Calendra, Part #4: The Global Pandemic

❖ Version History ❖

16th of March, 2020
This week was the week of my birthday. As a celebration of all the work that has happened over the past several months, I invite many friends over to my home to host a night full of home made games, home made food, and general wonderful merriment. The occasion is a glorious success and it is officially really starting to feel like we are onto something great with these table top games.

One major milestone of this week is that Ben and I officially land on a name for our beautiful fun new little rune game. To this point in time it has been called Attunement, but that never felt quite right. I wanted it to be a term we made up, and we both wanted it to be more on-theme for the Celtic nature in this game. I kept nagging Ben about how I wanted it to be somehow related to the seasons, and then we got to talking about the origin of the word calendar, which we then had the epiphany moment of rearranging just a tiny bit to land on our official title:

:: Calendra ::

Our little get-together at my house this week featured the brand new rune tiles I had spent most of the previous week working on. Playing with the tiles was a lot of fun, but there were two problems:

1. The sides and backs of the wooden tokens weren’t colored, so some bleed from the top art made it easy to tell who had what from afar.

2. The tiles are a great method for playing the game, but they would benefit from having a stand of some sort to help keep them organized & secret from other players.

I decide to start coloring the back side of the runes black to help conceal my coloring errors along the side edges of the wood. To achieve this I bring the full set with me to work every day this week, and color in a few at a time until they are all finished. In a tragic bit of irony, this process is easily concluded on this day, for while I am at work it is announced that the country is going to begin forcibly shutting down due to the Covid-19 Coronavirus global pandemic. The photograph above is of me and one of my coworkers sitting in the completely empty restaurant building on the last day that we were open.

In a last ditch hope to help the staff stay merry through this very sad day, I teach my friends about how this game works while I finish the coloring. It will be nearly four months until I see many of them again.