-=: GAME CHEF: The Judge Review Thread :=-

[Andy K]

This is just a marker for now, but this thread will soon be the place where the Game Chef Judges post their comments regarding the games they judge.

If possible, please keep side-chatter to a minimum, or move it to a new thread, as this thread is gonna get hella big.

-Andy

[Judgebot]

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[Judgebot]

THESE ARE THE COMMENTS OF JUDGE ALPHA. BEEP.

Bacchanal

A very strong piece. Ingredients are used in a pleasing manner, but the names are off; it’d have been better to subsume the principles of accusation and camaradie into the game through Roman terminology instead of blatantly utilizing the words themselves as pointers. Calling the Accuser just that instead of, say, Nemesis, just feels unnatural and unnecessarily simple, making the thematic intent more difficult to understand in the worst case. It takes a while to understand why the accuser and companion even are in the game, it’s that bad. While wine, accuser and companion are ultimately central in the themes and intents of the game, the crudeness of representation in this regard makes the reader feel like he’s being underestimated.

The game shines conceptually strong, holding many current issues of rpg design, play and theme in it’s coils. However, the expression of the thematic elements feels lacking and dull at the start; the game only sells itself through the examples of play, which are therefore absolutely crucial in actually getting excited by the impressive vision. It would have been better to spend a little more time in articulating the ideas of the game through prose at the start and thorough the rules text, to get the reader in the mood and to explain the relationships between the mechanics. Literary references are also a must, as the game represents an intricate and rare literary genre (erotic morality play) in a fresh manner.

Bacchanal is an example of the current mode of short, constrained design, and thus easy to make pretty complete. It includes almost everything one would expect of the content in a commercial version. I expect no rules problems in play with players accustomed to modern formalistic games. However, play advice is very sketchy, so one could expect problems in traditional circles or with first-timers. Not a large flaw, as long as it’s realized.

Much more problematic is the explicitly erotic content of the game; it cannot be downgraded to boot, because it’s integral as a thematic tool. Therefore the game is only suitable for audiences who like this kind of thing, myself included. This curtails suitable players radically, making the game even harder to play than usual. This is one of two reasons for the relatively low effectiveness score, and it’s more a fault of the culture than the designer.

The second reason I’m saving for last; the rules relationships clearly need some work. It’s minor compared to the content that already exists, but it’s clearly evident that the end-game conditions are not properly tied to the premise element of the game. Game ending seems to be more a matter of chance rather than any player choice regarding the bacchanal, which is a shame, because otherwise the game is very much about player reaction and narration. This is by no means fatal, because the game still seems fun to play, but it does lower the effectivity score.

Baihua

An interesting game with definite potential. However, the ingredient use is only cursory. While the companion brings a genuinely valuable level of structure to the game, his invincibility is a second order concern of narration in a game that’s formalistic to begin with. Wine is only a little better used, standing equal with companion. Baihua is stylish in a traditional, solid manner. Not mind-blowingly poetic, but interesting and inspiring in it’s premise. The period is a good and original choice. The setting and color elements support nicely the less than traditional game play.

The game is only complete in principle. While I’m not penalizing lack of actual cards or maps, the flow of the game is somewhat difficult to discern with no play examples or design commentary at all. The lack of even a crude map is a big flaw when considering immediate playability. The rules are written in a boardgame mode, with only limited explanation of how the action maps into the shared imagined space.

Barring the component problems, the game seems eminently playable. However, the design needs plenty of playtest to ascertain how the gamist priorities mesh with the subjective evaluations the players have to make. At first glance the scoring has checks and balances that keep the game in balance in non-hardcore play, but I suspect that the system breaks down with hard core gamists playing. Which is a shame, as the primary worth of the design should be in managing a hard gamist environment without a faciliating GM. Now I fear that the SIS is left by the wayside, and the players start to make their scoring decisions based solely on mechanical tactics. Although this is nearly impossible to do effectively, hard core values require the players to at least try, causing players giving bad points for good play and so on.

Companion Fever

The ingredients are used only as surface gloss in this formalistic bluffing game. The game wouldn’t be affected by removing them altogether. On the other hand, the historical period is a valid choice, insofar as the setting has any impact on this kind of game. The style of the whole suffers from the complex situation that is only reflected in the rules nominally. The game’d flow better with a more emblematic scenario, without the malaria etc.

The game is quite complete as is, although traditional roleplayers would prefer a clearer picture of available mappings of mechanics to SIS, as well as some source material on the ship, crew and the island. The content is, however, fine for a light game directed for casual play. I expect the game in all it’s simplicity to work well in actual play. The only problem is that the contorted situation seems nongenuine and limited, so the replay value is very low, and I suspect that the description and in-character dialogue will also suffer from the less-than-perfectly pleasing set-up.

Invincible

Ingredient use is formally acceptable, but uninspired. The Accuser mode is the weakest link, as it’d be clearer and more exactly named in some other way. The rules limitations are passed handily, though. Furthermore, the style of the game is stale; although the quotations are inspiring, the rest of the text makes no effort to be easily comprehensible or evocative. There’s no play examples, and the rules are just regurgitated in linear order with little structure.Thus the game is hard to understand.

Although the rules are complete in principle, not much focus has been given to the SIS and the different options the players have for action. This is a flaw in the completeness of the game as a roleplaying game. While the hand signals will certainly keep the game interesting for a while, the system is otherwise somewhat baseline. This, combined with the lack of setting inspiration or focus on SIS rules, will make the game an unfulfilling experience in play.

Sand

OK, this one’s just too far out in the boonies, as far as the period theme is concerned. So that’s minimum points for style right there, nothing personal. For ingredients, all but entymology are just adequate, but the complete lack of academic perspective on the bugs drags that one down. Also, the rules limitations are not applied succesfully – the colors are not utilized in any way (the die colors are coincidental, and are just used to distinguish between the dice), and despite the claims, the system does not derive three distinct pieces of information from a die roll.

Of course, these lacks reflect in no way on the quality of the game. The setting is fine and competently drawn out, the system is par for the course and so on. The game’s pretty much complete, as far as experienced traditional roleplayers are concerned. There’s no reason to expect it to be an especially pleasurable play experience, however – this kind of game does little to ensure a positive play experience, it’s all up to the GM’s plotting and preparation skills.

SAVEgame

Surprisingly enough, this judge accepts the use of the Period theme in SAVEgame, insofar as the game takes a historical view on the era it’s depicting. However, the historical perspective is incidental to the actual design, manifesting mainly in Gming advice, so a high style score is out of the question. Furthermore, the chosen mechanics of the game leach the colorful idea somewhat.

The Ingredient use is borderline-passable, but merits no extra points. While invincibility is certainly a core part of historical console gaming, the other ingredients are clearly crafted purposefully, resulting in a superficial feel. What’s worse, the game fails the mechanical limitation: like some other designers, Christie has misinterpreted the limitation in question to mean different degrees of success, which is unsupportable.

