B x B is now available!
January 4, 2012
You can now order our new yaoi dating sim game B x B (Boy x Boy) here!
B x B pre-order and the Atarashi Games Library December special!
December 17, 2011
I’m happy to announce that B x B (Boy x Boy), our new yaoi dating sim rpg, is finally available for pre-order! B x B will ship at the beginning of the new year, but you can pre-order it now!
“Koichi is a new transfer to Atarashi High, eager to make friends but too shy to talk to anyone! What will he do when he becomes the object of affection of the schools three most handsome young rivals? Will he fall for the promising Young Athlete, the superstar Model or the school’s most popular Teacher’s Assistant? Guide Koichi through three dates and help him break through his shyness and fall in love for the very first time!”
G x B (Girl x Boy) creators Jake Richmond and Heather Aplington return with an all new yaoi tabletop role playing game for 4 or more players!
Panty Explosion gift art
November 28, 2011
Holy crap! Patrick Devine, creator of Calico Jack, posted this great Panty Explosion Perfect sketch on his DA page. Super cool!
G x B in the classroom!
November 17, 2011
Pete Figtree talks about playing G x B with the students of his high school gaming club. Looks like the game went over especially well with the non-gaming girls! Check out this short 5 minute podcast to hear all about it!
Cel*Style October Special
October 10, 2011
Ready to pit desperate, sword wielding psychic school girls against insane, blood thirsty zombie hordes? Cel*Style’s Zombie Highschool Apocalypse October Special contains two great games, Panty Explosion Perfect and Cannibal Contagion, everything you need to play a brutal, blood soaked school-based zombie showdown! From now until November 1st get both games for just $26! That’s a $10 savings!
Panty Explosion Perfect is perfect for playing bloody high school grudge matches fueled by supernatural powers. Add in Zombies in place of the traditional demons and ghosts for a Highschool of the Dead style game!
Cannibal Contagion is built from the ground up for insane, zombie filled survival horror action, perfect for fans of Resident Evil, Dead Island or Highschool of the Dead!
Get both games now for just $26.APE!
September 29, 2011
Visiting the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco this weekend? Make sure to check out the Neko Machi booth (#273), where Ewen Cluney and Ben Lehman will be showing off the entire Cel*Style line, including Panty Explosion Perfect, G x B and Classroom Deathmatch. You’ll also be able to get a copy of Ben’s new game Clover and talk to Ewen about his upcoming game Magical Burst. Make sure to ask fro a free Modest Medusa con book!
Jedi x Sith
September 23, 2011
What’s this? A brand new G x B play set featuring Jedi? Crazy! Download it now!
Jedi x Sith lets you play a quiet but resourceful Jedi Knight charged with rooting out Sith infiltrators in the Jedi order! This 3 page pdf includes a new jedi themed scenerio for G x B, rules and guidlines for playing and 4 character cards. You’ll need a copy of G x B to play, of course!
French G x B and Panty Explosion cards now available!
September 22, 2011
Cel*Style friend Xavier Raoult has taken the time to translate the Panty Explosion Perfect and G x B character cards into French. You can download both sets here. Thanks Xavier!
Okay, here’s a long story about my new game (B x B) and a game that never saw the light of day (Yaoi Explosion).
Back in 2006, for the first few months after releasing the original version of Panty Explosion, Matt and I were getting a constant stream of emails and posts asking us to publish a version of the system for playing… well… anything else really. People liked the game and it was selling well, but most players wanted to play Bleach, or InuYasha or Sailor Moon or Gundam or anything but pissed off psychic school girls. Most people wanted us to release a version of the Panty Explosion rules for generic anime play, something like BESM I guess. Matt and I talked about this for a bit and decided that we were totally against it for a few reasons. We’re both big believers in purpose built games, games designed to do a specific thing or emulate a certain genre. Also, we already knew that Panty Explosion just didn’t work well for certain kinds of games, and trying to adapt it to play something like One Piece, Patlabor or Crying Freeman just didn’t seem like a good idea. There was one really good idea that a lot of people kept asking for though, a yaoi game.
A yaoi version of Panty Explosion seemed like it would be a good fit for the specific reason that it would be a game built around a specific subject. As I said before, Matt and I are both believers in the idea of building games to do a specific thing. The more things a game has to do, the more kinds of stories it has to tell, play styles it has to accommodate and genres it has to emulate, the poorer it will be. We see this with Gurps, BESM and every other traditional toolbox game. Gurps can be used to run almost anything, but it doesn’t put much distinction between space opera and detective mysteries, and it doesn’t really do anything that well. BESM is great if you want a really generic, mid 80′s kind of anime feel, but the kind of games you get out of it emulate the kind of anime you wouldn’t really ever want to watch. You’ll never get a Cowboy Bebop, Spirited Away or Perfect Blue out of BESM. The system just doesn’t provide you with the tools for that kind of play. If you want something like Cowboy Bebop, you need a system designed to do just that.
