Where Trunk Book got its start
I have always loved playing and inventing paper-and-pencil games. This interest started back before computers were everywhere, so making up games on paper was just a natural creative outlet that was available. We played them at school, at home, and even before church on Sundays. It hadn't occurred to me to write them down until a time I was visiting my grandmother. She'd been working with housekeeping at Duke University and at the end of the school year, after the girls in one of the dorms had moved out, she found a nearly empty notebook they'd abandoned. She brought it home for me — just something to use as scrap paper or draw in. Instead, it became where I started recording the games themselves, not just playing them.
The notebook itself
The notebook had a hard cover, and across the front a student had written "Trunk Book" in bold magic marker. I often wondered why they picked that name, but in hindsight, it fit. Over the years, the book spent long stretches packed away in storage, living up to its name like a forgotten relic.
Why now
Plenty of years went by where I never touched the trunk book at all, but it would surface occasionally and it managed to survive every change of address we've made. Once my daughters were old enough to appreciate a sense of what younger me had been into, I introduced them to a number of the games. In some ways gaming in general has become increasingly complicated, but even with how massive modern games have grown, there’s still a huge pull toward simpler, lower-stakes play— a niche where minimalist indie games and retro classics thrive. I believe that same pull exists for paper-and-pencil games, and that’s the spirit I want to tap into here.
This project is something I've thought about doing for a long time, but there had been a real barrier: I spent so many hours a day in front of my laptop, on the clock and off, that turning this into another computer project risked making it feel like a chore instead of the thing I wanted it to be — play.
What finally gave the project some momentum happened quite suddenly. I was already looking for an excuse to spring for a paid personal subscription to an AI coding agent for some other ideas I'd been kicking around, and I figured — why not let this project be the justification for buying the full year's subscription and a chance to learn what the current generation of AI tools can do? I expected to more or less vibe-code a rough prototype, then put it back on the shelf and move on to something else. Instead I found the toolset was strong enough that I was almost never fighting it. It transformed the process from what could have been a grind into the genuine passion project I wanted it to be. I could move back and forth between designing and polishing whenever I felt like it, and my coding partner kept track of issues raised along the way. Some evenings I had time to work on it a lot, other evenings barely any, and I could pick it back up again just as easily the next time.
What I hope you get out of it
I hope you find a game or two here that you genuinely enjoy and return to play again. More than that, I hope it leads to some of you pursuing your own dormant ideas, as the world could use a little more of the creativity we all had as children.