Back in November, 2020, I put out my first "fully my own" game, chatter/box. I put up a post about it on my blog. I was pleased, and remain so. I also know that, along a certain continuum of "doing it right," I do what I do wrong. I rarely revise, beyond the "let this sit for a few weeks or months, and fix the glaring problems." I have about 5% layout skills. I have never hired an editor. I would like to do those things, but I'm some joker doing this as a hobby. Were I ever to decide to make a product, all of those things I do wrong I would do differently.
I've also always felt the prose was unwieldy, and there should only be one mechanic in a game that claims to have only one mechanic. (There's really only one resolution rule, but players can implement it with either dice or playing cards. But even so, I felt like the actual words weren't great.)
So last week I started an earnest rewrite. This week I also started reading The Troubleshooters. I bought it last year in July. It looks like a fun game to me, and right up my alley. And, I was startled to find, it's similar enough to chatter/box that someone familiar with both might wonder about the connection. I wondered about the connection. Even though I know I wrote chatter/box before The Troubleshooters even came out, at a glance it would be easy to think I stripped The Troubleshooters down, and filed off the serial numbers.
The dates don't support that idea, and I'm not defensive about it. And also I'm really interested. The Troubleshooters must have been pretty deep into development and play-testing at the same time I was writing chatter/box. The Troubleshooters is explicitly inspired by a certain kind of French & Belgium comic book, and its explicit setting is that kind of imaginary 1960s-1970s Europe. By comparison, chatter/box is explicitly inspired by TV shows like The Rockford Files and movies like RED: Retired, Extremely Dangerous.
But this description of the ethos of The Troubleshooters is way close to the ethos of chatter/box.
The Troubleshooters is about good friends, competent in their fields of expertise, who have fun, exciting and light-hearted adventures together, in Europe and other exotic locations.
The only significant difference is that chatter/box does not have an explicit setting.
I wonder what was in the air.