So, in past news posts I've discussed my plans for a Game tab for the Central Wongery, which would make available statistics and suggestions for the use of Wongery content in various role-playing games. The Game tab doesn't exist yet, because it will involve some customization of the MediaWiki installation, but it's something we definitely hope to have up before the hard launch. Recently, though, it occurred to me that, well, there are other kinds of games, too, that can be tied to specific setting elements, and that Wongery content could be adapted for. Fantasy and sci-fi wargames like Warhammer 40000 involve battles between distinct units with different abilities and powers; it might be interesting to have a wargame set on a Wongery world. And then there are customizable card games like Magic the Gathering; it could be fun to design cards flavored with Wongery content.

(Okay, maybe I didn't think of this for the first time just recently, I guess; looking back at what I have written so far for the Game tab for the main page (I haven't done the coding for the MediaWiki extension, but that doesn't mean I haven't started writing the content), I see the following elliptically incomplete sentence: "(For the moment just role-playing games, but we decided to leave the name open in case ...board games or card games....)". So apparently this is something that occurred to me at some point before; I just forgot about it until recently.)

Some of the Wongery worlds lend themselves more to this than others, but there are worlds that these kinds of games could be good fits for. I could maybe see a wargame set on Curcalen, with the various sorcerous, uh, whatever I end up calling them battling each other with different corps of summoned creatures. Tada's Great Empires of Piobagh seem ideally suited for a wargame, with diverse battling empires, not to mention various intraimperial conflicts. And, well, okay, I guess pretty much any world has things that could be used as the basis of cards for a customizable card game.

Of course, Warhammer 40000 and Magic: The Gathering are not under any sort of open license, nor do they have any kind of community content programs. (Hasbro, the corporate owner of Magic, seems to have been pretty tolerant of people posting fanmade cards—at least I'm unaware of their ever having taken action against them—, but I don't believe they have any policy in place to specifically endorse it. (Wait, I forgot, they did shut down Card Conjurer, an online custom card creator, which was... kind of an obnoxious thing for them to do. (It's back up now, but has been altered to no longer make cards with the MTG look and feel.) But I'm unaware of them ever having taken action against anyone for just posting custom cards.)) But I thought maybe there were other wargames and customizable card games that were under such licenses. The open game movement started, or at least rose to prominence, with role-playing games (and specifically with Wizards of the Coast's Open Game License in 2000), but there was nothing about open licenses that restricted them to role-playing games. It would certainly be possible for someone to apply an open license to a wargame or a card game—whether the WotC OGL, a Creative Commons license, or something else similar—and I thought it likely that at some point someone had. I didn't know of any open-license wargames or CCGs, but it seemed probable that some did exist.

So I did some searching online. (Spending time I really probably should have been spending writing and editing Wongery articles, or doing any number of other things that I need to get done, but, uh, oh well.) It was a bit tricky because whatever keywords I tried to search invariably turned up mostly open source computer games, but I persisted and my expectations were—more or less—confirmed. I did manage to find some open-licensed wargames and card games, albeit very few compared to the number of open-licensed RPGs, but most of them seem to be long dormant, in the sense that, well, the game is still technically available, but there seems to have been little or no active development going on for the last decade or so. Then again, that's also true of some of the RPGs we're planning on supporting (Dominion Rules, EABA, Iridium), so that's not a major deterrent. In fact, if the Wongery becomes popular (admittedly a very big if), then the inclusion of those games might actually bring attention to them and possibly even spur their further development. Raising awareness of indie games with which the Grandmaster Wongers have no affiliation is not one of the primary goals of the Wongery, but it's not something we're opposed to. On the contrary, we'd count that as a very positive side effect.

