With our other projects firmly in the “being written and fully tested” category, we wanted to put something together that could go from playstormed idea to full game as quickly as possible. And I had just the half-baked idea: something to do with Scrabble tiles.

The basic idea started with characters being wizards of some sort and manipulating the names of the things to do magic. Players would get Scrabble tiles and spell words for points, trying to beat a target number. That’s about all I had before we started.

Epidiah and Jim made characters (a bookish halfling and an elf mercenary, respectively) and starting pulling letters. As we started to play, the rules began to take shape. I think we went through about three incarnations of rulesets before landing on something with which we could all agree. Most of my original ideas got scrapped, but it was for the best, as we ended up with a fun little game for people with good vocabularies.

Oh, and it wasn’t until after we had finished and we ready to get some lunch that I was able to come up with a name for the game: Spell. Nice and simple, eh?

All in all, it was a great success for our first true playstorm. An alpha version of the rules should be available real soon.