Band-Aids & Bullet Holes Design Diary: The Moves That Didn’t Make It

Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is my upcoming deckbuilder tabletop roleplaying game built for bloody revenge operas inside a tight-knit clique of professional assassins. Here’s a post where I take one story from its design and break it down so maybe you can better design your own games. If you want more context on how the game works before diving in, check out this free demo. Last time in this series I took a look at my favorite basic move from Band-Aids & Bullet Holes. But I also mentioned that throughout design I had this open question of whether the game wanted moves at all. Today I’m going to walk through every basic move I tried putting into the game and why the vast majority felt useless at best. I’m gonna start up top here with my conclusion after looking back over these: I wrote ~10 moves and only ~2.5 of them made it into the final game. That’s so interesting to me! Again and again I concluded that handling something with a move was less compelling to me than leaving it up to…