Many of these games have their own built-in settings, but that doesn't mean that units and cards in other settings can't be made. Wizards of the Coast has recently started doing just that with Magic the Gathering with its Universes Beyond sets; there's no reason it can't be done with open games as well. (On the other hand, reception to the Universes Beyond sets has been mixed—and I have to admit I'm definitely not a fan of them myself, though I'm not a Magic the Gathering player so my opinion doesn't count for much—so maybe this isn't the best thing to invite comparisons with. Then again, I think in an open game where community contributions are expected and more customization is the norm such deviations from the game's canon might be less obtrusive than in a game like Magic the Gathering that has traditionally kept to its own multiverse... maybe?)

Anyway, here are some of the non-RPG open game systems we've found, some of which the Wongery will (hopefully) be supporting:

Wargames

"Wargames" is a bit of a vague term, and maybe I should be more specific, but I didn't know what else to call them. "Miniature wargames" is more specific, but perhaps too specific, in that it excludes games where units are represented not by three-dimensional miniatures but by cardboard chits, which actually seems like something an open game might be likely to do. "Skirmish game" likewise generally refers to a specific subgenre of wargames, where each model (or chit) represents not a group of similar units but a specific individual character. But anyway, when I say "wargames", I'm referring to the type of game exemplified by Warhammer 40000, HeroClix, Malifaux, and Warmachine.

Releasing an RPG under an open license is a relatively straightforward matter. Typically, the game's owner sells the core rules, and usually some supplements as well, but under the open license other companies produce their own supplements, either printed, electronic, or both. Releasing a wargame under an open license presents some additional challenges. As I understand it, the publisher of a miniature wargame does not make money primarily—or perhaps at all!—from selling the rules. It makes the bulk of its money from selling miniatures, and therefore may be loath to let other companies cut in on that aspect of the business. But it may be difficult for other companies to cut in on it anyway, since it's a much more difficult and technical matter to produce three-dimensional models than it is to print books—and of course while it's possible to freely release a book in electronic form, it's not possible to freely release a miniature. Or at least it wasn't possible, but with the current surge in 3D printing technology, a company that wants to make their models available can just distribute the digital models so people who own 3D printers can print the models themselves. Besides, as mentioned above, not all wargames are miniature wargames, and an open game could just use cardboard chits... or it could just direct players to use whatever models they have available, and not demand special models for the game. Anyway, while wargames perhaps didn't lend themselves to open licensing quite as well as role-playing games, it still seemed likely to me that some wargames would have been released under open licenses. And indeed, I found some that were, and that we could in principle release Wongery content for.

(I also found one game, The Ninth Age, that looked very promising; it had a nicely laid out website and lots of development, and was released under a Creative Commons license—except that under closer examination it was released specifically under a Creative Commons No Derivatives License, which means, well, no sharing of derivative works... so making available custom units and scenarios is förbjuden. Oh well. More games where that came from.)

As far as the models, well, we'd already been planning on releasing 3D-printable digital models under the Build tab anyway. When we first described the custom tabs we had planned, I'd said the Build tab would have instructions for building LEGO models of Wongery objects and creatures, but I later decided it could be expanded to instructions for creating models in other ways as well, including 3D printing. (And also including origami, because why not.) So yeah, the models were already going to be covered. Though I guess we may as well also provide 2D images that can be attached to cardboard chits for players who don't have access to 3D printers.

OpenTactics

OpenTactics is a wargame by Ill Gotten Games that is not designed for any particular setting and encourages players to "use whatever models you like from your own collection". Each unit is defined by an ancestry, an archetype, and equipment; the sixteen ancestries provided in the book are mostly standard-fare mythic fantasy—centaur, dwarf, elf, etc.—with a few sci-fi options thrown in, and, of course, humans—but it would be simple to write up custom ancestries for Wongery folks and creatures like batirines and gulangas. Similar notes apply to the archetypes and equipment. All in all, this looks simple and customizable and may be a good choice for one of the first wargames we'll try to write up Wongery content for.