The game is adequately complete, and should work in play to the degree merited by the chosen mechanics. However, one can’t be but disappointed – the concept in itself, as well as some of the high points of innovation in mechanics and planned adventure structure, indicate a much greater potential. The overly heavy point-build of characters and the traditional resolution/reward mechanics hadrly do justice to the ideas here.

Sedition!

The ingredient use of the game is easily acceptable, and the game’s focus is not bothered too much by the excess ones. Luckily, none are really attrocious, and it’s valid to interpret the bugs not as representatives of an ingredient (as the game doesn’t try to give an academic context). The period choice is original, and it’s evoked in all kinds of small ways in the rules. The greatest problem is the presentation and completeness of the game – although one can deduct some interesting things to do with the game, little effort is spent in guiding players to the themes supported by the game. What’s worse, the designer opts to hand-wave some key components of the game altogether, preferring a freeform approach. Freeform is not game design, and leaving those things for the players to work out isn’t defensible in the context of the competition, even if it’s part of the designer’s goals.

Sedition! is potentially a very strong experience in play, but the degree of freeform makes it largely a matter of the right play group. The mechanics are basic, but potentially powerful when correctly applied. The overall impression is that this is something worthy of developing, but not really a game right now – it’s closer to a toolkit of symbols and structure, really.

The Dinner Party

Three of the four ingredients are just fine, but Invincible is weak, and thus disregarded. Also, the period of the game is suspect: although the 70s would be a valid period, the game is practically timeless and makes no special effort to capture any historical or entertainment aspect of the decade.

Especially the period choice is a shame, because otherwise the game shines – it’s very complete, and seems extremely playable and fun. Adding some period material for the players to reflect on, like conversation topics for example, would have easily given the game some serious points in style and completeness. All in all, a very strong game.

The Doomed Assault on the Fire Moon

Again, the game’s not Period, and thus obtains a rather low style score, especially as there’s little effort to color the situation in any way. The basic scenario is very interesting, though. Likewise, the ingredient use is cursory, almost non-existant. The challenge is to make a good game about the ingredients, not just any game.

The game is complete only insofar as it requires very little in the way of rules. Consequently, there’s also little support for the players. It’s almost completely freeform, with a rather challenging dual-role for the players to boot. I expect the play experience to depend largely on the players and little on the game. With the dual roles requirement and minimal rules for disagreement, this game is pretty much doomed.

The Gentlemen’s Entymology Club

The period is strong, and the game is stylistically complete, if light. The ingredients are less than perfect, however: wine is an incidental setting element, and although the designer emphasizes it skillfully, ultimately it has no meaning for the game. The strength of other ingredients compensates a little, of course; both are used better than in any other game of this judging batch.

The game is playable, although somewhat freeform. The mechanics would benefit from allowing an active role for the audience (why just one skeptic?) and perhaps making the card play a little more involved: some more cards to control the story flow, and the ability to play them in the middle of the story, perhaps. But the game’s definitely playable as is, as well.

[Judgebot]

THESE ARE THE COMMENTS OF JUDGE BETA. BEEP.

Carry by Nathan Paoletta

Most ambitious game I read.

Do the die pool sizes work with the maximums you can spend, or does
one in practice make the other irrelevent? Is there a way to give the
templates behavioral oomph, other than just "you should play your
character to his template"?

I could use a lot more situation and setup support.

I really like the thing where you obey the order or don't vs. agree
with the order or don't.

Charles the Bald is Superf***ed by Matthijs Holter

Best title, hands down.

This game gives me an uneasy feeling, like it's better than I realize,
like playing it would be surprising and awesome. Some kind of click
between the subject matter and the action of play that isn't apparent.
Or maybe not - that's the thing.

City of Brass by Clinton R. Nixon

Best writing of the games I read.

My only concern is: when you're drawing for food, are the odds that
you'll draw any? I didn't do any calculations but it seems like
something that might go pretty badly wrong.

The challenges per stage are colorful and solid, easy to work with.

The voting blind hand gestures are terrific.

In a Grove by Kenji Baugham

This is the most interesting partial game I read.

I suspect that it's more playable even as is than a 4. I couldn't
envision play from such an abbreviated outline of the rules.

Please finish this game!

Invincible Hench by Matt Cowens

GM authority: too much! GM support: too little.

Malleus Maleficarum by Kenji Baugham

Nice focus on practical play, very little wiggling or handwaving. Fun
subject matter too.

Also, the best publication I judged, presentation-wise.

Operation Foole by Kirt Dankmyer

Too wiggly for me! It sounds hard to play, I'm not sure how I'd start
or what I'd say next.

The endgame conditions are genius, though.

The Doomed Assault on the Fire Moon by Jason Morning

I penalized this one all harshly for not being historical. Don't mind
it, though: of the games I judged, this one seems the funnest and it's
my first choice to actually play with my friends.

The Last Supper by Eric Finley

This game gave me no kidding goosebumps. Eric, playtest and publish.

XVIII by Justin Jacobson

Best name for the GM. "G-man" made me smile.

[Judgebot]

THESE ARE THE COMMENTS OF JUDGE GAMMA.

JUDGE GAMMA WAS ENTHUSIASTICALLY VERBOSE, SO COMMENTS WILL BE DIVIDED ACROSS SEVERAL POSTS.

THIS IS PART ONE. BEEP.

Bacchanal
M. Paul Bruja

Historical period: inspired by ancient Rome

Style

One word gamers use that’s hard to define, but they know it when they see it, is “elegant.” Bacchanal is elegant -- a formal dance of dice in and out of players’ pools according to interlocking rules in which the high die rolled in a pool (or the type of tie for high roll) moves other dice move in or out of the pool. As the players narrate scenes of the Bacchanal, the dice represent characters and emotional influences entering, leaving, and participating in the scene.

The writing is very concise, managing to evoke the setting (including specific locations that should be helpful to players thinking up stages for their first scenes) and situation in just a couple of pages. The presentation of the rules is a bit too concise at times; some important rules are mentioned only in footnotes, and in places an additional phrase or two might go a long way toward clarifying some of the rules.

