Hour Games

What Is This?

Hour Games are games which are created “In an Hour”. Maybe not the nice typing up of the rules, but you get the idea.

Why would you want to do this?

Remember when you were kids how you’d make up games and play them? They probably weren’t anything near as complex as Calvin Ball. You didn’t care so much about the “right” way to play a game, but just to have fun.

Tell Me More

Hour games started out as an idea planted by GenCant – The Unofficial Official Website for the Original UnConvention’s Roll-And-Write Contest. Create a game which uses pencil, paper, and dice. Add to this The Game Crafter’s Gamehole Dungeon Crawler Challenge and I wanted to see if I could create a dungeon crawler (which could be played solo) using dice, pencil, and paper. Then, to make things interesting, I had an hour’s worth of free time before I had to be someplace else.

An Hour Game was born. This got me to thinking that it’s certainly a good framework for stimulating creativity.

What are the Rules?

Pretty much, there’s only one rule… An hour game needs to be created in about an hour.

The second rule, I think is important, though others might not be as stringent about it as I am. Hour Games should be shared. Just like when we were kids playing outside, there were no “seekrit” rules in Le jeu du jour. Anyone who wanted to play could. And if they had a good idea, that became part of the game, too. So all of my Hour Games will be released under Creative Commons. This lets others play, change the rules, and create something new.

Creative Commons License
Hour Games by Matt Williams / Steam Kitty Games are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Get to the Games Already!