I find myself in an odd situation. I have a need to develop a clone game for an old and out-of-print game. I want to make my clone game OGL, and I want to improve the game to fix a lot of the problems with the original.

It may not be a true clone, as I am finding some of the game terminology to be confusing and just a tad pretentious.

The original game I am looking at is the Amazing Engine, and I want to call this new one the Astounding System, to keep the flavor of the original. I need to remove the Amazing Engine rules from another product, and replace them with it's evil twin. The original rules are only about 25 pages long, so this isn't a massive project.

Anyone have any ideas of the legalities of writing clone games here?

Thanks,

Craig J. Brain

I'm not a lawyer or anything but in general, here's the idea: rules cannot be copyrighted. Only the particular expression/presentation of the rules can be. To be totally on the safe side, you'll want to write it from scratch, avoid any reference to Amazing Engine (even if it was just to point out it is compatible with it) but technically, you could keep the math intact and still totally be clear legally.

Many people prefer the safety of an open license to clone, such as the OGLed DnD, even though legally, you can do without. Since Amazing Engine was never opened, you'll have to do without this if you want to produce a clone.

Thanks for the advice. I am writing the game from scratch, and I am not going to make it a true clone. I've already started changing the terminology to make it a little less confusing.

Craig J. Brain