Editorial
Bojan Prakljacic has been an indie PnP game design maverick and genius for over a decade. He creates amazing PnP games with well-thought-out mechanisms and beautiful artwork drawn and painted by hand. His games are always a thematic and mechanical feast for the senses. And it is simply amazing that Bojan, ever the mercurial artiste, generously gives his game creations for free.
He is an absolute treasure to the PnP community and to game design. If this is your first time encountering a Bojan PnP game design, I can tell you that you are in for a wonderful experience. I first encountered one of Bojan's mad projects back in 2018, when he designed his take on Eldritch Horror in just 9 cards. I have been a fan ever since. Many other PnP game designers would do well to study the work of the master, Bojan.
But Bojan is more than just one great game. He represents something rarer and more important in the PnP space: a throwback to an older sensibility, the kind that was prevalent before the pandemic. Back when I first entered the PnP world in 2017, the space felt fundamentally different. It was populated by designers who were driven by sheer creativity, the genuine joy of design, the desire to make something bold and new that nobody had seen before. They put their work out there for free, period. Just love of the craft. I was introduced to brilliant, talented game designers who were not motivated by profit. They were motivated by the art of game design itself.
Look at the other designers I gravitated toward when I first started in PnP. Jake Staines, designer of the PnP classic Maquis. John Kean, designer of Black Sonata and so many others. Todd Sanders, creator of Pulp Detective and more. These were people who started out as free PnP designers, and that was the whole point. They wanted to share their work, not sell it. They wanted to push boundaries, not repeat the same old tired design formulas. And to me, Bojan is cut from that exact same cloth.
Nowadays it seems more and more that the newer PnP games coming out on crowdfunding are the roll-and-write type. And a lot of them don't seem to be mechanically creative or interested in exploring new game design boundaries. A lot of them seem to be sticking to the same tired old formula, differentiated just by a thin coat of paint, a different theme, same mechanisms. These projects seem motivated to sell as many copies to as many people as possible. And that is all well and good, if your motivation is to make money in the PnP space. But that is not what excites me about PnP, or why I got into it in the first place.
In this post-pandemic day and age, surrounded by derivative, stale, unexciting PnP game projects, for Bojan to still be working as he has always worked — to still be putting out honest games that don't care about making money — that is incredibly comforting to me. It brings me back to a better time in the PnP scene, in my opinion. It reconnects me to why I got into PnP in the first place.