Review: Someone to Love

[chiefprimate]

Someone to Love

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REVIEWER NAME: Michael Selvaggio

1) CREATIVE AND EFFECTIVE INCORPORATION OF RULES (1-10): 5
Feedback: All elements are met. Committee and Love work. The ingredient ancient is not a significant ingredient. The use of time 10 one hour sessions I believe is a poor choice and dose not work for this subject regardless of the 10hrs div. by five player issue. A 2 hour format would add pressure for the committee and the dating dead.


2) CLARITY (1-10): 4
Feedback: Using the tem “roll” (there are no dice in the game) when cards are played is confusing even for mega players. It took four readings of the rules to understand the game mechanics. Twice is expected four is laborious. Also how gender specific is the game? Shouldn’t it be a game for 6 (three couples) instead of five. Is odd man out or is there three on a match?

3) COMPLETENESS (1-10): 3
Feedback: This is not a game for the imaginational impaired. The key here is to get into a role and have the committee set the stage. Unfortunately I liked the premise of meeting with weird dates and having some tribunal awareness add to the pressure. It was unfortunate there was little guidance from the maker of this game.
There is no mention of the contrary natures of some of the dates. The goals of the committee are mentioned but not defined. The land of the dead is only mentioned in the intro yet it is the main selling point of the presentation. The limiting of three cards for Com. Members is a poor mechanic. If the committee votes three times and is forced to use three random cards the only power you have is the order of play. Weight of card, suit, replenishment, combinations are not address. In the underworld is there dinning at the river Styx, the Hells Bells Disco, and how about having Hitler as a chaperone. Even an actors workshop needs parameters. The work isn’t here.

4) ESTIMATED EFFECTIVENESS IN PLAY (1-10): 4
Feedback: I did like the use of cards and the way colors of suits worked a lot. The level of motivation required and the poor use of goals, Identity, the lack of guidance, and the over done use of the 10 x 1hr. rule makes this game only playable by fellow designers or drunken actors.

5) SWING VOTE (1-10) 4
Final Feedback: I really like the premise of the game and felt the lack of effort to do it justice disappointing. This is a first draft. Make it happen and get it to a store shelf. Not as a RPG but as a board game. How about the title “Night of the Living Date?”


TOTAL SCORE (add items 1 through 5, above): 20

[Doug Ruff]

And here's my review.

Note: "First Impressions" don't affect final scores. They're just there to give an impression of what leapt out from an initial viewing. I'm hoping this is useful to anyone who's planning on publishing and selling their game.

Doug’s Review of Someone to Love, by Mendel Schmiedekamp

First impressions: First impressions for this game were very favourable. It has an interesting premise (dating) that isn’t covered enough in roleplaying games (Breaking The Ice being the only example I could think of. Even more interesting, it’s a dating game for 5 people. In addition, the game is very well laid out and there are some nice cards in the back of the document. My other impression was “how the hell did he manage to enter so many games in one week?” and “my god, this is all meant to be one game?”

Analysis: First up, I’m reviewing this as a game in its own right, with one exception (see feedback on incorporation of rules below.) I haven’t yet read the other games, but I’m looking forward to doing so. This appears to be an incredibly ambitious project, and I applaud it.

If this game were a standalone entity, my first advice would be to keep the Archetypes, but to set the game amongst living, breathing people. Heck, I’m going to give that advice anyway. This game has the innate potential to be the Woody Allen RPG of chance encounters and complicated relationships, and I think this represents a better design direction for the game than the basic premise of the dead lonely (pardon the pun). I may change my mind when I read the other games, though!

The basic structure of the game is decent. There are three scenes, set by the non-dating players. This leads to my first rules question: when does a scene end? Is it when both players have called for a vote, when a committee member decides that it is time to change scenes, or some combination of the two? Some guidance on pacing and/or structuring the hour would be useful here.

The dating players take on all the narration duties, except from occasional and structured intervention by the other players.This is a good clear way of assigning authority. However, I think a trick has been missed here. Why shouldn’t the three ‘committee’ players take on narration of NPCs and events? If Mendel hasn’t read Polaris already, then I’m personally recommending it to him as an example of how to assign characterisation into clearly defined “categories” of ownership.

I think the game would be far more entertaining if the two dating players were to get more active involvement from the other three players – it relieves some of the narrative burden from their shoulders (so they can concentrate on the relationship) and it also draws the other players into the game. Because each player will only be dating for 4 of the 10 sessions, and I’m not sure I want to go to 6 hour-long sessions of gaming when my main input is to vote 3 times and make a couple of suggestions.

The voting mechanism is interesting – particularly as there is the possibility that a player will want to vote a particular way, but won’t have the cards to back it up. as long as this is presented as part of the mystery of relationships (y’know, sometimes it just doesn’t work out), then I think I’m cool with this.

What’s somewhat unclear is that the “all red/red high/black high/all black” system appears to be pulling double duty. It’s used when recording the individual votes, but when these are totted up at the end, are we scoring all four categories, or just reds and blacks?

