Games for Crabs

The Garrison Hotel Sheffield 

Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th July 2026

1. Why I Went

I have someone I consider a friend. He is someone who pushes the boundaries in many things and tries things other people think are bound to fail. A blue-sky thinker. An innovator. A risk taker.

He had this idea of calling a group of games designers together at a small convention. This seems to be part of the zeitgeist, with conventions specifically for games designers or writers popping up here and there. I may be attending another one later in the year.

But THIS convention idea went further. Could these designers design games FOR (not about) non-human species? Completely bonkers. But I had the weekend free, so I agreed to attend.

2. The Shape of the Convention

The event took place at The Garrison Hotel in Sheffield - the base of so many wonderful (normal) TTRPG conventions. There were eight attendees, the organiser and a guest speaker.

All of the attendees had credentials in gaming, but most were in video or board gaming. Everyone seemed aware of and had played TTRPGs, but they weren’t their focus.

I found them to be an extremely impressive group of individuals.

The event opened with a fascinating talk from a researcher involved in the field of evolution - specifically the evolution of the mind. His current research is into the evolution of "low mood". Desperation as a survival mechanism?

The thrust of his talk was about how non-human minds could evolve. Fascinating stuff.

Following this, the organiser presented a range of non-humans we might wish to base our game designs on - Bats, Crabs, Fungi, Hive and Pixies.

We chose the species we wished to work on and formed groups. Ironically, Crabs were not selected. Bats, Fungi and Hive (Bees) were selected. We split into three groups of three. The organiser joined in with the group working on a game for Bees.

I ended up in the group working on Fungi.

3. What Happened

Saturday morning: Following the talk, we were supposed to determine what our advanced version of the species we were looking at would look like. Develop a "people" we could design a game for. The organiser had designed species-specific notes for each group for each session. The ones we were given kept referring to "hosts" rather than leading us to develop separate fungal individuals or "mushroom people".

Our research showed fungi to be a challenging choice. The sheer number of fungi, their various abilities and the way they reproduce and grow was overwhelming, even given help from the visiting evolutionist, who dropped into the group to answer questions and give us a steer.

Saturday afternoon: This session was to develop our evolved people into a society. What would that look like and how would games fit into it? What values would such a society have and how would they pass them on?

Given the massively devolved nature of any potential fungal intelligence, we found it hard to conceptualise a fungal society in and of itself. So we settled on the idea of fungi forming symbiotic relationships with other life forms. A game idea began to evolve of fungi "learning" how to infect and co-operate with such life forms through "Robot Wars" style games. Equal amounts of fungi infect other forms of life and then compete to see who was most successful. Would it be better to infect a large number of smaller life forms or a smaller number of larger ones?

A coffee break naturally formed in the middle of the afternoon, where the different groups exchanged notes on the progress they were making.

Saturday evening: This is where we were supposed to hone our ideas about what games could exist in our society and how we were going to present them. As we talked more, we realised that representing the way fungi communicated with each other and with their hosts was too complicated to express.

One of our group (not me) stated he felt like it was beginning to feel like a role-playing game. He posited the idea that fungi in a symbiotic relationship with humans would have drives based on two axes.

Covert to Blatant. Some fungal colony intelligences would want to keep their relationship with humans secret and others wouldn’t care.

Active to Passive. Some fungi would want to infest as many humans as possible as quickly as possible, whilst others would be much more subtle about it.

Clearly this was too much to design in the short time left, so we decided to present the character sheets and box art for the game.

There was some time for drinks in the bar, but I decided to try and get a head start on designing the character sheet in my hotel room. Unfortunately, I struggled with the hotel Wi-Fi and fell into a rabbit hole trying to find images of veins of blue cheese to use as axes on the motivation chart.

Sunday morning: We were supposed to finish designing/making our game and playtest it with the other groups.

I spent the morning designing the character sheets. The fungi PCs themselves would have one sheet, but the players would collect cards presenting the hosts they’d infested. I also knocked up a front cover and back cover for the box/book. The text was written by one of my team-mates.

We had nothing to actually playtest. I was lucky in that I was able to delegate explaining our game to the other two groups in turn. I got to see each of the games the other groups were working on.

The work of the Bee group was brilliant. The organiser had provided whatever game development materials he could acquire and thought would be useful. This included some hexagonal cards.

The conceit of the game was that two hive minds, upon encountering each other, would have no way to communicate directly and would have to grope towards understanding via their bees. To represent this, two players each wrote words on the six sides of some hexagonal cards, which were then arranged in a hexagon. These had to be adjusted and rearranged until all 12 words on the adjoining sides had six pairs which made sense. But players couldn’t communicate with or even look at each other. They had to communicate through a third player called "The Priest". They would keep throwing in instructions, some of them designed to make the communication difficult or make the players feel socially awkward.

There was a workable game in there, but it had too many layers. It was also a game ABOUT bee communication rather than one FOR bees.

It could easily be developed into a saleable product, though. "Hive Mind".

The Bat group had developed a British Bulldog-type game where young bats flew around trying to collect fruit while older bats pretended to be humans and tried to beat them to it and capture or kill the bats. They had several variations depending upon the state of their bat society’s development.

This was a game FOR intelligent bats to train their young and met the design brief for the weekend.

My group didn’t even have a game. Just an idea of what it looked like and how it could be played. It wasn’t a game FOR fungi. (How would you even design something like that?) It was a game ABOUT fungi infecting humanity.

Feedback was that the working title - "Fun Guys" - needed workshopping and that we should lean more into the communication between fungi and between fungi and their human hosts.

Sunday afternoon: We were supposed to use the feedback to refine our designs ready for a final presentation. I was unable to connect my iPad to the hotel's projector, especially given my problems with the Wi-Fi. But the hotel kindly printed my designs to hand out, and I held my iPad up during our talk.

As it turned out, none of the groups needed much time for refinement. The calibre of designers present was stunning. All were able to crash through refinements and preparation with ease. The whole weekend rounded off over an hour earlier than planned, which suited everyone present.

4. Play Reflections

This was a speculative weekend from an innovator in the hobby.

No one really knew what to expect.

It seems likely that the three "games" developed will never see the light of day as finished products. However, many of the gaming luminaries present maintain blogs, and I expect many of the design principles explored to appear in those.

This was a weekend about PROCESS not PRODUCT.

And it worked. I enjoyed it and learnt a lot. I suspect the other attendees did as well.

5. Cost, Time, and Value

Headline figures

Convention cost (ticket): £35
Travel cost: £22.69
Accommodation cost: £95*

Total convention-specific cost: £152.69

Total hours: 15

Approximate cost per hour: £10.18

Cost of a pint of lager: £5.80

* This is the standard Garrison "convention rate" and includes breakfast. On this occasion it was cheaper than the chain hotel I sometimes use in the city centre, especially when you factor in the cost of breakfast.

6. What I Took Away

This event should not have worked. It takes visionaries to try things like this.

I do not work well with others. I write my games on my own in my bedroom on my iPad. I play TTRPGs because they give me a reason to get around a table with other people and rules to manage that interaction.

At Games for Crabs I worked with two amazing men on a focused project and interacted with several other intellectually impressive people with regard to their design work. It stretched me socially and intellectually. I enjoyed it.

It doesn’t matter that the design work was all theoretical and nothing tangible will come out of the weekend. It was all about the journey, not the destination. I hope it fits into my diary in 2027 because I do want to do it again.