itch.io

Phew! Thank you :]

Sorry I missed this comment! A quickstart download shows up for me regardless of browser or account, so this issue might unfortunately be on your end. Is it showing up now?

Thank you for making such a cool game! In case you haven't seen the discord or itch announcements: we've made our judges' selections for the Havoc Engine Jam, and your game was one of my selections. We have a certificate with your name on it; if you'd like us to mail it to you, please email admin@rrdgames.com with an address for us to mail it to (and a phone number for our delivery partners). If you'd like more than one certificate so your team can each have one, let me know. 

To avoid a certificate heist, please include a screenshot of the edit page for this game on itch in your email. Example screenshot: 

In the meantime, please feel free to use our Seals of Approval on your game:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ShhLB_D4KHDKvuXebAzJXjESvcoSRzpb?usp=sha...

Best wishes,

Jim 

To avoid a prize certificate heist, please include a screenshot of the edit page for your game on itch in your email (example attached). 

To avoid a prize certificate heist, please include a screenshot of the edit page for your game on itch in your email (example attached).

To avoid a prize certificate heist, please include a screenshot of the edit page for your game on itch in your email (example attached).

To avoid a prize certificate heist, please include a screenshot of the edit page for your game on itch in your email (example attached).

Hello! Thank you for making such a cool game! 

In case you haven't seen the discord or itch announcements: we've made our judges' selections for the Havoc Engine Jam, and your game Free Like The Moon was one of Grant's picks to win. We have a certificate with your name on it; if you'd like us to mail it to you, please email admin@rrdgames.com with an address for us to mail it to (and a phone number for our delivery partners).

In the meantime, please feel free to use our Seals of Approval for your game:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ShhLB_D4KHDKvuXebAzJXjESvcoSRzpb?usp=dri...

Best wishes,

Jim

Hello! Thank you for making such a cool game! 

In case you haven't seen the discord or itch announcements: we've made our judges' selections for the Havoc Engine Jam, and your game Search and Rescue was one of Grant's picks. We have a certificate with your name on it; if you'd like us to mail it to you, please email admin@rrdgames.com with an address for us to mail it to (and a phone number for our delivery partners).

In the meantime, please feel free to use our Seals of Approval for your game:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ShhLB_D4KHDKvuXebAzJXjESvcoSRzpb?usp=dri...

Best wishes,

Jim

Hello! Thank you for making such a cool game! In case you haven't seen the discord or itch announcements: your game Masamune was one of Chant's selections. We have a certificate with your name on it; if you'd like us to mail it to you, please email admin@rrdgames.com with an address for us to mail it to (and a phone number for our delivery partners).

In the meantime, please feel free to use our Seals of Approval for your game:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ShhLB_D4KHDKvuXebAzJXjESvcoSRzpb?usp=dri...

Best wishes,

Jim

Hello! Thank you for making such a cool game! In case you haven't seen the discord or itch announcements: we've made our judges' selections for the Havoc Engine Jam, and your game Father Octopodes was both the second place voting winner and one of Grant's judge's picks. We have a certificate with your name on it; if you'd like us to mail it to you, please email admin@rrdgames.com with an address for us to mail it to (and a phone number for our delivery partners).

In the meantime, please feel free to use our Seals of Approval for your game:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ShhLB_D4KHDKvuXebAzJXjESvcoSRzpb?usp=dri...

Best wishes,

Jim

You can tell how much trouble we had picking favourites from how many wound up sharing the winner's image. Thank you for your patience, and without further ado.

The WINNERS of the 2026 HAVOC ENGINE JAM are:

Voting Winners:

Bone to Pick

Father Octopodes

Red Star

Chant's Seal of Approval:

Masamune

Dead and Breakfast

Hedge Knight Hustle

Grant's Seal of Approval:

Bone to Pick

FATHER OCTOPODES

Asphalt Overdrive

Search and Rescue Sector 22B

Free Like the Moon

Bump!

JAMS!

Jim's Seal of Approval:

Killer Crips 3000

Green the Grid

Arachno-Nerds!!

I'll contact all the winners over the next few days to arrange delivery of your Deeply Official Jam Winner Certificates and their attendant Seals of Approval, to be applied if wished to your game.

We'll be wrapping everything up over the next few weeks, but that's the bulk of the preserve jarred, so here's my soppy end of jam message. It's hard to communicate what a pleasure seeing this jam develop has been! There's games at earlier stages of development in that jam forum that I deeply hope see the light of day, reams and reams of carefully considered feedback and design thinking between itch and the discord, and literally hundreds of pages of original game design. I'd like to give a particular shoutout to HogwartsHoe, for leaving a substantial comment on every single game. Well done all.

With thanks,

Jim

Hello all. The voting period has ended! With 51 beautiful entries (and one car racing game), this would have been incredibly difficult to judge fairly as three partisan individuals, so we're really glad you've lent your knowledge and taste to the task and left us able to choose judges' favourites.