Use of Ingredients

Wine -- The central theme of the Bacchanal, and the most common type of die
Companion -- A key character and die
Accuser -- A key character and die

Rules Limitations: Use of colors in resolution; no character sheet

All in all, excellent use of the Ingredients. It’s hard to think of anything more intimately associated with Wine than the Bacchanal -- and the nature of that Wine is liberating and dangerous, like this game. The Companion and Accuser are key figures in the narrative, as they frame the two possible final outcomes: escape or imprisonment and death. (The Accuser as a die is less central, Soldier dice being ultimately more decisive.) Though there’s no character sheet, the current mix of dice in the player’s wine glass shows at a glance the character’s present situation. That’s a great example of taking a restrictive limitation and turning it into a positive.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

The real issue here is whether players will find enough choice and decision-making in the game to satisfy them. Some will, some won’t. There’s a bit of strategy when the results give you a choice of dice to draw or remove and when deciding whether to remove wine (more wine makes you just a bit safer when there are dangerous characters in your scene, increasing your chance to get ties that allow you to remove or dilute them, but also makes escaping with the Companion less likely); and there are some occasional decisions to make regarding whether to be nice or nasty to the other players. But mostly you’re spinning story, usually one of escalating decadence, to keep up with what the dice are telling you. Given the game’s subject matter and pushing-the-line nature, the limited choice will be for some a plus. The dice, to the players, are a bit like the wine, to the characters: they take away control and thereby mask responsibility. It’s not that you’ve been spending too much time at BDSMlibrary.com; the dice told you to escalate the decadence! But, for those very same reasons, I wonder if the game can stand up well to repeat play.

As I mentioned, a few rules could be stated a bit more clearly. For instance, when a single Wine is high, for which the rule says to remove Bacchus to the tray, is Bacchus removed only if he’s in the glass of the player who rolled, or can he be removed to the tray from another player’s glass? Similarly, example II would be clearer if it mentioned which starting dice the scene represents, especially since it immediately follows the rule for determining who narrates first, which led me to expect Bacchus or a Satyr in the scene. (However, pausing to figure this example out is probably a good exercise for the prospective player.) And what happens if your final roll, after capture, comes up Venus? I can imagine, but the text doesn’t say.

I couldn’t resist trying a few rounds to try to get a feel for how the dice and characters move through the game. I set up the dice as for a three-person game, narrated out loud for one player, and just rolled and manipulated the dice for the other two (playing one “nice” and one “mean”). On my first try, I started with my character (a banished corrupt former Senator), a Soldier, and Bacchus, and set a scene along the lines of the initial scene example provided. The first roll was singleton Wine, escalating the decadence. (I decided not to bother adding any additional NPCs, such as women). Second roll was the Soldier. Oops! Capture. Final roll, rolling the Soldier and Bacchus (and thus, no chance of survival), the Soldier rolled 7, Bacchus an 8. It wasn’t at all difficult to imagine, from this, what sort of fate befell the Senator. (The write-up will be appearing soon on BDSMlibrary.com.) From a storytelling point of view I can’t really complain about this result, despite the story being so short, but if I were playing a real game I would probably have been disappointed at being out of the action so quickly. (While this fast end is clearly a possible result, it didn’t happen again in many tries. My suggested fix is simply to not include the Soldiers in the initial dice allocation. Between Pluto, the Accuser, and being forced to pick when Soldiers are the only non-Wine dice left on the tray, there appear to be plenty of other ways for Soldiers to reliably get into players’ dice pools.)

Another issue is that a player has no guaranteed in-game recourse to stop escalating the decadence of a scene should the limits of their imagination or social comfort be reached. In an example in the text, a player deliberately adds a Soldier in order to make it possible to end a scene that was growing too prolonged. But even that desperate measure only provided a chance, not a guarantee, that the scene would end. Some other recourse might perhaps be made available, even if at a high penalty, to prevent players from having to simply refuse to continue.

Without real play tests (and with different numbers of players, at that) I cannot tell whether further tweaking of the rules might be needed -- for instance, to make sure all the dice get their share of influence, or that unrecoverable conditions are minimized. Venus doesn’t seem effectual very often, and getting rid of a large accumulation of wine dice so as to have a decent shot of a high Companion result appears impossible without extraordinary luck or a lot of help from the other players.

One minor complaint: this game makes formidable demands on one’s dice collection. Eight purple d6’s per player? A silver metallic d6? A pearlescent white d4? (I actually had a pearlescent white d4 on hand! Along with about half the others in the specified colors). Obviously one can substitute, but I found I then had to write down my own color chart to keep them straight.

For true decadence, the game should be played with those gemstone dice. Amethyst d6’s for the wine...

Completeness

The game is ready to play, and it doesn’t appear to need anything else. Perhaps a few more words about some of the locations in Puteoli (Are there tables to lie on? Is olive oil readily available?) would be helpful for some scenes.



=====================================================



Morpho Londinium
by John H. Kim

Historical Period: London, 1669, a period of political and intellectual transformation

Style

John Kim has cooked up a LARP... a Game Chef first, if I’m not mistaken. The presentation lays out a scenario full of both conflict and a shared sense of awakening knowledge. Like most LARP texts, it might come across as a bit dry and technical to casual readers. This is largely due to the demands of the form. With no scene-setting or scene-framing narration during play, and with a limit on how much background detail players can memorize in advance, LARP rules usually need to be downright journalistic in terms of getting the who-what-where-when-how facts across. The play style calls for an interesting blend of genteel period-piece character acting and cutthroat intra-player competition, in a compelling era-in-microcosm setting that has a lot for players to work with.

Use of Ingredients

Entomology -- The characters are entomologists, and are themselves associated with insect-types
Wine -- Players can voluntarily raise their Intoxication score, making them more vulnerable to some kinds of actions and less so to others. Drinking (real or simulated) wine is one way to do this.
Accuser -- Players accuse one another of possessing secrets, with rewards for correct accusations and penalties for incorrect ones

Rules Limitations: No character sheets; fixed characters; designer-created cards; hand gestures with mechanical effects in-game

In his designer’s notes, John claims that using all five Ingredients was a goal, but Companion and Invincible, if present at all, were too subtle for me to taste. (No adverse effect on the score from that, of course, since only three are required.) The use of Entomology is very effective. John didn’t just toss a few insects into the pot; the gathering is (ostensibly) all about entomology. Accusers are key to the game play, but the Wine (as only a prop used to role-play increasing one’s Intoxication, and beer works almost as well) is barely touched upon. The choice of a LARP format is an interesting tactic from the Rules Limitations point of view. For this type of LARP, it’s not at all unusual to have a fixed set of characters and to use custom cards for character powers in play, so John had more than the required Rules Limitation covered from the outset. (Aggressive chef that he is, he then went and incorporated two more, making particularly effective use of the hand gestures, which allow players to invoke the shared social powers without interrupting the dialog.)

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

This game, unusually for a LARP, gives players a concrete competitive goal of scoring points by informing and accusing. This establishes the secrets as the crux of the game play. It also raises the bar design-wise for John, because balancing the vulnerability of secrets in LARPs can be maddeningly difficult. Secrets tend to be either too easy or too difficult to ferret out (often depending on how savvy the players are -- the more savvy, the more difficult to learn secrets), especially when they’re the focus of competition. For instance, since there’s no downside to being falsely accused, and it costs the accuser, it’s to most players’ advantage to draw suspicion to themselves. If that strategy sets in, it will be very tough going for secret-hunters.

