My Role
Game designer &
Gender consultant
Team Size
2 during development
4 during launch
Time Spent
2 years
Year
2020
Blood Feud is a tabletop role-playing game about toxic masculinity where you portray men struggling to uphold their honor. In the end, you will see what that struggle has cost both them and their community.
With this game we want to make toxic masculinity easier to spot for a wider variety of people in our communities—and encourage critical discussions about how men behave, and what the consequences are.
Article Coverage
SVT Småland (swedish)
How it plays
The central theme of this game is power—specifically the power of men: how you earn it, what you have to do to keep it, and most importantly what you do with it.
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To make power visible, we use a currency called Honor Tokens. Throughout the game these tokens will get moved around between the players as their main characters interact with each other—depending on how “manly” or “honorable” their actions are.
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Honor changes when a player describes an action matching one of seven Moves. This triggers a set of rules telling the players how to update honor.
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All players must pay attention to the Moves and their effect on the game. In this way, every player learns to recognize these behaviors and their effect on power structures.
Capturing the setting
Blood feud is a minimalist game, that means we have few opportunities to convey our setting. We used three main areas:
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Art
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Mechanics
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Character and place names
Art communicates setting better than anything else.
Since our audience has already seen viking warriors countless times, we spent our limited budget on art depicting domestic life. This way, we also got to depict the environments the players will be interacting in and what these characters stand to lose once the status quo is breached.
We went all out on making our names as viking as we could: both using actual historical icelandic first names as well as mandating saga-style epithets such as "the Raven", "the Horse-gelder", "the Half-troll". This way, we could reinforce the setting during play every time the players decide who goes in the next scene. We used the same technique for place names.
Mostly, we used mechanics to reinforce our world. Each move the players need to look out for is directly tied to a cultural behavior we want to emphasize. The majority of the game consists of teaching the players to pay attention to these moves, effectively forcing them to be on the look out for the setting relevant cultural behaviors we are interested in.
Process
Blood Feud began as an interest in making a viking game that discussed gender. Inspired by games such as Dog Eat Dog and Dream Askew we wanted to make a game that shed light on social issues.
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Our first step was to document and codify behaviors that we were interested in. Public cat calling became the move Commenting on a Woman's Appearance, teenagers one-upping at the bus stop became the Escalation and conflict system.
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Other moves such as Giving Someone a Gift and Praising Someone came from Norse and Germanic sources such as the Icelandic Sagas and Beowulf.
Prototyping focused on game play-central mechanics to get the game into playtester's hands as soon as possible. Early prototypes only featured core moves with the role of men and the role of women defined.
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Second priority was character generation and relationship map. These mechanics allows us to explore more norms in the player characters than before. After these were added the remaining development focused on gradual refinement.
The last mechanics to enter the game were scene setup and wrap up procedure and generational feuds.
Release
The public beta released to a fair bit of controversy. Concerns were split between pushing modern norms on a Viking game and fearing that the game would encourage living out problematic power fantasies as opposed to critiquing them.
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I addressed both of these fears in a developer FAQ which successfully allayed most of the initial controversy.
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Full release happened through Kickstarter and entailed several interviews and actual play appearances.
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I am particularly proud of our international reach, having confirmed sales on three different continents and external coverage in five languages.
What I learned
Blood Feud challenged me in ways I had not encountered before. Designing around complex and controversial subject matters required a new level of research and sensitivity screening, as well as keen management of our customer's expectations.
I now had to consider the result of my words and designs in an international market, and performing well in interviews and outreach became key. I had to communicate not just the game, but also the people, ideas, and processes behind it.
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This project also challenged me to pay attention to the product as a whole in new ways. I had a key role in the art direction and illustration commissioning to ensure our representation goals were met, as well as marketing strategies and texts.
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Above all Blood Feud taught me the importance of clear and consistent communication in a game: where art, gameplay, and marketing all convey a single unified vision. And how closely I must listen to my team to achieve that cohesion.