ZipWarZ

ZipWarZ is another game designed to be used with whatever miniatures the players already have, played on a 4×6-zone "battlefield board". (The battlefield board is nothing more than a piece of paper with the zones delineated on it along with any relevant terrain; printable examples are provided.) While the core rulebook itself isn't under any sort of open license, AnSR Games has released a System Reference Document released under CC-BY. The SRD is currently available in a free SRD bundle that also includes a "Powered by ZipWarZ" logo for use in derivative products. Given that this game is relatively new and still being actively developed, this is another one that may end up being one of the first wargames to be included on the Wongery Game page.

Nemesis

Released under a CC-BY-NC-SA license, Nemesis is easily the most polished-looking and professionally presented of the open wargames I found. Unlike the other games in this list, Nemesis does have special miniatures made for it and sold by the game's creator (and while I'm not a miniatures connoissieur, at least to me they look to be of good quality, comparable to those of other commercial wargames), though the CC license means that other people can create their own supplements for the game as well. Also unlike most of the other games in this list, Nemesis does have a defined setting, a fantasy world called Miter... but as discussed above that doesn't mean that supplements for other settings can't be created.

Brigandine

Hm. I can't say much about this game yet, because despite being released under a GPL license it's currently only available, as far as I can tell, in print through Lulu.com. I went ahead and ordered a copy—it's only $4.76; even if it turns out to be terrible I'm not out much money—but obviously I don't have that copy yet, so I don't know anything about it beyond the description on the Lulu product page. Still, according to said description it's released under an "open source license that encourages and forking/redistribution", so yeah, unless it's absolute garbage we're probably going to be making content for it eventually, because why not?

Countermoves Generic Microgame Engine

The Countermoves Generic Microgame Engine (CGME) is a simple ruleset intended to be used as "the basic building blocks that could be used to make a Microgame"—by which was meant a wargame that used paper counters and was "[q]uick to play, easy to learn, [and] inexpensive in price". The system was introduced in the first issue of the free Countermoves Game Zine; later issues developed it further and provided details on specific "Gameworlds". While the latest issue of the zine is released under a CC-BY-ND-NC license, which prohibits the distribution of derivative works, the earlier issues—including the first issue that introduced the system—were released under a GNU Free Document License that does allow the distribution of "Modified Versions" provided that certain conditions are met—and since after all the whole point of the CGME was to enable games to be built from it, it doesn't seem likely its creators would object to that happening. All issues of the Countermoves Game Zine can be freely downloaded from the Countermoves website.

TinySquad

TinySquad is a skirmish game with three to five "heroes" per player, released under a GNU GPL license. It's still in a relatively early stage of development, although there's—barely—enough material to play it; the available material includes a dozen heroes, and the support deck—a deck of Gear and Events shared by all players—only exists in a rough version with a promise of "a nice print ready PDF" to come later. While most or all of the heroes released so far are well-known pop culture characters very thinly disguised by not using their full names (with the possible exception of "Avi", whom I don't recognize, but I'm guessing she's probably a character from some source I'm unfamiliar with), certainly there's nothing preventing the use of original characters.

Tabletop Tactics

Tabletop Tactics is a "universal miniature wargaming system" compatible with Saga, a role-playing game ruleset by the same creator. However, I'm given pause by the fact that it doesn't seem to be linked anywhere on the creator's site... there's a post from 2010 touting Tabletop Tactics as a "new release" and linking to the page from which it can supposedly be downloaded, but it's no longer mentioned anywhere on the linked page—and from what I can see on the Wayback Machine, doesn't seem to have been linked there since 2013. The creator made a 2011 post mentioning that he was "going to overhaul" Tabletop Tactics, so... maybe he deleted the link to the game until such time as the overhaul was complete? Since the game was released under a CC-BY-NC-SA license, I don't actually need the author's permission to release material for it... but if the author doesn't currently want it to be out there, I'd prefer to comply with his wishes. (I did find a working link to the game, but I didn't include the link here because I wasn't sure the creator intended for the game to be available.) I think I'll hold off on trying to do anything with this until and unless there's a link to it on the creator's site again, or some other indication that the creator's okay with its promulgation.

