A Couple of Drakes: Weird Games, Fast

A Couple of Drakes Design Studio is an independent tabletop roleplaying game design studio crewed by us, Navi and Shawn Drake. We’ve been told that we make “weird games, fast”. That’s not inaccurate, so let’s start there. What are weird games?

Weird games are ones that fall outside the expected fare of tabletop roleplaying games. Whether through theme, setting, mechanics, or format, our games differ from the standard dungeon crawling fare. Firstly, we key in on tightly-focused experiences and play loops rather than big “toolkit” games. We drill down until our pitch sounds like a game we’d like to play, and then rather than deciding how it should also be useful for playing all kinds of other games, we make every part of that premise fun to play. Second, our aim is to deliver an experience, repeatable, mechanically interesting, and fun right out of the box. We deliver mechanics that support our theme, no “rule zero” necessary. And lastly, we aim to deliver games that are as fun to read as they are to play. If we write rules that are fun to read, then people won’t see learning a niche indie-game as such a huge barrier to entry. That’s the hope anyway. 

So that’s weird games. Let’s talk about fast.

We tend to build on top of the systems that we love best. The enormous generosity of creators releasing the systems resource documents (SRDs) of their systems out into the wild allowed us our start, and they continue to provide useful foundations on which to build new and interesting games. While we are developing and iterating our own systems the while, at the heart of most of our games you’ll find familiar DNA shared by the games that we’ve gotten to the table, fallen in love with, and wondered how far we could push.

That’s weird games fast, and that’s A Couple of Drakes. We’re making the games we always wanted to play, iterating and innovating as we go, and releasing them as fast as we can whenever the muse descends. Follow along with us. We might be building your next favorite game as you read.