Decision-making, mastery, and engagement.
People learn by doing, by trying, by succeeding, and by failing. These attempts (and especially failures) can have significant impacts on themselves, their workplaces, and the world around them. Games, wargames, simulations, and agency systems provide safe structures through which people can explore, grow, and even have fun.
Wax Wings designs are built to consider these three elements in everything we make:
Agency - Our games offer space to make decisions
Feedback - Our games respond to the decisions players make
Delight - The act of engaging with our games is a joyful process, which makes the lessons land harder
Games, Supplements, and Projects
-
Action Paths
"Action Paths: How Players Play" is an ethnographic approach to understanding how players make decisions, and how we can use that to make better games. "Action Paths" is an employable model that supports all designers: digital, tabletop, and even strategic serious games.
-
Decaying Orbit - ARPIA Game of the Year 2023
Humanity’s most distant outpost falls slowly into a star.
Decaying Orbit is a storytelling card game that invites players to explore a space station through confusing timelines and interesting methods. Decaying Orbit was part of an incredibly successful Kickstart that raised over 450% of its goal.
-
Die, But Once
"What a great look at death in #dnd, especially for a low-magic campaign. Read this; you aren't expecting what it's got for you." - James Haeck, Lead writer on DNDBeyond. Co-author of Waterdeep: Dragonheist, Descent into Avernus, and Explorer's Guide to Wildemount
Die, But Once is a 5e supplement for how to respond to player-character death. It offers players a chance to reflect on what the fallen character meant to them, and integrate some part of them into the future of their story. -
Rider's Last Rites
Felix Rider, mech pilot 1st class has fallen in battle. Now her four best friends gather to decide what will come of what remains.
Rider’s Last Rites is a small-team workshop about palliative care decision-making and the intersection of our emotions and medical ethics. It provides the Trojan Horse of giant robots to keep players engaged with a difficult topic.
-
An INTERCEPTED Communication from a REDACTED Organisation Referencing an UNKNOWN Individual
Do not let THEM know you’re playing this game. They are watching, change nothing. Your life depends on it.
INTCOM is a low-resolution one-page one-player Augmented Reality game exploring the act of play, where playing and not playing become indistinguishable.
-
Matches to Paper Dolls
Do you remember the first time you fell in love? That crushing, all-consuming feeling that captured all your waking hours? This game is about that.
Matches to Paper Dolls has been used in US High Schools to teach students about how to express their feelings with each other, put their hearts on the line, and how to take and accept rejection with grace. It was published prior to Wax Wings’ branding as a collaborative project under the banner of The Gauntlet. It is played by post, creating a pace that teases players into wanting more.
-
The Heartland
A 5e setting supplement with two new race options, new subclass options for every class, and a stack of quest hooks for bringing stories out of the big cities and into the breadbaskets that make them possible.