It's Already Beta Season
My latest blog post plug a whole lot (16 and counting!) of beta, fully playable games coming out on the back of it!
I seem to like to start out every new year with a banger. In 2021, I shared my first blog post to ever really get noticed, Don’t List Out Gear; in 2022, I started promoting Barkeep on the Borderlands by writing a treatise on drinking rules; in 2023, I hosted the first ever Bloggies (the latest incarnation is going on now—go read the top 64 posts of the year and vote for your favorites and watch them progress, or be eliminated, in the March Madness of TTRPGS); and in 2023, I issued the New (Year’s) Resolution Mechanic Challenge, which drew over 60 entries from across the blogosphere.
My latest January shenanigan is another challenge. This time I called on all TTRPG designers to release a fully playable Beta of their rules. Here is a snippet of my call to action, but the full thing can, of course, be found over at the Prismatic Wasteland:
Did you know that every baby you’ve met recently is an alpha? Unfortunately for zoomers, that is the official name of the generation slightly younger than them who will mock them mercilessly for affections we won’t know are uncool for at least another decade. But that changes this year because whatever secret council of deranged lunatic wizards who makes the arbitrary decision as to when one generation ends and another begins has declared that the newest crop of infants belong to a new generation that is sure to be tested extensively: the beta generation. Sorry, kids.
We should embrace this dawning era of the betas. Beta doesn’t just have pseudoscientific meanings when applied to wolves, or fanfiction about wolves (don’t correct me if that’s wrong, I don’t want to know more than I already know), or a word appropriated by manosphere dipshits. It also means, most typically for software but increasingly for video- and non-video-games, the beta version of something, i.e., a nearly complete prototype of that thing. In analog games, it may be the first draft before the niceties of editing, art or even layout have been applied.
“DONE is a myth, Complete is a joke, PERFECT is impossible, and SATISFACTION is a lie.” So saith 200-Proof Games in one of the best blog posts of last month (which places it squarely in Bloggie 2025 contention already). The argument in that post is that you don’t benefit from never releasing something until you’re done with it because you’ll never be done. Release it now, grow as a designer, and if you want to update or improve it in the future, you can. But making all those additional (editional) changes without ever releasing it means less growth for you as a designer.
I started off 2024 with a New Years’ Resolution Mechanic Challenge, and 61 bloggers and designers answered the call. This year, I issue a new challenge, a bolder one: Put Out a Beta Edition of Something You’re Working On. Unlike the 1e manifesto, this isn’t something that is basically done but you are still tinkering with. This is something that is explicitly unfinished, where work is still to be done, but it’s more or less playable. Release it this year, comment or tag me or somehow let me know, and I’ll list your beta edition below and tweet (by which I mean post on Bluesky) about it. Let’s make a big deal out of beta releases this year.
This challenge would land soggily if I weren’t to also step up myself. And so I shall call my shot: I will release the first public, beta-access version of Prismatic Wasteland, a game I’ve now been working on (to varying degrees) for nearly five years in 2025. If you follow me here, social media, patreon, email lists, discord, or anywhere else I am legally permitted to crow about my games, you’ll be sure to hear about it once I’ve submitted this first hilltop along the mountainous ordeal that is publishing your fantasy heartbreaker. But I hope you’ll join me and make headway up your own mountain. I’d love to read what you’re cooking. Mix a few metaphors, break a few eggs, and in 2025 let’s fucking make something.
And already, people are stepping up to this gauntlet thrown. Here are 16 of the first beta challenge entries I’ve seen thus far, listed in no particular order. All are immediately available at no cost to you! I encourage you to peruse them, strip them for parts if they strike your fancy, and even playtest them if you have but the courage (and it would be awful nice to let the creators know if you do so!). Let me know when YOU have released YOUR Beta and I’ll add it to the list I’m keeping on my blog. Maybe if everyone is extra good this year, I’ll go through and highlight some favorites at the end of the year.