On the Counter

On the Counter is a wargame ruleset using hexagonal cardboard counters instead of miniatures. The core rulebook includes "sample games in four genres: Starship combat, Mecha combat, WWI Dogfighting and WWII combat", but while I haven't read through the rules in detail I doubt there's anything that prevents it from being used for fantasy settings—the rulebook itself says that "you can create any genre you like." I don't know where this game was originally distributed, but in any case the core files are now downloadable from BoardGameGeek, so it's still available and, given that it was released under a CC-BY-NC-SA license, it's still possible to develop new materials for it. (I know I just said I wasn't going to do anything with Tabletop Tactics because the lack of a link to it implied the creator might not want it out there, but in that case the creator's page still existed and the link had been removed, which suggested an active effort to make the game unavailable. Here I don't even know if the creator had a website in the first place, and if he did it doesn't seem to exist anymore, so there's no indication of any intent on his part to remove the game from circulation.)

Ætherverse

Ætherverse is a CC-NC-SA game themed around a conflict between parallel universes (but, again, it should be readily rethemeable). According to the introduction of the rulebook, a primary design goal of Ætherverse was to enable players "to build armies that have real character rather than just being a collection of numbers." Unfortunately, the creator's website has long gone, and aside from a forum post and a LiveJournal last updated in 2006 there's little evidence that the game ever existed. (It does have a Wikipedia page, oddly enough, though it's been tagged since 2014 as needing citations.) The Alpha Release Version 1.06 of the second edition Core Ruleset is still preserved in the Wayback Machine, but if that's the only place it's available and if the game's creator seems to have abandoned it I think this is another one I'm not going to try anything with for now.

Little Wars

Little Wars is famous for two reasons. First, it's the oldest known published ruleset for a miniature wargame. Second, it was created by H. G. Wells, the celebrated author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau—to name only a few of his best known works. Wells, of course, did not release his ruleset under any sort of open license—but as he died in 1946, Little Wars is now in the public domain. However, while that means that we can create and share supplements and scenarios for it themed around Wongery worlds, it doesn't necessarily mean we should. Little Wars may be of considerable historical interest, but does anyone nowadays actually want to play it? Hm. Well, at any rate, it definitely won't be a priority. Anyway, Little Wars can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg or from the Internet Archive, though there are also print versions available with introductions and other added matter.

Customizable Card Games

So, when I was thinking of the possibility of open-licensed card games, I was thinking card games like Magic the Gathering, or Flesh and Blood, or Yu-Gi-Oh!, or the Pokémon Trading Card Game. But of course these are collectible card games. A good part of the design and marketing centers around the fact that you can buy randomized packs; you don't know what you're going to get. You can trade cards with other players, if you each have something that interests the other, but otherwise you are at the mercy of the luck of the draw—or at least, that was the original idea. But how would that work if a game was released under an open license? If the whole game is freely available, how could it be collectible?

This didn't seem to me, however, to be a fatal obstacle impeding the creation of an open-licensed customizable card game. In fact, I could see at least two main ways around it:

First, releasing a game under an open license doesn't necessarily mean that every supplement and detail is included in the license. When Wizards of the Coast first released Dungeons & Dragons under the OGL, it famously excluded certain monsters in the core Monster Manual from the open content—the beholder, the mind flayer, and the slaadi, among others. And while it did release further open content in some supplements, most later supplements didn't add to the available open content at all. The core rules were available for anyone to use under the terms of the Open Game License; most of the contents of the published D&D books was not. Paizo was much more generous with what it released as open content from its Pathfinder and Starfinder lines, but even there there was some material reserved as Product Identity.