So I mentioned to someone that we were thinking about doing a yaoi version of Panty Explosion, and pretty soon a few sites had published the news that our next game would be a yaoi game. The problem was that neither of us could come up with anything. Matt and I spent a few months reading manga and hanging out on yaoi boards and pretty much absorbing as much material as we could manage. We had decided right away that we didn’t want to just modify Panty Explosion, but we weren’t sure where to start on a new design either. The suggestions we were getting, and we were getting a lot, we’re… well… really, really awful. Check this out:
Lets design a yaoi game!
1. Start by choosing a race (since all rpgs have races). You can be gay, or… umm… straight? I guess? Since we need to have more than one choice?
2. Choose a class! You can be a seme or uke, of course. We still need more options though, especially since we have straight characters. Maybe a sibling character, like an older sister or brother? Or a straight best friend? Or why not just create classes based on stereotypes! We can have the gay biker class, and the Bear class and the… yes, I know this really doesn’t fit into the genre. So what?
3. We need plenty of skills and feats and advantages and whatever. Uke are often portrayed as shy, vulnerable or naive, so those could be skills, right? And of course we want to make sure both characters can put skill points in beauty, or looks or something. Is Anal Virginity a feat or an Advantage?
4. We need a combat system, of course. All rpgs have one.
5. And monsters! Maybe a bitch co-worker who wants to sleep with the seme, or rapist after the uke, or…
And so on and so on. Does that sound awful? Does that sound like a game anyone would want to play? Does that sound like a game that does a good job of capturing the yaoi genre, or that would attract fans of the genre? No, of course not. And yet, that’s what almost all the suggestions we got were like. In fact, spend some time looking around the internet for yaoi table top rpgs and you’ll find people discussing games just like this, trying to adapt the D20 system, or Savage Worlds or Fate or something else to play a yaoi game. Why? They don’t know any better. These are players who only have a single tool to play with. They’ve been playing with a hammer for so long, it doesn’t even occur to them to try using a different tool. They’ve been sold on the idea that the hammer can be used to build anything. They’ve invested in this idea. Once you’ve spent months or years learning a game system and buying book after book for that system, a system that promises it can be used for everything… would it even occur to you to try something new? Would it occur to you that the same set of narrative rules that you use for murdering goblins and stealing their stuff maybe wasn’t the best way to approach exploring an intimate sexual and emotional relationship with another human being?
We ended up shelving the project. Neither of us could come up with anything. The closest we got was a Gundam Seed style mech game, where the main character (the uke) was a gifted young mech pilot, and the opposing character (the seme) was an enemy ace, trying to seduce him during battle. It was a fun idea, but when we posted it on the forum we had created for discussing our upcoming yaoi game, the reaction was pretty negative. The players didn’t want pre-made characters. They wanted a toolbox style game where they could make whatever type of character they wanted.
See, the thing is that they were wrong. As I said before, a decade of gamer training has told us that what we want out of our rpgs is a tool box, a customizable system that allows us to play any kind of game we want and make any kind of character we want. It’s not true. Or maybe it is, but… well, fuck it. No, it’s not. If you want to play a yaoi game what you need is a game built to emulate the genre. Built to tell yaoi style stories with yaoi style characters. You don’t also need the option for playing Indiana Jones. Or Star Wars. Or Lord of the Rings. You don’t need stats for playing an elf. You don’t need a special rule set in case you’re playing pirates.You need a system that emulates the yaoi genre and gives you a platform to play characters and tell stories that meet the expectations of that genre. A toolbox style game simply gives players the illusion of freedom by offering tons of useless and unneeded options. Look, here’s stats to play an Orc uke. Here’s stats to play a Half-Tyranosaurus seme. Here’s rules for adapting D20 combat for sex scenes. Here’s how the Cleave feat works in relationship scenes!
Useless.
Build a simple game from the ground up that does exactly what you want it to do. Leave out everything else. That’s the right approach.
I wasn’t having any luck coming up with a yaoi game, but I was jetting along working on a shoujo style dating sim game with a simple premise. You played a young woman who has just moved to a new high school. You want to fall in love, but you don’t know how. You’ll go on a series of three dates, each with another player, and at the end decide who you like best. The game used a simple card mechanic and a rotating narrator. While player one and two were acting out their date, players three and four would be narrating. Then player one and three would go on a date, and two and four would narrate. The game went through a few major revisions, but it really came together when I decided to abandon the section on character creation and just introduce 4 pre-made characters. Here’s why: When you pick up the first volume of a shoujo manga, you can’t choose the characters. Often, the main character seems weak, childish, stuck up, naive or pitiful. Often the supporting characters and love interests are unlikable. At first. The entire point is that each character is a unique individual, and as the story continues they change and grow. Creating pre-made characters, each with a set personality, appearance and name forced players to accept the characters as whole individuals, complete with strengths and flaws. If they wanted to change who the characters were, if they wanted them to grow, they’d have to do so through play. Plus, and this is even more important, rpg players have a tendency to play the same characters over and over again. Denying them that choice and forcing them to play something new and unfamiliar creates vulnerability, awkwardness and uncertainty. Which is perfect for a shoujo manga story.
