THRACK
How Thrackdown Started
Thrackdown actually began as something much smaller. I was trying to strip a campaign-style skirmish game down into something we could run as a quick drop-in, drop-out experience at conventions for Crossfire Gaming Club. The idea was to give people something fun they could sit down and play without much preparation, while also giving us an excuse to get them over to the table and talking to the club.
That experiment went better than I expected and picked up a few awards along the way. More importantly, it taught me a lot about what worked when you put a skirmish game in front of someone who hadn’t spent hours learning it beforehand.
Rather than keep cutting pieces out of an existing style of game, I decided to start again and build one around those lessons.
That was really the point where it started becoming Thrackdown.
The aim from the start was to keep the number of dice rolls down, make turns move quickly, and concentrate on the things people actually remember afterwards: the desperate shot that somehow worked, someone refusing to go down, a weapon failing at exactly the wrong moment, or a fighter completely misjudging a jump. Those are usually the stories we end up talking about after a game, and I wanted Thrackdown to create plenty of them.
It has now been in development for more than two years, with a lot of that time spent testing, rewriting and running games through Crossfire Gaming Club. By the time I released it into Open Alpha, it was already a complete playable game rather than an early rules sketch.
What it needs now is more people playing it without me at the table.
That’s the reason for the Open Alpha. I want to find the rules that only make sense because I wrote them, see what different groups do with the factions and campaign system, and work out what still needs changing before Thrackdown becomes the finished game I’ve had in my head for the last couple of years.
Why Thrackdown?
Thrackdown is a made-up name, but there's quite a lot packed into it.
Thrack is an old English word meaning to burden or load. It also appears in Scots as a form of thratch, meaning to struggle or writhe, sometimes in the throes of death.
Both meanings seem rather appropriate for a world built on industrial exploitation, where civilisation has collapsed and the people left behind are fighting over whatever they can salvage.
There's a bit of throwdown in there too. At the end of the day, it's a skirmish game, and sometimes the best way to settle an argument in the wasteland is with a length of rusty pipe.
If you're curious, I've written a bit more about the name and some of its other meanings.
Read: Why Is It Called Thrackdown?