Deep Hearth: A Tactile Computer in a Tabletop World
Basin Game Studios
Deep Hearth is an open-source tabletop game about worlds that remember.
It is a small, playable reference ecology where characters, parties, rooms,
factions, equipment, dice, cards, familiars, machines, and land can all carry state and computation.
The game is designed to work with ordinary dice, tokens, paper, and writing. It
does not require Magic: The Gathering or an app. Those can become optional
Tableau organs through the Familiar System when a group wants to bring its own
decks, cards, calculators, or other instruments into the world.
Magic was one of the inspirations for this extension. The companion field note
is The Garden Is a Computer, which looks at cards, decks, zones, tokens, mana, and the stack as a tactile computer already present in the game.
The generic card substrate is called The Tableau. Magic is one Tableau host;
ordinary playing cards, tiles, counters, and other card systems can enter through
the same optional boundary.
The broader home for this work is magesguild.io, including Khipu Arcade and the Master Yupana,free games and instruments for exploring material computation.
Deep Hearth is now a public alpha. It needs playtesting. The rules are complete
enough to create characters, run scenarios, resolve combat and magic, use
optional familiars and compute organs, save a world, and return to it, but the
numbers, forms, and table procedures still need real groups to challenge them.
The project is open source under the MIT License. When the system is finalized,
we plan to publish affordable game books, campaign books, and prepared worlds
alongside the source.
Please play it, break it gently, and open an issue on GitHub when a rule is unclear, a sheet is awkward, a scenario surprises you, or the
garden grows somewhere we did not expect.