The three Havoc Engine Jam winners based on voting are:

Bone To Pick by Lucien Rain, which was ranked first place overall, in good use of the Havoc Engine, and in the interesting things it added to the engine;

Father Octopodes by RollForThings and with illustrations by Magicalflyingart, which was ranked second overall and first in how fun to play it seemed; 

And Red Star by Last Minute Panic Games (written by Xauri'EL Zwaan and illustrated by Brittany Becker), which was ranked third overall as a good all-rounder, with particular emphasis on using the Havoc Engine well!

Congratulations to our voting winners!! Thank you to everyone for participating in the jam, whether you reached ranking stage or not, and especially thank you to everyone who ranked other submissions with such zeal. 

I'm away til Monday, so we'll announce the Judges' Choices winners then (and I'll save my soppy ending remarks til then). We'll also get in touch with all winners to arrange delivery of your extremely official winners' certificates :] 

Community Store Information

In a different vein: we occasionally sell PDFs of community-made games through our website. If any of you are interested in selling your game this way, we would love it if you submitted it for consideration! Here is the form for that: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSelkA7KjG-p4uUUX2zUAqpXMnZyTtmQsUhNfQ4x... .

We're slowly spinning up our pipeline for community content after  testing it with three awesome community-made zines for Heart (https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product-category/community-works/?v=7885444af42e). You can find more information (the full Community Store agreement) here: https://rowanrookanddecard.com/rrd-community-licence/?v=7885444af42e 

This isn't a particularly time-limited offer, so if you're still working on your game but are interested in submitting sometime in the future, please bookmark the information page!

Some Community Store FAQs: 

What are we looking for in a strong submission to the community store?

- We want you to self-publish what you make, and then decide if you want to also submit it to sell through our website. We really want to avoid people limiting what they make with our community licenses on the offchance that we might put it on our website. Our priorities are not the deciding factor in whether you should publish your work

- You did it yourself (no AI)

- Relates to our work in some way - either using one of our community licences or something else

- It is a finished thing, playable / usable in the form it's submitted

- It broadly fits with the line it relates to, and doesn't bump into red lines around that. eg child death is off limits for us for Heart but OK for Hollows. this is the fuzziest one and it's very much evolving case by case - we want to do a guide when the process is a bit more developed

If you have more questions, please ask em here or in our discord, which you can join here: https://discord.gg/5DS7fnrvsy

I love a game that lets you cram a bunch of favourite characters into one big self-indulgent crossover and games that are about Defeating the Narrative, so I think I'm very much the target audience for this. I'd really like to play this game with friends and lean into the joy of tormenting favourite characters until they break reality about it! 

It's appealing and feels fitting for a Havoc Engine game that this game's approach is to immediately 'vastly oversimplify [your] Characters', and I like the guidance for making those simplification choices. The visual design also made me laugh in delight. 

I can see the plot of the Alternate Universe dissolving and crumpling in on itself in weird ways as the game progresses and characters get closer to their canon selves - I feel like this could be extremely cool, but could also feel disjointed and strangely paced. I'll echo other comments and say that in an ideal world it could be helpful to have some further advice or guidance for helping the game hang together as the story splits apart - for example, more clearly marking the key Plot Points that you might plot your session around in the examples list.

- Jim

#1 Industrial Sabotage Fan is my favourite piece of art for this jam. An icon. The Raid generation tables are brief but meaty, just ideal. This is a rare game that feels good for printing at the library, it's very efficiently laid out, but if there's one thing I would wish for: if you were willing to spread it out a bit with some more art (from field manuals or otherwise) I think it could be an especially pleasant reading experience. 

Thank you for making something with the Havoc Engine!

- Jim

This is a complete 74 page game with a nicely formatted VTT in Google Sheets! Created for a one month jam! Disclaimer: I don't have the knowledge to comment on balance, so this is all based on other elements of design. 

I love how this game builds on a disabled view of the past and present. The list of Disabled Heroes' Wish-Granting Artefacts introduced me to 5 wikipedia rabbitholes on historical disabled people I would never have thought about otherwise. It's such an unexpected relief to be so fluidly and unashamedly shown our world as one that disabled people have always lived + struggled + done cool shit in, here and elsewhere in the game. It's such a good, solid base for a game that asks you to imagine a disabled utopia while ramming, sniping & exploding your way through the Cursed Tower. "Remember the past, fight for the future"...! 

The way the mechanics incentivise you to slowly and collaboratively add details to that mostly-unseen utopia in order to reroll dice - meaning that this imagination will likely happen in times of the most high-stakes stressful rolls - is also extremely cool. This is very much my own game preferences, but that's the part of this game that I'd be most excited to experience in play. 

I particularly like The Office encounter - excellently deployed balance of puns and creepiness - and the evocative little questions for the players in some of the encounter descriptions (do the players recognise any of the statues of benefit cutters? what inspirational poster catches the players' attention?). I want to talk about interesting tensions and questions of this game's setting for ages, but I should really just play the game to explore them. 