Here’s the thing. G x B (that’s what the game would eventually be called) would have four pre-made characters, and it was easy to choose the types. We had the shy, uncertain heroine who always tried her hardest, the nerdy student who was smarter than all his classmates, the bully with a heart of gold and the confident class president.
The class president was a girl.
As soon as I made that choice I realized that the game could work in reverse as well. It didn’t have to be the story of a shy young woman looking to fall in love. It could just as easily be the story of a shy young man, trying to choose between the three attractive guys who are totally into him. I finished up G x B (Girl x Boy) with artist Heather Aplington earlier this year, and we immidetaly started working on the follow up.
B x B (Boy x Boy) works for the same reason G x B does. Falling in love, and looking for love, and wanting to be in love, is universal. It’s something we all know. The game gives you a character and gives you a platform for falling in love. Or going on a first date, anyway. That’s it. The yaoi part? The part about playing beautiful young men? That’s there as well of course. It’s there in the premise of the game and the appearance and the description of the characters. The game itself though? B x B is a game about falling in love. It took me awhile to realize that this was what was missing from our earlier efforts to make a game. Yaoi is a genre, but a genre is only a platform for a story. Our game needed a story to hang on. This is the reason the mech game seemed to work when the others didn’t. Looking at other genre examples it became pretty obvious. There’s yaoi detective stories, stories about struggling musicians, vampires, assassins, chefs, teachers and cave men. These are all stories featuring beautiful and passionate men having sex with each other, but each story is also about something else. So B x B is a game about a young man who wants to fall in love, but can’t choose between three suitors.
Anyway…
B x B is pretty much done. I’m just looking for a little free time to finish up some of the text, letter the instructional manga that Heather created for the book and do the layout. The game doesn’t exactly play like G x B. There are a few small changes to help the play experience stand on it’s own and stay fresh for fans of the first game. It’s also probably just not as blatantly sexy as some people would like. Too bad. Just like with G x B, I wanted to create a game that was more sweet and funny than sweaty and sexy. Anyway, I think you’ll like it!
Jake
Ocean live play
September 16, 2011
Here’s a great game of Ocean recorded by some first time players. If you’ve ever wandered what playing ocean would be like… well, check this out!
G x B strategy on the forge
September 14, 2011
Vincent Baker, Ben Lehman, Joel P. Shempert and I talk about Cel*Style games HGMO and G x B (Girl x Boy) over on the forge. Check it out and discover the secret strategy to winning G x B!
Hey, remember Ocean?
September 2, 2011
The Above 49 blog did a little review on Ocean (as well as Dread, Lady Blackbird and Fiasco) awhile back. Ocean never really found an audience when it was released 2 years ago, but sales have been picking up slowly (very slowly) over the last few months. I’m actually really proud of teh game, but I designed it and released it during a period where I just didn’t want to do any promotion.
Anyway, here’s what they had to say:
At PAX!
August 24, 2011
Hi. Nick and I will be at PAX in Seattle this coming weekend representing Atarashi Games and Cel*Style. We’ll be running Panty Explosion perfect, Tulip Academy and G x B all weekend long. Find us at the Gamma Ray Games booth (who will also be carrying our games) or on the Designing and Publishing a Tabletop Roleplaying Game panel of Friday at 4:30 in the raven Theater!
New Atarashi Games t-shirts!
July 12, 2011
We’ve added 4 brand new shirts to our shirt store, featuring designs from G x B, Tulip Academy and Panty Explosion Perfect! Each shirt is available in a variety of sizes and colors for both women and men! Just $15 each!
The next few Atarashi games…
July 11, 2011
Now that Panty Explosion Perfect is out and done, what else is Atarashi Games working on?
B x B (Boy X Boy): This is both the guy on guy follow up to G x B. Some of you will remember that way back in 2007 Matt and I promised that Atarashi Games would eventually release a yaoi or boys love game. This is what the project eventually became. B x B is about a struggling high school student who finds himself the object of affection of 3 very different young men! B x B uses the same system as G x B, but includes some new twists and scenarios, new comics, new guidelines for creating custom characters and all new art by G x B co-creator Heather Aplington! When will we see it? Expect to see B x B in late Summer or early Fall!
