TTRPG Collective Data Sparrow Celebrates 4th Year Anniversary
...and you've likely never heard of them before! Let's fix that.
Have you ever thought of how a game of Battletech would play like if, instead of a painstakingly rendered simulation of sci-fi armored combat, it was an arcade fighting game?
Have you ever wondered why there's so few tabletop games about powerboat racing, despite having there been a boom of videogames about it in the late 90s?
Have you ever wondered what an 8-man game of Battleship would look like if it was also Werewolf, and every player commanded a single ship?
Have you ever wished to disrupt grandma's flawless run of Monopoly by marching on her properties with a mech battalion and a few infantry platoons?
Have you ever stopped to consider...what if Mobile Suit Gundam was European?
If you found yourself answering "yes" to any of the above, we at the Data Sparrow art collective have one or more games for you!
Inspired by a pool of shared influences that include late 20th century anime, weirdly niche sports, contemporary historical happenings and obscure videogames old & new, Data Sparrow is a remotely-managed art collective spanning at least three of the seven continents, aiming to bring stylish and kinetic and somewhat unusual tabletop games straight to your table - mainly via PDF.
Operating since 2021, we've spent the past 4 years working on an anthology of print-to-play board games (& one RPG-lite) set in a unified narrative universe occasionally referred to as "Volgaverse" (from the name of the first game set in it, "Fist World Volga") or "Mankind's Reach" (which sounds fairly cool overall).
All of our games released so far are set on a particular planet within this greater universe, and going from one to the other will have you recognize reoccurring corporations, polities and ongoing historical events - as the whole setting reels from the end of an interstellar war and sets about to build a new order from what pieces lie scattered among the rubble and bodies.
Unlike certain other multimedia endeavors however, it is not at all necessary to follow our every release to "get" individual games - as they're all self-contained scenarios within the grander whole. We also don't plan on making sequels or incremental editions, only updates to the core games.
Since 2022 we've also done our best to pair each release with an accompanying music compilation, featuring both licensed and original compositions from artists we're lucky to be friends with. This seemingly unusual commitment hearkens back to the lost art of "unexpected game tie-in albums", whose best examples can be seen here and here. We at Data Sparrow believe more game studios, whether making videogames or tabletop, should do this again - mainly as a way to define the sound and feeling of a particular work's aesthetic pursuit, but also because it would be really funny.
We also make no money from these records, as sale revenue is split equally between the contributing artists of any given album - which means that every purchase actually supports the artists involved, no buts!
Occasionally, we've also had the chance to branch outside of tabletop gaming, working on a couple of videogame mods to include a port of Shardana: Hydro Trail GP to Tabletop Simulator, a landing page on Hypnospace Outlaw's fake internet and a setting/rebalance mod for the 1970s racing management game Golden Lap.
...and we've done all of this, but we forgot to actually let people know!
As such, we hope this article can contribute to fixing that somewhat. If anything described above sounded up your alley, you may find us on Bluesky, Itch.io and our own website (which has links to a whole lot of other sites)! Plus, all of our fixed-priced games are on sale from time of writing (April 30th) to May 13th - as part of the anniversary celebrations.
Also part of the anniversary celebration is the release of the Fist World Volga: Hall of Fame Collection - a series of 8 complementary cards depicting the various "canon" champions of the Fist World Volga mech fighting circuit! Cards such as the one pictured below, meant for print & fold. If you like the idea of owning a set of fake wrestling trading cards, you can get them for free from the game's itch.io page!
Last but not least, a huge thanks to Rascal News for letting us write this piece - and for being a pretty sick source for news on tabletop gaming projects & adjacent endeavors.
See you around!
