Tabletop

Sweet Agatha is an ambitious product in many ways. It's a two-player, limited scope, narrativist RPG; it's a literarily ambitious attempt to marry themes of love and loss to an interactive product; it's a beautifully designed (from a graphic perspective) product that gets destroyed in play.

The story behind Pathfinder is so convoluted and indeed silly that it's worth noting.

Once upon a time there was Dungeons & Dragons. It was a little game published in a small box in three booklets, and it was, actually, kind of a bad game -- very poorly written and rather clunky. But it was the first RPG, and at the time the idea of a roleplaying game was so novel and exciting that it became a huge best-seller.

"Perhaps I should write about Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!," I mused. "But of course they can't play this thing, since it's not only out of print but incredibly obscure, and basically no copies are available anywhere."

No problem; I emailed JFD and got his permission to put the game up here.

The Dungeon of D is a "print-and-play" (PnP) game, meaning it's not available for sale, but instead you can download PDFs of the components and print them out to make your own copy. In other words, it's an amateur rather than a professional production, but it's worth remembering that "amateur" has its roots in the Latin "amare" (to love); that is, an amateur does what he does for love, not for money. While its rare for any amateur product to reach or exceed professionally-produced products, it can and does happen -- as it has with this game.

I am now officially tired of the "why can't we have games that do ______?" conversation. Like, you know "games can't do conversations, games can't do tragedy, games can't do X, Y, and Z", so we're stuck with nothing but Gears of War until the end of time.

The basic problem with this idea is, of course, the insistence that a "game" is a 3D high-poly-count app created for tens of millions of dollars by wageslaves in an EA/Activision/Ubisoft sweatshop.

A Bitter Aftertaste is a jeepform roleplaying game for four players that premiered at Ropecon, the Finnish national roleplaying games convention, in 2007. It is about two lovers who have just had the best sex of their lives, sitting on a balcony overlooking their city, and talking. Something games supposedly can't do, to be sure.

Why does a game about two people talking require four players? Because, of course, the game is a jeepform, and uses several of the techniques common to this game style: inner monologues, "insides & outsides," and imaginary scenes.

Harviainen imposes a narrative arc: by the end of the game, the insecurities of both members of the couple will lead to the loss of their love. Many narrativist "indie" RPGs also impose a narrative arc, but unlike those games, jeepforms have no die-rolls or other external mechanics for either action or scene resolution. They are pure roleplaying -- with a set of rules that allow players to seize and usurp the nature of the roleplaying, complicating the situation. Jeepforms have rules and mechanics, but they are rules and mechanics that control who roleplays what, and when and how. They are, in many ways, closer to "acting games" than traditional tabletop RPGs -- and yet, derive ultimately from the tabletop roleplaying tradition.

At game start, the lovers are chatting on their balcony. Two players represent them, and roleplay freely. At any moment, any of the players -- the lovers, or other two -- may interrupt, and act out an imaginary scene: A scene depicting what is going through the head of one of the lovers. For the purposes of this scene, any of the players may be chosen to represent either the lovers or other characters. As an example, let us say that one of the lovers is Robert, and the other is Sara (A Bitter Aftertaste is gender-neutral, and the game provides for both same sex and heterosexual couples). Something Robert said may have suddenly triggered, for Sara, the fantasy that he might betray her by having an affair with a co-worker. The player theoretically playing Sara on the balcony may not be aware of this fact, until another player seizes the action and grabs other players to act out the scene, one of the players (not necessarily the "balcony Robert") representing Robert, and another the coworker.

One rule of the game is that all such scenes must create doubt. None are permitted to end in happy resolution. And any return to the scenario in a later scene must escalate -- a greater fear, a greater consequence. During such a scene, the "dreamer" -- the person proposing that this scenario is running through one of the lover's head -- may request a monolog. S/he speaks this, facing away from the other players; the other characters do not hear it, but the players do.

Another rule is that imaginary scenes may not establish facts -- only doubts. And a third is that the game must end in a break up.

