Cheeky
Monster
Games
purveyor of quirky, baroque fantasy-horror games
Featured Game:
Pocket Troll
Pocket Troll is a tiny portable game for 2 players. The premise is that 3 boys have seen a troll, but no one believes them. The boys have to bring 3 pieces of evidence to the village, while the troll has to get to the village at night (or eat all 3 boys). The game board has only 8 spaces (+2 tunnels), with a den at one end and a village at the other, and is played with tokens and cards.
I designed the physical version some time ago, and even did some motion capture for some of the animations, but got sidetracked with Io and other projects. The main task at the moment is redesigning all the game assets for the print version and then finishing the digital version in Unity, as my old version uses some outdated coding techniques that make it less extensible.
Enjoy the images below and keep an eye out for any playtesting sessions!
Our Games
About Us
Cheeky Monster Games is a purveyor of quirky and baroque, fantasy-horror games.
I started my gaming career playing roleplaying games, computer games, boardgames and outdoor games at friend's houses. My gaming nostalgia is governed by Fighting Fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons, Dragon Warriors, Call of Cthulhu and other RPGs, as well as Scarlet Sorcerer and Emerald Enchanter, that graphical interactive fiction book where you played two wizards but it was in first person. In a book. (There was another one but you were flying biplanes.) Defender of the Crown? Amaze-balls. I also fondly recall Attack of the Mutant Camels (giant camels like AT-ATs from The Return of the Empire Hoth sequence), The Bard's Tale (original), Might and Magic: Mandate of Heaven, Heroes of Might and Magic 2, Diablo (1 and 2, I even bought Hellfire, the Sierra expansion)...
Through my youthful gaming I dabbled at designing hybrid RPG systems, writing RPG campaigns, and coding homages to, and variants of, games I loved. My proudest original and finished adolescent work was Master of Icons, an odd hybrid of chess and RPGs inspired by Talengard and Archon Chess. (I only ever played those games briefly on a friend's Commodore 64, and had to pretend it and another friend's Amiga weren't really proper computers because I only had access to my dad's PC when PC's had 4 colours and music like a kid with a tin whistle scraping its nails on a blackboard). In any case, Master of Icons was 'released' as Shareware to much ado about nothing because I didn't understand things like promoting games or making them accessible to others...
I inconsistently pursued gaming, and after my PhD in game design finished prototypes for a mini-boardgame Pocket Troll as well as an over-sized strategy wargame Colossus Awakes. I then began adapting one of my old RPG systems, Shadow Realm, into a tabletop game which I re-branded Eidolon.
In 2013 I learnt Unity and made an experimental car installation called Holden Sunrise for The Cars That Ate Perth exhibition, and in 2016 a quiz game Quiz Quest for the WA Department of Health. After those digital excursions I got a little bit more professional and now, teaching game design at SAE Perth, Eidolon has evolved into a near-finished 2-volume 900 odd page RPG called Io, and I am working on digital versions of Pocket Troll and Colossus Awakes, and hoping to get time to work on a woodcut strategy game Death by 1000 Cuts and my 2019 game jam prototype, where you play a gelatinous cube trying to make a dungeon a home.
If you are interested in quirky, hybrid or unconventional games and all things monstrous, I hope you look forward to enjoy ours!
Regards,
Glen Spoors
