I haven’t played the following games yet and therefore the opinions below are just based on reading the entries.

No mistakes, only deeper plans

This is a heist game that hinges on a single clever mechanism, whenever the thieves fail in a dice roll you flashback to the planning stage and explain how the failure is part of the bigger plan to rob the vault.

As an entry it focuses on its core mechanic to great effect, however in doing so there is nothing offered on how to create the crew trying to complete the heist and what tensions might exist between them.

This was one of the Judges’ short-listed games.

Fallen Stars

I’d already seen a draft of Fallen Stars written in anticipation of this year’s competition. It’s inspired by a lot of things I like, especially the House of the Dying Sun.

Open Mic Dungeon Night

Believe or not there are a few games based around creating rhymes as their resolution mechanism.

Open Mic Dungeon Night delivers its rules in rhymes but uses a shared collection of words on slips of paper to create the challenges and possible solutions. Players then create a rhyme that describes the challenge and how it is overcome in four lines.

My experience of rhyming games is that generally players have to take time to compose their response and the resulting downtime kills games.

It might be a fun thing to do online though.

GHOST//BODY: Road Warrior Repossessors

GHOST//BODY recasts Mad Max: Fury Road as a ghost story with hideous ghosts possessing both people and vehicles and retaining them through social media pleasing violence.

The mechanics are pretty boring: a d8 pool rolling with a 50:50 hit ratio and success cancelling on a 1 (which is very boring). They are orthogonal to the theme.

The concept seems interesting but it needs more words to explain it.

All for one

All for one offers a lightweight take on the single-character RPG. It does a good job of assigning roles and handling the setup of the situation but then doesn’t have space to explain how a story arc is meant to be evolved or how challenges or problems should be resolved during game play.

This probably would have been better as a “supplement” style piece.

Road Trip

Road Trip has a classic premise a driver and their passengers are making a journey. The game is mostly freeform with players taking turns to describe how the journey is going. However the passengers each have a trait which if they bring it into play may allow the driver to progress to the next milestone on the journey on their turn.

I found the game hard to read even at 200 words, it took me multiple scans to understand how the rules fit together. It also has a weird thing that a passenger might have a trait that prevents the driver from getting to the next stop which seems like a tedious ability to prolong the game with no particular increase in the drama of the game.

Road Trip is an interesting sketch of a game but it lacks drama for me. There’s nothing to emphasis why the trip is important and why some of the passengers might want to delay the trip and others are eager to complete it.

It more of an opening than a complete game.

Memory Palace: a character study in reverse

Memory Palace is a game of memory and recollection. There’s a lot here that recalls A penny for my thoughts and Bibliomancy. All the players are exploring the sub-conscious of one character, they select a book that will provide the context for role-playing out memories based around objects that the group find in the subconscious. The goal is to learn the story of the person.

There are no mechanics and really the game is more the structure for a game poem.

Superstition

This was a PbtA supplement, the highly expandable system of Fronts and Moves means that you might have expected more entries in this category but this is the only one I saw.

It’s also a little disappointing, it introduces a new stat Belief and an associated move that offers a related type of Hold when the character acts according to popular superstition and achieves a hit.

The move doesn’t really add depth to the world and the miss result doesn’t really have story consequences so really this feels like a little sub-system that is spinning in its own little niche.

Lovecraft Lightest

A mini-system that really feels like it doesn’t have that much to do with Cthulhu. It’s most interesting feature is that it has rolls on a d12 with the stat accumulating after failures with character death occurring when the stat hits 11.

This would be great for something like mutating superheroes but it’s not clear why a professor would just get stronger when they fail to kill things until they eventually die.

One-night stand

Two people have flashbacks as they make love, in the heat of passion their true natures are revealed with random consequences as to whether this is bad or good.

It’s interesting, more than a little awkward in terms of who you might be able to play it with and I think the randomness robs something from the game.

Reframed as lovers flashing back into their history together this might be quite interesting.

When the wolves come

A walking game about preparing for the apocalypse and deciding how your going to use your local area to defend yourself against the marauding packs of wolves that will accompany the end times.

It’s one of those semi-autobiographic LARPs that has a kind of conceptual art and this type of directed experience doesn’t really float my boat.

They’re just dice, right?

The story of adventurers discovering a set of dice that reveals an alternate reality is more a piece of flash fiction than a game. Suberversive concept but also a bit unnecessary.

Steampunk Serial

There’s a hell of a lot of ideas in this game: a class-based conspiracy, metaphysical serial killing, police procedural and reincarnation. It feels heavily influenced by Perfect and has a PvP element where most of the players are trying to stop the serial killing character from destroying society.

The rules imply some random tables and a way to make the hidden roles work. However it’s hard to fathom how these are meant to work. It feels like one entry that would benefit from a higher word count version.

The tavern at Dungeon Level 200

This is a great entry with a simple fail-forward system and a narrative closed system that is GM-less. The conceit is that you are the staff of a tavern deep with a dungeon. A powerful monster arrives and orders something that requires a vital element or ingredient to be be obtained from the surrounding dungeon.

The basic system feels strong and like it could be hacked to do other kinds of games.

Thomas Crown Affair

A strictly three player structured freeform which feels like it might be better suited for an online text-based game rather than a face to face experience.

The entry describes a series of scenes to be played out with strict directions but not much support given the word limit. A few of the stages (which mirror the film’s plot structure faithfully) have helpful questions but there is no game structure or way of resolving the outcome beyond negotiated endings that require experienced or skillful players.

The Truth of the Stars

Conceptually this one is brilliant, the players take on the roles of an heir who is soon to be Queen and the astronomers of her court. Each player takes it in turn to assume the role of the heir while the others throw mixed dice to create constellations in the sky, drawn on a shared sky map.

Each astronomer then describes the constellation and explains how it demonstrates the heir’s fitness for the throne or prophecies their coming rule.

The heir then picks which story is most truthful and the next round of play begins.

The text is characterful but it does bump into the word count slightly, it would have been useful to have more about how the different constellations and the stories build together to foretell the coming of a great ruler.

So you’re being hunted

Another mindful/presence LARP but this one is about running rather than walking. Run as if someone is hunting you down. Decide what it is and whether you will be able to face it, escape it or succumb to it.

At least this one is about running, other than that these games aren’t really my bag.

Escape from the Drowning Tower

Conceptually strong, the game is about escaping a Tower that is sinking into some unspecified body of water. The players take on the roles of adventurers who have slain the former occupant of the tower and are now trying to escape the tower.

This is a playing card game that very much puts a light roleplaying sheen over a clever piece of collaborative card play. Each round the GM describes a situation and draws a card from a fixed deck, the players have to beat the challenge value.

Although the rules don’t explicitly say it I think this is meant to be played similar to Hearts Blazing in that players can’t say what value card they are playing so collectively the team need to guess at what the other players might play to avoid going to high above the challenge value and potentially not being able to counter another challenge later.

It feels a lot like a lightweight closer or filler which means it needs the right moment to come to the table.