Something similar could maybe be done for a card game—the rules could be released under an open license, along with sufficient graphic templates to allow anyone to create their own cards, but that license wouldn't have to include the specific cards—or at least, not all of the specific cards. Sure, people could make and print their own cards with the game owner's blessing, but the official cards they'd have to buy. Or, heck, even the text of all the cards could be released as open content / creative commons, and only the art excluded from the license, and there'd still be a collectible quality. After all, Wizards of the Coast manages to get people to chase down rare alternative art versions of common cards ("rare" and "common" here being used as general terms and not with their specific meanings pertaining to MTG card rarity); it's not hard to imagine that someone might still buy cards to collect them for their illustrations even if they're freely licensed to legally print out their own versions (sans the illustrations) as much as they want. (Well, okay, people can—and do—print out their own copies of MTG cards, too, but they're doing that without Wizards of the Coast's legal sanction.)

The second alternative, of course, is to not worry about the collectible aspect at all. As I understand it for Magic the Gathering nowadays it's only the most casual players who really experience the game's collectibility in anything like the way it was originally designed anyway; any competitive players or serious collectors shell out money to buy the single specific cards they want from resellers and don't rely on hoping to get lucky opening boxes. If a game's creators really want to make it freely available, they could just... do that. Just make it all freely available. It would be a customizable card game, but it wouldn't really be a collectible card game—and it's not obvious how the creators could make money from it—but they might be okay with that.

Which is why in the initial section I referred to "customizable card games" and not "collectible card games"—a customizable card game doesn't have to be collectible. In fact, while Magic the Gathering is a collectible card game, there are some commercial customizable card games that aren't: Ascension, Dominion, Hero Realms, Thunderstone; Fantasy Flight's "Living Card Games" and Cryptozoic's licensed games using its Cerberus Engine. Vampire: The Eternal Struggle and Legend of the Five Rings started out as collectible card games with randomized booster packs, but later were transitioned to fixed packs.

So yeah, it didn't seem at all impossible to me that open-license customizable card games could exist. And indeed, it turned out they did. But all of them that I found, interestingly, chose the second option: just making the whole game fully available and not worrying about collectibility. I'm kind of surprised nobody tried the first option. Or on second thought maybe I'm not, because, well, physically publishing a collectible card game costs money—a lot more money, I believe, than a book for a role-playing game, by the time you take into account the special printing and collation necessary, not to mention the cost of the art. (There's a reason why most small-press indie RPGs aren't exactly copiously illustrated, but for a customizable card game, more so than an RPG, the art is a big part of the draw.) I do wonder, though, whether that first option—making a customizable card game and opening up the rules for anyone to make their own cards, but retaining exclusive rights to the art on the official cards so you can be the only legal source for those and still make the cards potentially collectible—might be viable, but I can understand that indie creators wouldn't have the budget to pull it off, especially with the risk that it wouldn't pay off.

Anyway, here are the games I found:

Arcmage

Out of all the open-license card games we've found, Arcmage is the only one that seems to both be in a finished and playable state and still be under active development. At the time of this writing, there are five sets available—the latest released only last December—and over four hundred fully illustrated cards. While the rules are similar to Magic: The Gathering, one of the biggest differences is that victory is achieved not by depleting the opponent's life total, but by destroying all of their cities, a unique card type that plays an important role in the game.

The biggest challenge in creating Arcmage cards associated with Wongery worlds would be the factions; while Magic: The Gathering, for instance, has five color philosophies that are general enough to be fit to features of pretty much any world, the equivalents in Arcmage are five factions that apparently exist as specific organizations in the gameworld. Still, this is just a matter of reflavoring; it shouldn't be too hard to figure out appropriate factions in various Wongery worlds that can be more or less mapped to the Arcmage factions. In the world of Dadauar, for instance, it seems reasonable to match up the onirarchs to the Empire and the rebels to the Red Banner. The other three factions will require a bit more of a stretch, but perhaps the counterpart of the House of Nobles could be the faithful of Dadauar's gods; some of the undeveloped nations to the Gaians; and... hm, well, the Bathybius seems like it should be represented, but the only faction left is the Dark Legion, and that seems like a poor match. Wait, maybe the Bathybius could correspond to the House of Nobles and the gods to the Dark Legion? I'm not sure that's better. The thought occurred to me that maybe I didn't have to match the five default factions; maybe I could just make whole new factions of my own—but eh, I think there are a number of problems with that. Wait... maybe the Bathybius could be a neutral faction, "buyable" with resources from any faction? I'll have to think about this.