The setting is well-chosen, and John has provided a few pages of background information plus some Web links. As an interested reader you might find yourself hungry for more information about this intriguing place and time, but it’s just the right amount of information for playing the game. The text’s most annoying typo sets the date at 1699, but it clearly is supposed to be 1669, the close of a decade that carried London through plague, fire, political and religious upheaval, and the forming of the Royal Society. The perfect setting for the elite to gather and discuss insects -- especially when insects represent people, and discussion of their nature becomes veiled discussion of topics that might be too dangerous to discuss openly.

The fixed cast of characters, loosely based on real figures of the era, includes three strong female roles. Some gender substitutions, in case the group doesn’t happen to be composed of five males and three females, would have been nice. (While cross-gender play is not uncommon in LARP, it’s not to everyone’s taste.) The character profiles are about a paragraph per character -- again, quite sufficient, as more often isn’t better when players have to rely on their memories most of the time. The secrets players are hunting for aren’t related to the character backgrounds, which means that unlike many similar LARPS where characters’ secrets are in jeopardy, Morpho Londinium is fully replayable. On the downside, this makes the character backgrounds more likely to be overshadowed by other elements of play.

The built-in code of talking about specific characters by talking about the type of insect -- not exactly “veiled” insinuation since all the players know the code -- promises to be a lot of fun in play. I mean, seriously, a LOT of fun. This is the kind of feature, that might look minor on paper, that can really make a LARP memorable. Some background information about the relevant insects might have been a useful adjunct here, but that’s no big deal either way. One rules point that must be clarified, however, is the interaction between conversation in insect-code and the lie-detection mechanics. Is the truth or falsehood of a statement about the mating habits of fleas, which is obviously an allegation about the character George Ringer, to be judged based on whether it’s true for fleas, or whether it’s true for George? If the former, then it encourages the use of the code by making coded speech immune to lie detection, but it would also make the secrets-game that much harder to crack.

There are some significant pitfalls in the rules for handling secrets and informers. It’s not specified how the informers are selected when setting up the game, or how the informers find out who they’re informing on -- and this is tricky to arrange so as to not give secret-holders’ or informers’ identities away in the process. I would suggest, to anyone running the game in its current form, adding a non-playing referee to handle this and similar information issues (such as, when resolving accusations, determining whether the accuser is correct about who the informer is without leaking information to third parties in the process). Once these procedures are tightened up in the rules, it should be possible to run without a referee.

The point scoring system as it stands is fine for players’ self-tracking of their achievements, but as a competition for high score it has some flaws. The informers have the opportunity to score many more points than non-informers (since they can get informer points, and can also accuse -- in fact, there’s no rule preventing them from accusing the character whose secret they already know, deliberately misnaming the informer in the process, scoring eight free points.) The secret-holders have even less scoring opportunity than those who are neither secret-holders nor informers, since there are only two other secrets for them to accuse. Some thought must also be given to possible game-breaking collusion, since social LARPs run on alliances and deals. For instance, is anything (besides the danger of a double-cross) preventing an informer from telling allies, “I’ll tell all of you the secret I know, as long as you agree not to name me as the informer”?

These mechanical and balance issues appear fixable. Does the game have any deeper structural problems? Such things are hard to predict, but I suspect that the political, religious, and class issues in the setting and character backgrounds will be overshadowed by the secrets-game. That would be unfortunate because there’s such interesting material there to work with. Players are more likely to play up the entomology, because it’s fun and because it provides a language to conduct the secrets game in (especially if, as I mentioned, it’s immune to lie detection). But there’s no strategic or mechanical benefit for getting into conflicts over philosophy, religion, or politics. Some groups might do it anyway, as cover or because it’s something to do in-character that fits the scenario and because it would be fun to “argue” these topics using the insect code. But it would be better if the game structure encouraged it more.

Completeness

Several omissions in the game mechanics have already been mentioned. There’s no rule for how (or after how long, if it’s a time limit) the game ends. Also, the character-specific insect-themed social powers, which players use by showing the appropriate cards, are incomplete. At least two are missing entirely, and about half lack instructions for how their effects are resolved. This is clearly a case of a chef running out of time, which probably accounts for the other mechanical omissions as well.



=====================================================



Labyrinthiathan
by Chris Andrews

Historical Period: the American Civil War

Style

A hard-to-pronounce title and an H. P. Lovecraft quote leading page one... anyone care to guess what genre we’re in here? For a game-chef entry this game is a big main course, with all the trimmings (including the customary dire warning not to read the game -- fortunately, ninja judges fear no text). Survival horror is the principle here, for which Chris lays out the rules and setting using three different voices: excerpts from a book called In My Master’s House on which the game is said to be based, the main game text, and the “transcriber’s” commentary on the game, inserted here and there. This adds to the genre flavor but also causes occasional confusion when one or another of the voices refer to things that haven’t been defined yet.

As for that genre flavor, what we have here is 96% horror, 4% Civil War. Though the provided PCs and NPCs are period types, as are the example weapons, it’s not particularly relevant to the game. All play takes place isolated inside the House. Where conflicts from the period would seem to have a chance to arise -- slave and master characters and Union and Confederate soldiers trapped in the House together -- it’s glossed over rather than emphasized (e.g., the Union and Confederate soldiers manage to not notice, at least not immediately, that they’re enemies -- and if they do notice, aren’t they just going to shoot each other?) Though it’s situated in a historical period, I can’t give the game full credit for being “based on or inspired by” that period.

The screen-friendly (landscape) page formatting isn’t something I can give extra points for, but it’s appreciated.

Use of Ingredients

Companion -- The player characters are companions against adversity
Accuser -- As their situation and sanity deteriorate, the player-characters will distrust one another and accuse one another of being the cause of their misfortune
Invincible -- The evil in the House is invincible, until cumulatively unraveled over many deadly forays

Rules Limitations: Three or more pieces of information from each resolution die roll; designer-created cards; fixed characters (in the example scenario)

This is adequate but unoriginal use of the ingredients, kind of like taking rice and making steamed rice out of it. Aren’t the player-characters companions of one another in most role playing games? And aren’t powerful forces usually invincible until someone, well, vinces them? (I’m sure I’ll be saying the same thing again as I judge other games. Folks, “companion” and “invincible” weren’t supposed to be freebies; you were supposed to step up and do something original with them.) However, the Rules Limitations are quite well done indeed, especially the resolution dicing mechanics. The “three different pieces of information” limitation is one that relatively few entries chose to incorporate, and fewer still effectively (that is, with all of the information dimensions being truly distinct from one another as well as useful in play).

