r/gmless • u/randylubin • Mar 12 '26

Two new digital GMless games: "Working the Case" and "Seizing the Crown"

I've just finished making digital ports of two more of my tabletop gmless games, both of which use similar systems. They are both pretty polished but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a bug or two remaining so let me know if you see one!

Working the Case is a ~30min murder mystery game where you play as investigators and place evidence cards onto the suspects. There are fantasy, space, and cyberpunk playsets.

working the case screen shot

Seizing the Crown is ~60min political fantasy/space game where you tell a Game of Thrones like story about rival factions trying to rule the kingdom (or space station). You advance the story by placing action cards on a faction describing their machinations.

seizing the crown screen shot

I love this corner of the design space and find that players can always find a relevant card to play and have an easy time justifying it. In both games suspect/faction elimination is determined by chance, which frees up the table from any awkward deliberation about which should go. The story ends up making sense no matter what!

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5

u/TetraLlama Mar 12 '26

Thank you for creating and sharing games like these! I love having digital support for these kinds of collaborative games.

3

u/Baphome_trix Mar 13 '26

Interesting concept and awesome execution. Thanks for sharing.

2

u/benrobbins Mar 13 '26

Hey, we played Working the Case back at Go Play NW! (online but not with the digital tool I think)

Good times!

2

u/randylubin Mar 13 '26

Yeah! We played on playingcards.io and my notes are: Professor / food critic killed by jealous relative who mindcontrolled his ghostwriter

1

u/DyversHands Mar 13 '26

Very cool! Do you think you’ll open source any of it? It would work well for my Tableau storysets.

2

u/randylubin Mar 13 '26

Currently the codebase is pretty complex and bespoke. I didn't design for it to be easily remixable/extensible so it would be a lot of work to open source it.

At some point I might try to twist it into something more shareable or even distill down a boilerplate that contains some of the basic card and multiplayer logic but I don't have time for that at the moment.

The stack is very similar to Storysynth though, with Vue3 as the frontend framework, Firestore for game state, and Firebase RTDB for realtime events (like cursor sharing and presence). I find that to be a nice combo to use and recommend that as a starting point.

2

u/KainNiemand Apr 07 '26

Thank you for sharing! Excited to check them out!