Leviathan Knight: A super hardcore console JRPG style game with a pre-set plot, lead and back up characters and card based combat mechanics. When will we see it? This one is still early in development but I expect to have a rough playtest draft a vailable in the next few weeks.
The Magical Land of Yeld: Nick Smith and I have been working on our Zelda/Final Fantasy Tactics style fantasy rpg for years now,a nd I’m happy to say it’s nearly done! Yeld combines epic world building and exploration with tactics style combat. It’s the biggest, best and most fun game I’ve ever worked on, and I can’t wait till everyone can play it! When will we see it? Nick and I are commited to having the game finished by the end of the year, but you probably won’t be able to order it until next Spring. In the meantime you can download a copy of the early play test PDF. It’s pretty out of date, but it’ll give you an idea of what Yeld is all about.
Black Opera: Hardcore fighting game style action! Black Opera is a role playing combat system built around speed, practice and skill. Choose from 8 brutal fighters (including legendary Chinese Generals, Space Gorillas, Psychic school girls, Sentai heroes, Egyptian gods and Pregnant Jaguar priestesses) and battle your way to the greatest fighting tournament of all time, the infamous Black Opera! Black Opera is the first time since 2006 that Matt Schlotte and I have built a game together from the ground up,and this one is really like nothing else I’ve ever played! When will we see it? Expect to see it in 2012, but start looking for play test kits later this year!
Desperate Teacher Romance: The first thing new teachers at the prestigious Atarashi high school learn is that only way to secure a position is to marry another instructor by the end of the school year! While it’s more of a board game than rpg, Desperate Teacher Romance follows the tradition of the other Atarashi High School game by putting players in embarrassing situations and forcing them to improvise! I’ve been sitting on this game for about a year, but I think it’s finally time to finish it up. When will we see it? Sometime before the end of the year!
Jake on the Yellow Menace podcast!
July 11, 2011
The guys from the Yellow Menace podcast invited me on to talk about Panty Explosion Perfect, G x B, Cel*Style, making anime games for anime fans, forum gaming and all kinds of other stuff. Lots of fun! We also spend a few minutes talking about the next Atarashi Games, B x B!
You can hear the whole thing here.
Chainsaw Unicorn!
July 8, 2011
The Chainsaw Unicorn shirt, and several other shirts from Jake’s webcomic Modest Medusa are now available for sale!
The Chainsaw Unicorn shirt, and several other shirts from Jake’s webcomic Modest Medusa are now available for sale!
Atarashi Games announces a “Yaoi” sequel to G x B!
June 25, 2011
G x B (Girl x Boy) creators Jake Richmond and Heather Applington will be teaming up again to create a yaoi version of their popular datingsim role playing game. Although the game currently has no name, Jake is referring to the project as S x U (Seme x Uke) and plans to release it in late August or September of this year.
The game will use the same rule set as G x B, replacing Momoko, Ichigo and friends with an entirely new set of male characters and focusing on a high school freshman who discovers that he’s become the object of affection and desire for two of his closest classmates and his student teacher. Who will he choose?
Although the game uses the same rule set as G x B, Jake is busy re-writing the game text from scratch and introducing several small changes, including guidelines for creating custom characters. Heather Applington is creating a brand new set of illustrations for the game, including new instructional manga pages to help new players quickly learn how to play. Just like G x B, the new game will take place at Atarashi high school, and these early character sketches by Heather show off the Atarashi high summer uniform!
Jake on Yuruki Zero Games podcast!
June 25, 2011
Ewen Clueny interviewed Jake Richmond for the latest episode of the http://yarukizero.wordpress.com/. Ewen and Jake talk about Panty Explosion Perfect and G x B, designing anime games and selling game sat anime conventions, fried noodles and food carts in Portland, upcoming Cel*Style games and more!
You can also read a summery of the interview over at MiniEnt.net!
20 x 20 Room talks about G x B
June 22, 2011
Amy Sutedja recently played and talked about G x B on the gaming blog 20- x 20 Room. Amy homes in on what G x B is about right away:
“The goal of G X B is to make you feel awkward. It’s a lot more fun than it sounds, really.”
Amy offers a great review, and it sounds like she and her group had a lot of fun coming up with Dialoge Choices:
My mom would really love your aunt — I think our families would really get along together!” / “Gosh, your aunt looks a lot like my mom’s sister…
You both lean in for a kiss good-night, and you can feel your hearts swelling under the starry sky! / You both lean in for a kiss good-night, but there’s still a spicy pepper caught in Momoko’s teeth from dinner!
You can read the full article here. Make sure to also read the comments for some interesting insights on different types of romance games and why some of them might not be for everyone.
If you haven’t gotten a copy of G x B yet, it’s just $10 at the Cel*Style store!