Libre

"You might have heard of Open Source," says the Libre website. "And you might have heard of Open Source Software. And you might have heard of Open Source Games. But I bet you’ve never considered that Open Source could possibly spill over into the Trading Card Game arena." Well, I did in fact consider exactly that, which is why I was looking for open source card games and how I found Libre in the first place. But anyway. Like Arcmage, Libre has some similarities to Magic: the Gathering—in some ways even more so, since unlike Arcmage it even mimics Magic's mana system, replacing lands with temples, mana with "spirit", and the five colors of mana with seven "spirit types". Also like Arcmage, however, Libre has a unique victory condition, hinging not on damaging the opponent but on accumulating "Faith Points" (which is done primarily by stationing followers inside temples, though there are other ways of getting them).

While the Libre theme of temples and followers is interesting and helps set it apart, it does make it a challenge to reskin the game and apply it to other worlds. Maybe we could at least make Libre cards for worlds where the gods play a major role; that would include Norg and, uh, okay at the time of this writing pretty much only that (though I understand Alarcus has a new alternate Earth in the works that may also fit the bill). Or maybe I don't have to worry about matching the theming too closely and I'm overthinking this.

Vera Discordia

Vera Discordia is a wargame with fixed army decks of twenty cards each, out of which the player chooses one of the three possible generals and then (unless their chosen general dictates otherwise) randomly draws five of their army's nine Basic Units, two of the six Elite Units, and one of the two Legendary Units. After placing their units, they then take turns drawing Order cards and deciding where and how to apply them. While the developers' website is apparently long gone, they've made all their files downloadable from BoardGameGeek, including the Development Kit that was released with the third expansion. (You have to create an account there to download them, if you don't already have one, but given that the game is released under a CC-BY-NC-ND license (except the Development Kit, which is under a CC-BY-NC-SA license so it can be used to produce new material) nothing's preventing someone from making them available somewhere else.) Unfortunately, that means much of the lore from their website is lost—while the front page of their website can be seen in the Wayback Machine, many of the other pages either weren't preserved there or were never finished. (That doesn't of course have any impact on the possibility of making new cards for the game themed around different worlds, but I do kind of wonder, for instance, what the Falkaethe's deal is supposed to be.)

Gaia

Gaia is a sister project to Arcmage, a different fork of the same original ruleset. There are some significant differences, however; among other things, players start the game with a unique "hero" card in play with special abilities, and, like in Magic: the Gathering but unlike in Arcmage you win by depleting your opponent's life total, though Gaia uses the term "health points". (Does it seem like I'm bringing up Magic: The Gathering too much? Well, it's the first, best known, and most popular customizable card game, so it's a natural point of comparison.) However, Gaia is in a much less finished state than Arcmage. The playtesting rules were revised just last month, so it's apparently still being actively developed, but so far there have only been a few dozen sample cards released. Still, along with the beta ruleset, that's enough that we probably could come up with some Gaia cards based on Wongery worlds... but should we, before they've officially released their own starter sets? Hm... again, I'll have to think about this.

Mixed Media?

While looking for open-license card games, I also found a few open-license games that sort of blur the lines between card games and role-playing games: Expedition, Storyleaves, Unsung Tales. I haven't decided exactly how to categorize them on the Game page (if and when they're listed there), but I think if in doubt I'm leaning toward counting them as role-playing games. (And Expedition in particular looks interesting enough and simple enough that I may put it among the first role-playing games we'll put support in for.)

