Pandion Letters - March Update

Hints and Hijinx, Catalyst Cards, and Banda's Grove!

Hello All!

We have been a bit quiet on our newsletter recently as we wrapped up our crowdfunding campaign and shipped out all the Dungeon Year Design Journals to all the backers! If you haven’t received your Journal by the end of the week, please email us!

The Journals are now for sale in our store if you missed it!

Now that the campaign is complete, let’s take a look at the big projects we have going on. We have big news about our new mystery system, GMless player cards and Banda’s Grove is getting a complete makeover!

Hints and Hijinx

Hints and Hijinx is a new solo mystery game system we created in January. Our goal with it was to allow creators to make the foundations of a mystery, while putting the final answers of the Who, What, Where, When and Why into the hands of the players.

The idea is to build a series of mystery adventures that harken back to Choose Your Own Adventure books: A simple, yet engaging system, that players can feel comfortable and familiar with, while still offering unique twists and challenges in each game.

You can find everything you need to start playing at hintsandhijinx.com.

It all began with Waffles for Esther, a solo game of small-town hijinks, I created over the course of a 24-hour design frenzy and has since grown into a wonderful system with 7 Hints and Hijinx games already created at the time of this writing.

Preorders

There are two Hints and Hijinx games coming to print right now: Waffles for Esther and The Jester King’s Dance. While preorders are open, you can get 20% off the game books.

Preorders will end when we get the books in, which is estimated to be March 15th!

After release, the books will be available for purchase in our store, the Hints and Hijinx site, Knave of Cups, Exalted Funeral, Peregrine Coast Press, and Indie Press Revolution.

Game Jam

We have also launched a Game Jam for Hints and Hijinx, and already have 40 people signed up and making new mysteries. If mysteries are your thing, come stop by!

Whispering Pines - The Next Mystery

We are working on our biggest mystery yet - Whispering Pines! A wilderness mystery full of rowdy campers, strange phenomenons, and insidious conspiracies. We’re working with our long-time artist, Tony Tran, on the cover art for this one, and I am really excited to show it off.

Catalyst Cards

A new adventure for us! Catalyst Cards are tabletop player aids, designed for solo, duet, and GMless TTRPGs. The wonderful artwork is by Andy Moran, and we are partnering with Salt and Paper Press to offer high-quality letterpressed card packs, in addition to the digital release. We’re currently making on prototypes to select paper for the physical cards.

Catalyst Cards take the classic GM responsibilities and passes them around the table to each player, to ignite imaginations for GMless games. Once used, draw another, or trade your card with another player.

We will be making another announcement when the digital versions are released. Act I - Introductions is our first step, and we have plans to release additional card packs in the future if there’s interest.

Digitally printed prototypes

Banda’s Grove

Banda’s Grove is still being worked on - actually more now than in a while. Last weekend, we made the very difficult decision to pull it out of layout and back into Google Docs to rewrite the core game.

This is a game I absolutely love, and I know many of you do too. But it is also one of the first games we ever wrote, and after a year and a half of development, it shows.

There has been something off about the game that's been bothering me. I think it could be a lot better than what it is today, and the text and rules have become sloppy. The graphic design is all over the place. We've learned a lot in the last 1.5 years since we started working on Banda’s Grove, and it's time to address that.

All the core rules will be reviewed, rewritten, simplified, combined, or discarded as appropriate to make a more cohesive, easier to read and play game. I'll be condensing the writing in general, and ensuring the tone stays consistent throughout. To be honest, the core rules are starting over as headers, and are being completely rewritten.

Quite a bit will be kept the same, such as all the wonderful Nature Watching creatures, the Planes' lore, Quantum Events, Badges, and other content I'm filing under "The Library" that are setting related. All the supplements you've made will still remain compatible, and the core vibe and lore will remain.

While I'm rewriting, I will also be working on new layout templates to update the design with all the layout skills we've gained since we started to be more user-friendly, easier to read and navigate, while still keeping the core Banda's Grove feeling of the book and producing a consistent design.

A look at the updated layout and graphic design style we're testing.

An example of the updated spread design.

In addition to this, we have decided to expand the QuickStart Grove with a lot more detail. This is to give one-shots games, solo players, and groups who don’t want to build their own Grove a much deeper experience, full of varied and wonderful characters and places to explore.

While we work on these other games and products, Banda’s Grove is what I consider to be the heart and soul of Pandion Games. Because of that, we are working hard to continue to playtest, update, and refine it until we think it can really stand the test of time.

That concludes the March Update! A lot going on, and we are so excited to be able to create these games, systems, and player cards for you. We couldn’t do it without all your wonderful support! Thank you so much.

-Andy