Fire Breathing
Ferrets
Come see the game that inspired Gilbert Gottfried to call my education
"money flushed down the toilet," and Colin Mochrie to tell me to "stay
outta comedy"!
The Design
The first game I ever made at UCSC was actually a card game called Fire Breathing Ferrets. It's basically a card based simplification of D&D 5e, and it's still one of my favorite things I've ever made. A lot of my time was spent trying to make the cards funny! I had an absolute blast making my Looney Tunes-Pathfinder crossover, and I'm honestly still fond of the way my totally-new-to Adobe Illustrator style blended with the cartoon comedy I was trying to get across.
The Game
Fire Breathing Ferrets is an asymmetrical card-and board-game played with 5 people. Four players take on the roles of the ferrets, four classes of fantasy rodent with powers over fire, and take on their ancient enemy the 'Cryote', a merciless wolf with ice magic. Fight in a wild, goofy, marker-filled melee where every card has a joke!
Reception
The game was received well by my Professor and classmates, and created a lot of laughter in group play tests! Two years after its debut I would still find myself running into people wanting to talk about Ferrets.
​
For Christmas one year, my sister had a great gift idea. Knowing how much I love stand up comedy, she went to Cameo and sent them material from Fire Breathing Ferrets. She asked the great Gilbert Gottfried to read the blurb I wrote for the back of the box, which he started doing before he put his own spin on it and turned it into insult comedy, and the legendary improv-comic Colin Mochrie to do one of his famous “Hoe Downs” from Who’s Line Is It Anyway, before he told me to “stay outta comedy.” It was one of the proudest moments of my life.