Other Games

Of course, there are other kinds of games besides wargames and customizable card games that could be released under an open license, and could be adapted or expanded to other settings. Board games come to mind; of course many board games are abstract and don't really have a setting, but there are others that do, and that could be customizable to other settings. Anyway, I didn't find a lot of other games that both were released under an open license and had enough of a story or setting that it would make sense to adapt them for Wongery worlds, but I did find a few:

BrickQuest

Okay, I guess BrickQuest is maybe sort of a rules-light RPG, or it's maybe sort of a skirmish wargame, but, eh, its own rulebook calls it "fantasy boardgaming", so I guess I'll list it as its own thing for now, though when and if I add it to the Game page I may end up categorizing it as a wargame. Anyway, yeah, it's a dungeon exploration game released under a CC-NC-SA license, but its main gimmick is that it uses LEGO models for both the character and the environment (and even the character sheet!). Since I'd already been planning on releasing instructions for LEGO models of Wongery content under the Build tab, the hardest part of a BrickQuest adaptation is going to be done anyway.

Sovereign

Sovereign is an open source board game project released under a CC-BY-SA license, "designed to give flexibility to the rules so that players can develop in-house versions of the rules without breaking the game." Unfortunately, when I tried to look at the game's website, I got the message "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.", and I don't know whether it's really briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance, or whether it's down indefinitely and that's just meaningless placeholder text. According to the Wayback Machine, the site has been "briefly unavailable for scheduled maintainence" at least since Tuesday (the day I'm posting this is Friday); the most recent version of the site I can pull up is from about a year ago, and on that version the last post was from 2013, so... that's not encouraging. Still, as I said above, an open-licensed game's not being currently under active development isn't a major deterrent to our developing material for it, and given that there don't seem to be many open-licensed board games this may still be worth looking into. If the site doesn't come back up, you can download the core rules from BoardGameGeek, and there are more downloads available on the archived version of the site.

Saga

Not the Saga RPG mentioned above in the discussion of the wargame Tabletop Tactics, this Saga is a dice game representing a fight between two heroes, each represented by a hero sheet showing their attacks, defenses, and special abilities, or between teams of up to three heroes possibly controlled by different players. Each hero gets a number of Action Points per turn, which they can spend to move, attack, rest, use an ability, or visit a shop to buy items (or put down payments on items you'll obtain when they're fully paid for). The side that reduces the opponent's hero[es] to zero health points or below wins. The game currently comes with two heroes, a hardy berserker named Axe and a spear-wielding tribeswoman named Daia, but of course new heroes can be created—and there are source materials publically available to facilitate just that, including images for six more characters for whom full hero sheets are apparently not yet available.

Dragon Dune

Dragon Dune is a board game inspired by the Dune board game originally published by Avalon Hill in 1979 and long out of print until its recent rerelease by Gale Force 9. Dragon Dune removes some of the flaws the developers saw in the original game, as well as transplanting it from the proprietary universe of Frank Herbert's novels to a mythic fantasy "land of the Red Dragon"—and releasing it under a CC-SA license. Unfortunately, the game still seems to rely on enough specific features of the setting that adapting it to preexisting settings like those of the Wongery seems like it would be difficult—but that's not to say we won't look into it.

TinyTactics

From the same "WTactics initiative" behind Arcmage, Gaia, TinySquad, and Saga (the dice game), TinyTactics is a tile-laying strategy game where the tiles may represent characters (Unit tiles), locations (World tiles), or events (Event tiles). A player's goal is to defeat or capture the enemy Hero or reach nine Victory Points by taking out enemy units. Unfortunately, this game is still in an early stage of development, and while the playtest rules are available, nothing else currently seems to be. The link to get the PDF of the game isn't actually a link at all but just leads to the non-URL "coming", and the link to the source files leads to a private Google Drive directory to which I don't have access. Maybe that'll change soon, but at the moment I'm not sure there's enough here to work with. (A digital version of the game does seem to be available on Steam, but eh, I'm looking for physical open source games, and I don't use Steam anyway.)

