Remember the old Cheapass games in the late 90s? I do. Headed up by James Earnest, Cheapass attempted to open our eyes to the fact that most games are very samey. I personally have known this for a while; all games have three main “phases” so to speak. A setup, a Play space manipulation, and an Endgame. James takes it one step further into the realm of frugality reminding us that most board game components are interchangeable. He’s right, too. Play pieces, dice, tokens, paper monies, etc. really the only things not interchangeable are rules, boards, and cards. This bring me to his other point. Games are expensive, yo. The more we as a culture lose sight of the interchangeability of game parts, the worse it gets.
In my relentless fight against he collapse of gaming culture, Cheapass Games came to mind. James has seen Cheapass through many iterations the latest of which is Crab Fragment Labs where James keeps his proliferation of unique games, including a shop with some PnP versions of historic Cheapass Games.
James has been nice enough to help us out by selling us some of his classic Cheapass games he has left and granting us permission to create his PnP library for the Phoenix Games free games library.