The Tiniest of Updates

because my hands are actual claws now.

After taking WAY more time than I wanted it to…

I’m done with the art for the AestheticMatch game. There are eleven sets of three cards, each set representing the Stuff, the Costume, and the Stage for an “aesthetic”. You lay them out like you would for a game of Concentration, turn over three cards (per round), and try to match all three in that set.

When you think you know where all three are, you announce your intent to capture the set. If you get the three associated cards you announced, you capture the aesthetic and take the cards for yourself.

But if you announced and then MISS, your partner has a chance to try for the set. If they get all three, they get the cards..and it doesn’t count as a turn, so they could ostensibly wipe the floor with you at that point.

This is the Stuff card for Dark Academia, for example.

I’m writing up the rules and brief summaries of the aesthetics included, in case you’re not Gen Z and have no idea what this whole “-core” thing is about¹.

It’ll take me a day or two to format the rules and check that I’m not typo-ing all over the place, and to lay out the cards so they can be printed on your home printer. (It’s a print and play game, not a physical one.)

If you’re a subscriber (or you just happen upon that post), there’ll be a link later this week where you can download it for free, or it’ll be available on my etsy and my itch.io for a few bucks a few days later, too².

It’s been super fun, but I think I’ll be picking slightly less ambitious games for the rest of the ABC Project — this thing took FOREVER³.

Hope you’re all having a day that is statistically significantly 900% better than this day last year, and if not, you have cookies⁴.

1. We used to call them cliques in my day, back before the internet times, when Weird wasn’t nearly as prized as a character trait. And there were like five of them, and it was just you and your Stoner/Band or Theater Kid/Preppy/Jock/Nerd friends and you. But I digress.

2. Even Shakespeare had to eat.

3. Okay, FINE. There was that whole e.coli thing to deal with that probably made this about five times slower than typical. I’m conveniently blocking that out of my memory.

4. Mmm. Cookies.