Card Armies: Battle for Wesnoth

Card Armies: Battle for Wesnoth is a card game based on an open-source turn-based strategy computer game, The Battle for Wesnoth. (I gather The Battle for Wesnoth is a pretty big and notable thing in the open-source computer game community, but this post is about open-source tabletop games, so I won't delve into that here.) So why haven't I listed it among the customizable card games? Well, because according to the game's creator, it's not a CCG: "There are an abundance of CCG's out there already, but this is not one of them. The gameplay is closer to a wargame, only faster and no painting required." So should it be included under wargames? Uh... maybe? I'll figure that out later if and when I decide to add it to the Wongery Game page. At first I thought this was the original ruleset that Arcmage and Gaia forked off from, but no, it turns out that was apparently a different Wesnoth-themed card game, Wesnoth Tactics (so yes, that's what the W in "WTactics" stands for), and this game is its own separate thing. I think. Anyway, it's released under the GNU GPL, so there's no reason new supplements can't be made for it, including supplements that aren't connected with Wesnoth at all.

Masters of the Heist

Masters of the Heist is a cooperative game that uses interlocking hexagonal tiles to form the board and in which "[y]ou are a uniquely skilled career criminal who pulls meticulously-planned heists with your crew". The default game is set in 1919 America, but I could certainly see extensions and scenarios in other settings—as the game's creator says in the FAQ, "[t]he Heist narrative genre is incredibly flexible". However, while the FAQ mentions the game being "open source, under an MIT license", I can't find any mention of that in the rulebook or anywhere else on the site. I guess probably that's because the game is apparently still in beta; maybe the situation will be clarified when it has a finished release—though the wording in the FAQ seems to imply that only the development version is necessarily open source, and the final game may not be. Well, I guess this is a game I'll keep an eye on, but I won't try to do anything with it just yet.

Wastelander

Wastelander is a card game, but it's not really a customizable card game as we're (admittedly tacitly and vaguely) defining it here, so I'm putting it in the "Other Games" section. As the creator says, it's similar to Steve Jackson Games's hit game Munchkin, but unlike Munchkin it's released under a CC-NC-SA license. The core Wastelander game is set in a postapocalyptic, well, wasteland, but decks could easily be designed for other settings. The obvious choice would be to make a Nuclearth expansion, but there's nothing about the rules that really mandates a postapocalyptic setting, and we could—and intend to—make decks for other worlds as well.

Conclusion

Anyway, there are probably more open-source games out there, but I've spent enough (way too much) time as it is finding these games and looking into them; they'll do at least for a starting point. I don't promise we're going to release Wongery expansions, adaptations, or supplements for all these games (even the ones I didn't explicitly say we weren't going to do anything with), and I don't promise we'll necessarily have material for any of these games up at the time of the hard launch... but this is another item on our (increasingly lengthy) to-do list. Once I finally get the Game pages up and working, we're going to start with role-playing games, but we'll try to have something up for at least one or two games from each of these other categories as well.

Of course, all this may invite the question, why don't we just make our own open-source games? And, yeah, that's definitely something I've considered doing. But, first, while I do like to create things in general and I think it would be fun to try to create my own game, I think worldbuilding is really what I'm best at, and it may be better to focus on my strengths. And second, well, that's not what the Wongery is about. It's definitely not off the table for me to create my own RPGs other games at some point, and when and if I do I'll almost certainly release at least the core rules under an open license... but if I do that, I'll do it under a different pseudonym, and I won't announce it here. I'd rather keep the Wongery as its own thing, separate from any other projects I might have.

In fact, for all you know, maybe I've already released my own games, using a different pseudonym so you wouldn't connect them to the Wongery.

(I haven't.)