Minifigure

As I mentioned in my prior post about Visit Beautiful Carcosa, this summer saw a profusion of TTRPG jams going on all at once. Thus, as with that last game, I once again chose to put two requirements together to form the shape of a single game. In this case, it was the One Page RPG Jam 2025 and the Second Summer LEGO RPG Jam. And so, like injecting liquid plastic into a mold, I produced:

Minifigure

Much like with VBC, it’s a small game that’s Pay What You Want, but that doesn’t mean I’m not pleased with how it turned out. I’ve been enjoying writing shorter games recently – it’s satisfying to tighten up wording enough to fit a strictly limited format, and shorten the turnaround of coming up with an idea and delivering a finished game to a week or two. Minifigure in particular gave me an opportunity to prototype some ideas I want to expand upon in Protoplastic, so it was a useful exercise.

My primary goal with Minifigure was replicating the tactile nature of Lego pieces in a TTRPG. Therefore, the use of six-sided dice – plastic bricks by their nature – was the obvious choice, and the cheeky naming of attributes contributed a touch of the intended aesthetic. However, I wanted to go further than that.

• The “dice bin” gives the feeling of hunting through a box of pieces to find the one you need, and gave me a chance to test out the Dice Bank concept I introduced in a prior post.

• Physically building a tower of dice to complete challenges turned actually building with plastic bricks into a Dread-like core mechanic of the game.

• Eschewing hit points in favor of body part loss and skill progression in favor of acquiring items grounded the action in the (notional) pieces themselves. Not so incidentally, it let me work in an Orange Transparent Chainsaw joke.

All of that aside, the project let me use the three different “Clicky Bricks” fonts from Chequered Ink, which is a huge win in my opinion. It’s my homage to a childhood spent ignoring instructions to build whatever I imagined, and I hope it captures some fraction of that feeling.