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

This being a traditional-format game, and a horror game, the devil isn’t in the details, it’s in the devil. That is to say, in the Beast. That is to say, in the GM. With a good GM, the game could be truly horrifying. With a poor one... it could also be horrifying, in a completely different way. The Beast runs this show, controlling the evil sendings that afflict the PCs, the malleable environment of the House itself, four NPCs (in the sample scenario), the tracking of the PCs’ fatigue scores, the player-characters’ breakdowns when they fail a fatigue check, and any player-characters who have gone insane. In his copious spare time, the Beast is also encouraged to sow mistrust by passing notes to players, offering deals for betraying one another and so forth. Will the players fall for it? Meanwhile, the player-characters are trapped in the house with apparently little to do except search for food, react to whatever the House throws at them, and follow any clue that the Beast might choose to dangle.

I think this game will come alive once the PCs start accusing and betraying one another, but if I were running it I wouldn’t try to rely on tricking the players into doing so. The system has to firmly establish that the characters will distrust one another even though that goes against their own interests. Perhaps Fatigue could be restored only when player-characters accuse, argue, and fight one another. (In pick-em-off movies like Cube, it always seems to give the survivors a little boost when one of them, usually the one who’s behaved the most annoyingly in recent scenes, bites the dust.)

Now, I have to say I have no problem with giving an adversarial GM most of the cards and going along for the ride. When the goal is the kind of horror atmosphere Chris is shooting for, this might be the only way to do it. But what I do find unfortunate is the lack of help for the Beast in the game text. Over and over, the game’s advice to the Beast is: “That’s up to you to decide.”

The best model for how the Beast should think and act, that I can think of, is the Computer in Harlan Ellison’s I have no mouth and I must scream. But Harlan is a real-life evil genius. The rest of us might need some help. The text talks about how the evil of the House should afflict and test and ultimately destroy the player-characters, but actual examples of things the House might actually do to them are few and far between: a shadowy figure seen in a black corridor, which does nothing except chase and get shot at, and a swarm of rats that sets off a character’s phobia. There’s a general suggestion that there be monsters, but it can’t be all monsters all the time, or you’d have a (decidedly non-horrifying, no matter how high the fatality rate) dungeon crawl. What the game needs is a collection, or at least a few good examples, of creative “sendings” that the House can inflict on the PCs, that are designed to take advantage of the game’s versatile mechanics for things like verbal and mental combat. The effect of a PC losing a verbal or mental combat against a supernatural sending might be that the PC is convinced to do one of those foolish things characters in haunted house movies are always doing, like putting on the dress that the young bride was killed in 20 years ago, or opening the rusty iron door in the cellar. Is that the kind of thing you had in mind, Chris?

The resolution dicing system is sound-looking and interesting, yielding, as promised, a lot of information from the roll of three dice. The Arcane cards are well-integrated in a variety of ways, and I get the feeling that with a Beast and group of players who were really skilled in their use, they could cause the game to take on whole different qualities not really apparent or accessible to me just on reading the text. Verbal combat (with its literal-figurative “body of the argument” concept allowing hit-location rules to be used!) is so crazy it just might work; it definitely seems worth a try. The system for voluntary player-character death, involving literally handing over the character’s “Future” card (which always predicts “death” anyhow), nails a key aspect of the genre. All in all, a solid effort with some real ingenuity.

Completeness

The completeness is impressive. There’s not quite as much substance as the 24-page length (plus card and character sheet pages) would make it seem, as there’s some repetition and distraction, but there’s still quite a lot. As I said, I’d like to see some examples to inspire the Beast, but a talented Beast should be able to work with what’s there, including the House setting itself, equipment, characters, and an example back-story. The game’s mechanical elements are presented in thorough detail.

[Judgebot]

THESE ARE THE COMMENTS OF JUDGE GAMMA, PART TWO. BEEP.

1984 Prime
by Mischa D. Krilov

Historical period: inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962

Style
Brisk and grabby and suffused with a sense of wild optimism, from the very well-written cover copy to the “Chinese menu” adventure table on the last page. There’s no radical innovation here, but everything about the game suggests the promise of adventure. This is nowhere close to Orwell’s 1984, nor to our own. An unknown world, well-trained young characters starting out with eight competing visions of the future and whatever supplies they can convince their families they might need... who can resist? It makes you want to start a nuclear war, just so our own crechelings can get to do this in 22 years. (Okay, well, maybe not.)

The background text is filled with odd bits and pieces that, by challenging our expectations in minor ways, help to remind us how different these characters’ culture must be from our own. I don’t know whether these were deliberate or accidental, but they work for me. How did the kids learn the “flying” and “boating” parts of their “piloting” skill if they’ve never left the Haven? (And then the old-school sadistic GM in me imagines these characters’ first real airplane flight after years of training on simulators -- 1962 technology simulators, mind you.) What underlying political philosophies would explain how the family alliance structure comes about, along completely different lines than our own red-state/blue-state divisions, so that the populist unionists and the old-money industrialists are on the same side? What does the field of ecology look like when the environmental movement never happened because the devastation of nuclear war happened first? Why a glassworks? (Oh, that’s it, wine bottles!) If a character can have an Expertise in Psychology, does that mean Psychology actually works the way people thought it did in 1962, so you can use it to do things like reliably detect (and rehabilitate) criminals or implant post-hypnotic suggestions? What form did Quinn convert his family wealth into that would hold its value in the Haven -- cigarettes, perhaps? Somehow this game’s background makes even such odd points and not-quite-inconsistencies thought-provoking.

Even now, I can’t decide whether I’d want to role-play these bright strong hopeful all-American sacrificial lambs emerging from their Haven and getting a hard and sustained dose of post-holocaust reality, or play it as apparently intended (they’re equal to the challenges of the new world, but only just, fueling inter-family conflict when their goals have to be triaged), or if it would be even more fun to joyously chronicle their ass-kicking accomplishments as they really do bring Science and Democracy (and Wine!) to the mutant cannibals and giant cockroaches.

And that’s high marks for style in my book.

Use of Ingredients

Companion -- The characters are companions from the same creche
Accuser -- Survivors the PCs encounter will likely be suspicious
Invincible -- PCs are very strong and resistant; expertise makes you all but unbeatable in that field
Entomology -- Giant insects from radiation
Wine - A Haven trade good, and symbol of the higher culture the Haven is trying to preserve or reintroduce

Rules Limitations: Fixed characters; resolution system using colors

Use of the Ingredients is a bit disappointing, with quantity over quality. As I’m sure I’ll have to repeat as I judge these entries, “the player-characters are one another’s companions” as use of the Companion ingredient is really low-hanging fruit. Accuser is all but absent from the dish, as the likely reactions of survivors (other than avarice for the PCs’ valuable gear) are not discussed in the game text itself. Fortunately we can overlook those two and focus on the other three. Giant insects are one of the few known features of the setting outside the Haven, which does get the concept of Entomology in there (but it’s not mentioned among the skills as would expect if it were actually of particular importance; it presumably comes somewhere under scholar/science/natural). Wine is stronger, if a bit forced. But “invincible” is more low-hanging fruit; only the unusual expertise rule (expertise meaning unable to fail, under most circumstances) saves this from being the throwaway “invincible: player-characters are really strong and/or cannot be killed unless X condition is met” usage that pervades these contest entries. On the Rules Limitations side, Mischa made good use of fixed characters and the colors in the resolution system. That system needs work in some areas, but it certainly uses colors (all-American colors, at that!) in a significant way.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

It appears that at some point during the writing, the author re-scaled the primary character stats from a normal human maximum of 6 to a normal human maximum of 12, but didn’t completely make the needed adjustments throughout the game. This would account for the statement on page 12 that six is the normal upper limit for humans, which is contradicted elsewhere, and for the low-seeming stats for the fixed player-characters. A lot of things fit a lot better (such as, the lack of a player-character advancement system) if we assume the player-characters are actually intended to have stats appropriate for their being described as prodigies, nearly “invincible” by pre-war standards, and in keeping with their Abilities and Expertise.