Like other jeepforms, A Bitter Aftertaste blurs the boundaries between theatrical improv and tabletop roleplaying; indeed, you could see it being performed before a theater audience, and perhaps one day games of this type shall be.

Pit is a wonderful game, probably the best game released in 1904. I imagine that Wheedle came about by Knizia taking a look and saying to himself "that's interesting... but I think I can do better." And so he did.

Like Pit, Wheedle is a lightly-themed stock game, played in real time, where players are frantically trading cards with each other to try to collect sets of cards. Each card represents stock in one of several satirically-named companies (like "N Securities" and "Hard Cell Phones"), and players are trying to get at a majority share of as many companies as they can.

Unlike Pit, all trades are made with full disclosure. You say not only how many cards you are trading with other players, but also which cards. Trades can be uneven; you can trade one card for two, or you can even give away or accept cards in exchange for nothing.

Additionally, there is one face-up card in the center of the table (the deck has 61 cards, so there will always be one left over, whether you play with three, four, five, or six players). Anyone can trade one-for-one with the table at any time -- first come, first served. This does occasionally lead to disputes of whose cards are whose when several players put a card on the table to exchange at the same time; as players get more experienced at playing, this tends to happen less.

At any time, any player can end the round of trading. The game rules do not suggest a mechanism for this (and I have witnessed games where some players are concentrating so much on their hand that they do not notice that the round has ended), so you would be encouraged to supply your own bell, air horn, or some other sufficiently attention-grabbing device.

Scoring is as follows: for every company in which a player has a majority share, they earn one point per card; a player gets two points per card if they own all cards of a particular company. There is one modifier to this: whatever single card is face-up at the end of the round is the company that went bankrupt, and all matching cards are worth negative points (even if part of a majority). As such, there is often some frantic trading with the center once players perceive that the round is close to ending.

The player that ends the round gets a five-point bonus if their hand consists only of majority or totality shares. They pay a five-point penalty otherwise. This mechanism generally prevents players from just ending the round on a whim, unless they are far enough ahead that they can afford it (in which case, it offers a way for a game to end faster if the winner is essentially determined anyway).

You play a number of rounds equal to the number of players, with highest combined score being declared winner. Overall, it is a fast-moving game that serves well when there is not much time for an extended game, or if you are looking for lighter fare after playing something particularly involved. Be aware that the game often involves lots of frantically-raised voices, so do not play in an area where you would be disturbing anyone else's quiet time.

Oh, and I make absolutely no excuses for the box art. Getting people to look past the eyesore red-and-yellow logo is probably the hardest barrier to entry for this game, and I can offer no suggestions there.

Bitch (verb) is a very short (rules on one sheet of paper) pick-up-and-play RPG for up to eight players. In this, it is quite original: an interesting roleplaying set-up, intended for a single, quick session of play, with minimal rules. It comes out of the indie RPG scene, but reminds me strongly of "acting games," the improv scenarios used by actors to hone their skills.

Possibly the most daunting challenge any game designer could set himself is this: to design a new game with the rules simplicity but strategic depth of classic abstract strategy games like Chess and Go. Those games have been refined over hundreds of years and pondered by millions of people; for an individual to create anything remotely as deep is -- well, not impossible, but clearly astonishingly hard.

And yet, with Arimaa, the Syeds seem to have succeeded.

Mystic is a card game released in 2000. Like James Ernest's Brawl, it came in several standalone sets (there were four in all, two under the label "Domination" and two more under the expansion set "Companion"). Each set came with two playable decks of cards, so you could play a two-player game right away, and more cards allows more players (up to 5 at a time). While the decks of cards are pre-constructed, players are able (and encouraged) to construct their own custom decks according to certain restrictions; it is therefore a customizable card game, but not collectible.

James Ernest is the designer of, among other games, Falling, Lord of the Fries, Diceland and Button Men. Cheapass Games is his vehicle for self-publishing quick-playing and generally very cheap games (as Lone Shark Games is his vehicle for corporate event games).

Three earlier Cheapass titles are available for free download (print and play) from the company's website -- and while these aren't Ernest's best titles, free is a nice price, and they're fun enough.