I think the former, but if so, then the idea that a tie between two red outcomes could result in a “black high” final result seems odd.

On the other hand, if we’re scoring red and black only at the end, then all 7 votes would have to be red or black to get the extreme outcomes, and I don’t think that’s going to happen except once in a blue moon.

Speaking of outcomes, I found it rather odd initially that people would enter into a date with the express intent of “Separate Ways”. So, why are you dating then? Then I considered that there could be a peer pressure thing going on, or it’s a blind date and you’ve just realized what a big mistake you’ve just made, so I’m happier with that idea now. However, there isn’t enough scope within the game for outcomes to be unexpected. Either I get my way, or you get your way, or we get our way plus a bit more than we expected. There isn’t any support for one of the classic romantic subplots, two people who hate each other at first sight but fall in love by the end of the story. I consider that to be a fundamental weakness in either vision or design.

I’m going to mention the Archetypes again at this point, they’re brilliant. I like the special abilities they give (which aren’t balanced, but this isn’t important in my opinion.) I’d like to see a bit more differentiation between the Scenery and Muse abilities as well. One major query with the Muse abilities: what happens when I give another player a card? If it’s a dating player, can they use it for anything?

The relationship-based powers are also interesting, but there is a risk that players won’t be able to use cards picked up in the later game, as their opposite number may not have any dates left. Also, it doesn’t matter if I find True Love on my first date, we’re still going to shop around for Truer Love.

I think the definitive answer to a lot of the problems with the game is that players should not have to declare who they fall in love with (if anyone) until after all of the dates have ended. The outcomes should be more focused on whether the date itself was successful. I’d quite like to see each player write down on a piece of paper at the end:

- who they fell for, if anyone, and
- who they propose to, if anyone

And then build the end story out of what develops.

Alternatively, give each player a goal according to their Archetype – so the Angel has to see people get married, the Beast wants one night stands, and so on, and have them compete over the fates of the dating players. This would rock alongside the mythic theme of the game.

In summary, I love this game, because it’s full of great ideas and well-structured. However, I love the 3 or 4 games that could be written from this beginning a bit better, and they don’t have the same premise as the original. Also, although the author has taken care to distribute narrative authority (and should be applauded for doing this so clearly) I think he’s made the wrong choices, and they risk bogging the game sessions down because 40% of the participants are doing 80% of the work.

1) CREATIVE AND EFFECTIVE INCORPORATION OF RULES (1-10): 6

Feedback: I’m going to give this game a ‘half-pass’ against the time element. Strictly, the fact that it is designed to be part of a larger game should disqualify it from scoring, but that seems mean-spirited in the face of such a bold attempt. More serious is the lack of scene structuring, that makes it hard to ensure each session takes an hour (the ten sessions part is precisely met).

Ingredient-wise, I get the references to Ancient, but don’t think that they are adequate to score high in this area. Emotion is less well covered than I would expect for a dating game, but is good enough for the contest. Committee I’m happy with.

Overall, as time was sort of followed, and ingredients were fairly well followed, I’m giving this game 6 points in this category.


2) CLARITY (1-10): 6

Feedback: The writing is very clear, and the choice of layout and section headings is excellent. However there are several areas of uncertainty within the rules themselves that limit the score I can award in this category to 6 points

3) COMPLETENESS (1-10): 9

Feedback: This game is more or less complete as written, and most of my issues with have already been addressed under ‘Clarity’. However, the lack of guidance on pacing the game is a completeness issue. As this can be addressed with minimal work on the part of the author, I’m awarding a near-maximum 9 points for completeness.

4) ESTIMATED EFFECTIVENESS IN PLAY (1-10): 4

Feedback: The Achilles heel of this game is that the majority of the play could be replaced with “I pick an outcome, you pick an outcome, the other players vote”. It’s not quite a simple as that, but the lack of clearly articulated goals for the players beyond “let’s see what happens to these characters”, and the lack of opportunity for character goals to change throughout the 1 hour session, means that this game doesn’t work as written. Again, the characters should decide who they love after the date(s). There is an eminently playable game in there, but the reason I’m going to award the game only 4 points in this category is because a lot of that play serves little meaningful purpose. This score should improve dramatically in future versions of the game.

5) SWING VOTE (1-10): 8

Final Feedback: This game has fantastic potential, which is not yet realized. Part of the dilemma here is that there are so many ways in which the core concept could be developed: supernatural entities playing cupid, normal people dating and breaking up (which is at the core of virtually every modern soap in existence, and most films about relationships – see my Woody Allen comment early on in this review), Muriel’s Wedding – style competitive partner finding. I’m just not sure whether the author wants any of these things. I am still excited enough with the potential of this game to award it 8 points and I eagerly look forward to finding out what the author does do with the game in the future.

TOTAL SCORE (add items 1 through 5, above): 33 points