A more serious issue is what appear to be fundamental flaws (or at least, some very peculiar behavior which needs to be explained more in the text) in the resolution system for opposed contests. The current rules amount to whichever side has the most chips (including other-color chips converted at 2:1, assisting chips from other characters, and extra chips from skills) wins. The only open issue is, if the attacker has more chips, whether the defender persists, losing one chip per round as damage until he has no more chips (while doing no damage to the attacker), or yields, which loses a final two chips for the defender and inflicts a single chip of damage on the attacker. And in fact, continuing for more than one round is pointless -- if the defender has more chips, the attacker will fail in the first round, when he has no more chips to ante and must relent, and if the defender has fewer, he has nothing to gain by continuing to another round once he can’t meet the attacker’s ante, while by yielding he can at least get a blow in.

Initiative being based on philosophy (sort of) which in turn is based on family is very nice. The family structure, like so much else in the game, suggests all sorts of play possibilities. For char gen, the family of origin should serve as a good soft-touch version of (dare I say it?) character class. (There’s no char gen system per se, in keeping with the Rules Limitation, but players and GMs who find that the rules-light system and open-ended setting of this game meets their needs should have no trouble making up characters following the models provided.)

Completeness

Mischa has provided quite a bit here to play with or build from. I expect that others will urge him to provide more setting information about the outside world. However, laying out this-tribe-lives-here and here-be-contamination might just turn a world of open-ended possibility into another map crawl. Instead, if more setting information is needed, he should consider building on the Chinese-menu adventure example he’s already provided by adding more on-the-fly tools for deciding things like what’s over the next hill, what kind of bizarre cultural quirk the normal-seeming people of the next settlement are hiding, or what political Family dispute arises back at the Haven.

There’s a play technique, called “no myth” at the Forge, in which the GM fills in the world just ahead of the players’ exploration of it, and nothing is permanently entered on the map or established as a definite fact until the player-characters actually discover it. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but I mention it because 1984 Prime’s initial setting and scenario would be perfect for it.

Adding traditional setting material would also work, of course. But in any case the resolution mechanics have to be fixed up first.


=====================================================


Malleus Maleficarum
by Kenji Baugham

Historical Period: late 15th-century Lorraine

Style

I like a good page layout as much as the next guy, but I don’t weight it too highly in judging, because not everyone starts out equal in software resources. But I have to say, very first thing, this PDF is gorgeous. Typefaces, old woodcut illustrations, well-chosen quotes from period sources, and certain turns of phrase all evoke the historical subject matter, without being the slightest bit overdone or interfering at all with readability.

The writing of the lead-in pages is equally masterful. Economically, straightforwardly, anticipating some of the baggage readers are likely to bring to this emotionally charged subject matter, Kenji explains what the game is about, what the game is not about, and why.

And the game’s not too shabby either. Which leads me to the big question: just what kind of game is it? It’s clearly a strategy game, but is it also a role playing game? That is, does it not just call for players to play out scenes or events, but make the role playing a significant aspect of play in terms of affecting the course of events in the game? I conclude, tentatively, that it does, because the game allows open-ended role-played actions and arguments that players make during challenges to change the strategic game state (specifically, causing NPC characters to support or oppose the goal of a conflict). Just as important, it puts the mediation of those effects into the hands of an impartial referee. If the game were to rely on the competing players to make those decisions, it would likely fail this test, because expecting the players to make role playing judgments against their own strategic interests, putting the two aspects of play into conflict, would likely result in the role playing being overshadowed completely. Malleus Maleficarum stays, in my opinion, just inside that dividing line.

Use of Ingredients

Accuser -- The game’s about witch hunts
Companion -- A secret ally NPC that each player partly controls
Invincible -- PCs alone are not subject to being condemned as witches

Rules Limitation: Uses custom-designed cards

Excellent use of Accuser. The game doesn’t just involve accusations; it focuses specifically on the motivations of the accusERs. Companion is solidly represented. I’m not as impressed with Invincible; “the player characters are invincible” being a common dull note throughout this contest. (But at least it’s not “the player characters are invincible unless condition X is met” which would make it a complete throwaway.) The cards meet the Rules Limitation requirement and are right at home in the strategy game play.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

What we have here isn’t only an RPG crossed with a strategy game. It’s an RPG crossed with a strategy game complex enough to melt Deep Blue into a puddle of aluminum. First of all, a relationship map of nodes connected by arrows (technically, a directed graph) is an inherently more complex domain for game play than, say, a region map or a grid, because of the one-way links and the arbitrary interconnections. The interconnectedness is increased by facts and by additional secret connections through the player (PC-Companion, PC-envy, and PC-vendetta links). Conflicts can manipulate the network in lots of different ways. Even figuring out whether a given change (say, an increase or decrease in a non-PC non-Companion villager’s Social Standing) is good or bad for one’s own position might be tricky at times. And if one does identify an optimal move, and pull it off, a card could cause it to completely backfire anyhow (such as, by shifting the social standing gain or loss to a different character). Added to all that are the whole additional dimensions of trying to figure out your opponents’ secrets by observing their choices, and making deals and alliances between players.

There’s a technical term for estimates of the effectiveness in play of a complex strategy game, prior to play testing: “wild guess.”

I suspect (“wild guess,” remember) that this will be one of those games where there are so many choices, and so many factors beyond a player’s control in determining how those choices come out (especially since there could be as many as two cards on average played per challenge, though one per challenge is a more likely estimate), that calculated strategy is replaced by a kind of intuitive freewheeling “I’ll try X and see what happens” approach. If this proves to be the case, it would be good for the role-playing side of things. It’s even possible that the role playing could end up overshadowing the strategy, with players choosing what their character would do based on emotional reactions rather than tactics. If so, it would seem to go against the game’s apparent intention that players should be thinking strategically at all times.

A few other things to consider as this game goes into play testing:

- It’s not clear what kinds of actions a secret companion can be ordered to do during the secret action step of a conflict, or how those actions might affect the conflict outcome. Does the Companion just support one side or the other as ordered, at the usual value of 1/3 of their social standing, or is there an open-ended option here?

