Just before we took a break for Thanksgiving in 2025, Mike had the opportunity to sit down with creator Brian Bautista of Barge Games, to talk about his TTRPG, Twenty Flights. Twenty Flights is a game set in a post-fantasy dieselpunk world, where you play as broken gnomes in bombers. Over the course of their talk, Mike was able to find out what Brian means by “broken gnomes in bombers,” as well as talk about Brian’s thoughts on game design, the amount of math used in games, and making a dice rolling system that was difficult for all the testers with Master degrees to easily guess what was about to happen.
After the talk, Mike said, “Twenty Flights is a really fun concept built around a fast paced system that doesn’t require math! You should definitely try your hand as a daredevil gnome piloting a diesel bomber. I had a great time talking with Brian and appreciate his passion for game design and creativity in gaming. Dare to try something interesting and different on your next game night.” When I reached out to Brian about his thoughts on the stream, he gladly sent me a reply. “I had an absolute blast sitting down with Mike! It is great to sit down and talk shop and Mike does an incredible job probing into the underlying ideas of the game and drawing out the fundamentals of how they came to be. It was really nice to step back and verbalize a lot of the game’s design decisions, not something you get to do all the time.” Brian also gave some information about what’s coming up with Twenty Flights. “I am still working on Twenty Flights, I still need to figure out character progression in particular. Once that is worked out a bit, I should have an update for the ashcan and be ready to push towards releasing the full version of the game. Crossing my fingers and hoping for an ashcan update sometime in March with a more proper release this summer!”
The talk was streamed on our Twitch channel, with a replay over on our YouTube channel. You can follow Brian over on Bluesky under the BargeGames.com handle, and you can find the current iteration of Twenty Flights on both itch.io and DriveThruRPG.
The team would like to thank Brian once more for giving us a bit of his time to talk about games, and we encourage you to check out both the talk and Twenty Flights!