Some final notes:

- The art is gorgeous. Lo Cleary did an incredible job, the illustrations drip texture with a world it feels like you can bite. I kept coming back to stare at the cover. 

- Design for cognitive accessibility and particularly for different abilities at the same table is always cool to see.

- I'd be interested to see how describing moments of rest and care to gain Spoons affects the frenetic non-stop rhythm the havoc engine produces in something like Eat the Reich.

Thank you for joining the jam! 

- Jim

Hey Jay, thank you for your thoughtful reply! I've replied to your email.

Kind regards,

Jim

(Sorry that this message is public - I couldn't find contact information for you on itch, and this website doesn't have private messaging. If you would like to send us a private message, our email is admin@rowanrookanddecard.com).

Edit: the creators have kindly agreed to remove all art using gen-AI, so the game is now requalified. Thank you for going to the effort!

Hi Ben, Jay and Rich,
Thank you for submitting to the Havoc Engine jam. 

We noticed that your game uses some AI-generated art. The jam's rules don't allow AI-generated art to be submitted. 

Unfortunately, as the game stands we will have to disqualify it for this jam. This is a real shame because your game is both very impressive and obviously a work of love, and the game's artist can obviously make fantastic art without the use of generative AI. 

Our general stance is that we literally always prefer to see an imperfect human-made sketch to a shiny AI-generated image. Generative AI is a labour issue; our stance against it as a company is a strategic one, to fight against the ways it's increasingly used to devalue the work of writers and artists in our industry. One of the books we're currently publishing, Grossi Orchi Gay, was initially illustrated with AI by its author and is now illustrated with his extremely charming biro doodles, and it's about twice as characterful. 

If you would like to remain in the jam, we would ask that you remove all AI-generated art from the submitted game. We're aware it's a hard thing to do on a deadline - if it's not something you're interested in doing, no hard feelings on our end, we just won't keep it in the jam.

Kind regards,

Jim

Hello all! I'm crossposting this announcement (a little late) from our Discord server, which has a permanent havoc engine design channel. If you'd like to join the server, you're very welcome: https://discord.gg/8HrpaNfU3y 

Thank you all for joining the jam! It's been a sincere joy. If you just missed the deadline but would still like to submit something, just send a link to it on itch.io to me in the next couple of days (by commenting here, or emailing admin@rowanrookanddecard.com). Small and partially complete entries are welcome. 

We now enter the voting phase! Voting is limited to people who submitted to the jam (plus Grant, me and Chant) to avoid it becoming a popularity contest - we trust you to rate each others' games fairly and kindly. Everyone who submitted has 14 days to rate stuff, and then we'll pick out some winners who will receive a larger allotment of glory, and possibly some kind of mysterious prize. 

This is essentially an excuse to spend some time celebrating, reading and talking about what people have made, so if you (like me) didn't finish something but would still like to read some cool games, you can leave your nice thoughts as comments on game pages or in the havoc jam channels in the discord to give someone a lovely surprise. (With comments please ask before giving constructive criticism - this goes by standard 'people made this thing for free on the internet' rules.) 

P.S. Some lovely people in the discord have been running playtesting sessions twice a week over the jam, and are tentatively planning to keep a Tuesday night call going for anyone interested in playing each others' Havoc Engine games. There's also some interest in a Saturday and/or GMT-timezone-friendly games night. If you're interested, do hop in the Discord and head to the #havoc-engine-design channel: https://discord.gg/8HrpaNfU3y 

Phew. That's all for now. Thanks for reading!

- Jim

Hi Rupert! Sorry for the confusion - I made an end-of-jam post on our Discord server, but I've been slow cross-posting it here - I'll post it in the community now. We're accepting late submissions for the next couple of days to accommodate for misreading the deadline, life happening, etc.  - Jim

Hi Jorrit! Thank you for making something so cool for Eat the Reich!! We welcome slightly late submissions. This link should let you submit your game, if you'd like: /jam/414057/add-game/4422634/247805?token=AOxIymwLzg7wHYOOxFBdUL5...

- Jim

Ooh, thank you for letting us know! Something always slips through.
Here's a Discord invite that should work if you'd still like to join the server: https://discord.gg/B7QCYWCVfK Life gets in the way often, but we have a havoc engine design channel year round :]

Hi! I think I may have seen one of your custom characters on social media? This invite link should work: https://discord.gg/wERUmYbQph - Jim

Hi porridgelad - if you would still like a DIE pdf: we have a pdf guarantee, so if you email admin@rowanrookanddecard.com with a photo of your copy/other purchase proof and an email you've used to make an account on our website, we (I) can send the updated pdf to you.

Sorry for this extremely late reply, we weren't monitoring itch comments until... today!

Kind regards,

Jim