- The players have a lot of freedom to choose where to place their attack and what conflict stakes to set each turn. This means that if a player gets close to winning, it might be possible for all the other players, for the common interest of preserving their own chance to win, to gang up and destroy the leading player’s position between one of the leading player’s turns and the next. This in itself isn’t a fatal flaw, but it often goes hand in hand with:

- Beware of game play that tends to end in a pick-the-winner situation. That’s when a player who’s too far behind to have any chance to win nonetheless ends up able to pick which of the leaders does win, by deciding which of them to oppose more vigorously. Most strategy gamers consider that a flaw.

- To have the balance between strategy and role playing that it seems designed to have, Conflicts have to be able to be tipped one way or the other by relatively minor (numerically speaking) modifiers. It appears that the player framing a Conflict can easily frame every non-player villager who would be expected to support the desired effect into the scene, which the resources available to other players might rarely if ever be enough to overcome. If this is the case, it reduces the significance of facts introduced from the in-game-world situation, to the detriment of the role playing aspect (and it wouldn’t do anything good for the strategy game play either).

Completeness

A very thorough effort. To go along with all the other great layout work, the cards should really be laid out as printable cards, but that’s no big deal.

Oh, and one other thing: examples! With rules this intricate, I can’t really regard the rules as completely ready to play-test when they have no examples of play whatsoever.


=====================================================


Revolution
by Chris Moore

Historical period: inspired by the French Revolution

Style

In a word, minimalist! With this game, Chris distills the “take turns framing a scene” role playing game down just about as compact as it can get, and still have any distinctive flavor of its own. There’s not much to support players here, and nothing at all about the French Revolution in particular. Yet the game does contain a hidden gem of surprising “why-didn’t-I-ever-think-of-that?” simplicity, originality, and usefulness, that I predict will be imitated by future games. (It’s not really hidden, but calling it that makes me feel better about having missed it the first few times I read Revolution.)

On the other hand, the formatting of the game text is atrocious. I mentioned in one of my other reviews for this contest (where the page layout and typography were particularly good) that I don’t weight page layout heavily, because there are inequities in people’s software resources. But jeeze louise, Chris, it doesn’t require fancy software to use carriage returns! Would it kill you to begin each item in a list of possible results on a new line instead of running them all together in a paragraph? Or to start a new line between the heading of a list and the first list element? That phrase about monkeys and typewriters is just the name of the host site here, not an instruction for how your game text should look. Take pity on my bleeding eyeballs next time.

Use of Ingredients

Invincible -- The name given to the “A succeeds with no interference from B” result in resolution
Companion --The name given to the “A fails the announced goal but gains a little victory anyway” result in resolution
Accuser -- The name given to the “A must make a moral compromise to succeed” result in resolution

Rules Limitation: No character sheets

The integration of the Ingredients is a bit forced (“Companion” because the substitute failure accompanies the failure of the intended outcome; “Accuser” because player B gets to accuse player A’s side of moral failing), more a matter of using the words than truly incorporating the concepts. Not having a character sheet isn’t much of a concession for such a minimalist game, but it meets the requirement. Not bad, for a game text well under three pages, but more clever than creative.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

Chris describes the game as being about rebellion. Judging from the core formula that players start the game by filling in (roughly speaking, establishing the protagonist, the opposition, the grievance, the plan, and the goal), it’s about rebellion in a broad sense, including escape, growth, or transition, especially if the B player is willing to take on a more abstract role of a condition or situation rather than a person or group of people. For example, try plugging in a teenage character for A, “repressed” for the grievance (first blank), “living at home” for B, “get a job” for the plan (second blank), and “move out” for the goal (third blank). Seems to work. Or here’s a heavier one: A = an elderly person, B = “living with failing health,” grievance = “weary,” plan = “commit suicide,” goal = “end his/her pain.” Maybe that’s taking farther afield than intended, but it shows that this core formula is versatile, and it’s promising for repeat play.

The scene framing system also looks solid. The players have some interesting decisions to make, and the various scene-framing prerogatives get clearly allocated, all concurrently with the actual framing of the scene (with the exception of the “I get to end the scene” choice). It’s a little odd that after this careful step by step process, the scene framing rules don’t indicate which player should actually start narrating the scene. I imagine most players will simply continue alternating (so the player making the first choice, after all six choices have been made, will start the scene). but having the same player who makes the last choice start the scene would probably be slightly better.

The resolution system appears to be a bit lopsided. Ultimately the game comes down to comparing A’s little victories against B’s list of his failures and moral compromises. So I would expect the system to generate about equal numbers of both. But the system instead gives more victories to A:

Invincible: gives A a victory
Companion: gives A a defeat and a victory
Accuser: gives A a defeat, OR gives A a victory and a moral compromise; A decides
(each has an equal 1 in 3 chance)

This would become balanced if, for instance, a moral compromise is weighted as offsetting two victories in the final scoring.

Now, about that final scoring. Player A counts up all his little victories, and player B does likewise for A’s defeats and moral compromises, and the higher total wins. So the end result depends on who won the most die rolls, and the narration doesn’t matter, right?

That’s where the not-really-so-“hidden” gem comes in. The victor is not who got the most victories or defeats/compromises, it’s who can remember the most at the end of the game. In a competitive game in which players narrate based on mechanical results, what better way to reward good narration than by requiring the narration to be memorable to get the benefit of the mechanical rewards? And what better way to judge whether narration is memorable than to test whether the players remember it? It couldn’t be simpler, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be effective. Yet to my knowledge no role playing game has ever used this concept as a formal part of its scoring or reward mechanics before. (I believe this test happens informally and inadvertently all the time, in reward systems in conventional role playing games. In order for a player to earn bonus experience points for things like ‘heroism’ or ‘good role-playing,’ the GM must remember, at the time experience is awarded, what relevant incidents occurred. Some GMs keep written notes on such things, or allow players to remind them, but what the GM remembers without aid is still going to be important in many cases.)

Now, I’m not saying it will necessarily work exactly as implemented in Revolution. Some R&D might be needed to determine the ideal range for the length of the game (too short and players will remember everything because it just happened; too long and it becomes a memory challenge instead of a competitive narration game). Also, the exact rules for how the tallying is conducted would have to be determined. (One possibility: the A and B players take turns mentioning a victory or defeat/compromise respectively; the first who cannot recall one in 10 seconds loses.) But these are tweaks and details.

Completeness

This game accomplishes a lot in two pages, and it is complete in the sense of being ready to play. On the other hand, it is just two pages -- a bit shorter than this review, in fact.



