Historical Reconstruction as Play

With Cadastre and RAM out the door, I've been noodling on which projects to push forward to something like completion this fall. Last week I sat back down with Hellbenders and, while it was a charming re-read, it is going to take more than some polish and templating to make it worth releasing. My copy of Reiner Knizia's New Tactical Games with Dice and Cards (link opens in bookshop.org) arrived a few weeks ago; I picked it up after reading Skeleton Code Machine's post about GOAL. I have been reading through it and making notes on interesting engines to experiment with. A few have really grabbed my imagination, and one game in particular feels like an interesting tool to breathe some life back into The Mad Biographers, which stalled out early this year as an unbaked dice pool game. This post is my taking a crack at a revised theory of play which uses an adapted version of Knizia's Catego Dice Game. Mad Biographers Theory of PlayTop Level Pitch - This is a game to turn OSR adventure…