers appearing and I tested it over and over and over until I had to again take a step back (though this was all over the course of several days) and remind myself not to necessarily be so literal. The game was already about affairs, the story building aspect would be better fulfilled by focusing on building the tale of woe from the event table's prompts more freely. Then I cleaned up the Lucky & Unlucky Breaks mechanic, the rounds of play and spent another fully day losing my mind trying to fill said event table while I asked myself questions out loud like "What kind of violence is like, more than (example) but less than (example)" and "What else can happen to you when you have an affair? I've never had an affair." and "What's another way someone can pathologically Not mind their business??"
Game design is full of surprises. From here all I had left was small changes, doing the layout with illustrations I'd done over the last week and a half and releasing it, which I did here cutestpatoot.itch.io/seven-kisses where you can get a community copy before they run out or buy one for $10.
[ALT TEXT the cover of Seven Kisses, an off-white background with near-black geometric shapes (triangles and bars) interlocking and where they overlap they dance out each others coloring, peeking behind them is a ink illustration of a Queen like for a deck of cards but with hair and makeup inspired by trends of 1929]
Comments
Post a Comment