Band-Aids & Bullet Holes Design Diary: Ten Guys Named Barf

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. I won’t shut up about how much I love games that come with pregenerated, stock characters. I love it when a game gives me all the tools to get Put Into A Situation as quickly as possible so I can start agonizing over what to do about it, and very little does that as fast as stock characters plus a fixed starting situation. When I sat down to make Band-Aids & Bullet Holes (there’s that Kickstarter link again, you should click it), I knew I wanted a game that would play hard and fast in a two hour slot. That screamed stock characters to me. But the centerpiece mechanic, calling cards, didn’t fit that particularly well.…