Minigames (Firebrands) with Viditya Voleti

[upbeat music] Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder.

Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and ask it which page to turn to.

My name is Sam Dunnewald, and my co-host today is Viditya Voleti.

It continues to be the month of Band-Aids and Bullet Holes, my new John Wick-inspired deck builder RPG now on Kickstarter.

Go check it out.

I've wanted to have Viditya on the show for a couple of years now.

He's a great designer, best known for his lovely, quick, and easy world building game Of Land, Once Magic.

And when I invited him on the show a few months ago, he jumped at the chance to talk about Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands from Meguey and Vincent Baker, and the mechanical structure Firebrands is best known for.

In Firebrands, you go around and take turns picking from a curated list of mini-games, each of which frames one scene through a detailed list of prompts.

And this isn't just, like, a couple of prompts, it's two pages and a whole booklet of mini-games that you keep in front of you, like a reference sheet or a character sheet while you play.

And boy, does this just work like dynamite.

I love it so much.

Band-Aids and Bullet Holes started as a Firebrands hack.

The game had a whole list of John Wick and Kill Bill style revenge movie scenes, like any Firebrands game, until I slowly realized the game just didn't need any of that structure.

It didn't need a list of scenes to pick from.

It needed a list of characters.

So what does that look like? We get into it, not just why we love Firebrands and what makes its mini-games such a fantastic piece of design and framework, but also how it might change and transform into something new.

Thanks to everyone who's already backed Band-Aids and Bullet Holes on Kickstarter, and here is Viditya Voleti with Firebrands mini-games.