=====================================================


Operation Foole
by Kirt Dankmyer

Historical period: Inspired by post-WWII U.S. and Europe; set in West Berlin in April 1949, a few weeks before the Airlift began

Style

When I was in ninja grade school, in a long-ago time when dice were cubic by definition, I spent many recess periods playing narration games with a friend. These games generally consisted of telling shared stories in which we would interrupt each other to interject “what-if” cliffhanger challenges. (“What if the door locks behind you and the room starts filling with water?”) Fortunately our heroic characters were always able to handle any imminent deadly peril through a combination of superhuman powers and invented-on-the-fly technology. (“The water must be coming from somewhere. I freeze time, miniaturize myself, adjust the gas flow on my jet pack to turn it into a SCUBA tank, and swim upstream through the water until I find a way out.”) At the time, I thought my friend and I were the only ones who played games like that. Certainly no one else on our playgrounds did. But someone somewhere must have, or else Kirt was eavesdropping, because here’s our game, more or less, packaged and streamlined, a little more challenging, a little (but not too much) more grown up, sounding just as much fun as those old recess games.

(And way more fun than the swing sets with the painful hip-squeezing strap seats. Did the Marquis de Sade have a side business in school playground equipment, or what? Never mind.)

Kirt situates the game’s simple not-quite-freeform narration rules within a scenario that successfully evokes the flavor of an old-time pulp adventure serial. This material has two main parts: background material covering Agent Patriot adventures in general and the case at hand in particular; and extensive prescriptions for elements that the completed story must contain. The demanding “what must happen” rules of the formula makes parts of the game text feel like an episode-writers’ style guide for a TV series, which actually fits right into the pulp-serial feel.

Use of Ingredients

Companion --Patriot always has a Companion, the other PC, controlled by the player who’s not playing Patriot
Entomology -- The starting Companion character is an entomologist, because the case involves occult power over insects as a potential weapon.
Invincible -- Agent Patriot, the main PC, is invincible, in two senses: he cannot be killed, and he cannot fail to defeat the enemy Beelzebub in the end.
Accuser -- One of the story requirements is that one of the PCs is falsely accused of a crime in at least one scene.

Rules Limitations: No character sheets; fixed characters; hand gestures with mechanical effects in-game

All in all, quite adequate, but not outstanding. Companion and Entomology are the strongest here. Companion avoids the cliché of “the player-characters are companions” because the game’s Companion role is developed as a particular distinctive kind of supporting character. The Rules Limitations requirement is met but not in any particularly interesting way.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

The crux of play amounts to the current Companion player throwing a Problem at the Agent Patriot player during shared narration, which the Agent Patriot player then has 30 seconds to think of a genre-appropriate (read: not necessarily “plausible” in a conventional sense) solution that Agent Patriot comes up with. The player who comes up with the most solutions wins the small reward of full authority to narrate the final confrontation and Agent Patriot’s victory. This will work as long as players are up to a challenge and into challenging one another, without getting too directly competitive. (The same dynamic, really, as a simple game of tossing a Frisbee back and forth. A good throw is one that’s difficult to catch but both can agree is catchable -- whether or not it’s actually caught.)

Since Problem-posing is the game’s one mechanism, the rest being freeform shared narration, some additional examples of Problems and solutions would have been nice. Only one example Problem is mentioned (“Dear Lord, every one of this man's orifices are filled with maggots!”), and that one doesn’t require any action on the characters’ part (unless perhaps the man were still alive). That’s still, according to the rules, a legal type of Problem, the solution challenge being to explain the phenomenon. But the text gives no example solution for that Problem and no other Problem examples.

My biggest reservation about this game, though, is that it gives me a weird vibe of trying to imitate somebody else’s fun, if that makes any sense. Let me try to explain with an example. The rules specify that the player announcing a Problem should say “Problem!” in a “loud, chirpy voice.” Why the loud chirpy voice? My guess is because Kirt and his friends have had fun using this mannerism when telling these stories to each other. But the reason it’s fun for them is because they came up with the mannerism themselves. It’s a shared ritual, a little inside joke, a reference to their own past fun. Operation Foole players can follow the instruction, but it won’t mean the same thing to them. Players need to, and will, make the game their own by applying their own established style preferences and mannerisms, or by inventing new ones. Another example is the Metahumor Restriction rule, which rings a little hollow when Agent Patriot’s most important piece of equipment is called the Plot Device. Obviously some metahumor is acceptable in Kirt’s own Agent Patriot inventions. But even if it weren’t, what would be the harm if Operation Foole players went metahumor-crazy? Does Kirt think that would make the game less fun for them? The line here is very hazy. Most of the game’s constraints, such as having Nazis involved in the plot and Agent Patriot always prevailing in the end, seem completely appropriate for this kind of storytelling game. No different, really, from saying that there will always be a final confrontation with the Master in My Life With Master. But a few of the prescriptive details in Operation Foole give me, like I said, that vibe of imitation just for the sake of imitation.

In general, though, the game appears completely playable and very likely to meet the central goal of tossing and catching creative challenges in a friendly competition for bragging rights, as long as players take to heart the game’s suggestion to adjust the time limit as necessary for the players’ abilities and solution-quality threshold.

Completeness

The game has everything needed to play, but it focuses on a single specific story scenario. While that doesn’t mean it’s not replayable, players are likely to get tired of Beelzebub and beetles after a couple of runs.

[Judgebot]

THESE ARE THE FINAL COMMENTS OF JUDGE GAMMA. BEEP.

Invincible Hench
by Matt Cowens

Historical Period: Victorian London and environs

Style

If the Extraordinary Gentlemen of Victorian-era fiction can have a league of their own, then why not the henchmen and -women who work for Victorian-era villains? That’s a promising concept for a stylish role playing game: unusual player-characters, in the very tense and tricky situation of working for arch-villains, in a highly flavored period setting. But Invincible Hench doesn’t yet fully live up to that promise. The hench characters are sketchy (by which I don’t mean the illustrations); most are at least plausible as henchmen, but there’s not enough information about them to give them especially henchman-like qualities. The fact that they work for villains means only that that’s where their mission orders come from. (No loans of nefarious devices or hypnotic powers from their masters; no run-ins with their masters’ nemeses like Sherlock Holmes or Sir Dennis Nayland Smith trying to use them to get to the villains; no mention of the villains breaking the Hench team members out of prison when needed.) And there’s very little Victorian flavor conveyed in the game text. Though the Locations and NPCs tables have some promising entries, the elements chosen for the example mission seem deliberately generic.

What Invincible Hench does provide is a basic, workable, unabashedly rules-light system for the actual adventures. The system is designed for mission-oriented play that’s neither railroaded nor prone to devolve into aimless searching or trial and error. It requires the right attitude of cooperation between players and gamemasters, which the text forthrightly acknowledges and explains. Not everyone will be able to grok this play style from the text in its current form, and not everyone will like it (even many groups already into rules-light play might prefer, for instance, definite rules for determining who gets to narrate each conflict outcome rather than the “players and GM must work it out” approach taken here), but the game is clear on its general techniques. Given this system to work with, it should be quite possible to express more period style in play than the rules describe as written.

Use of Ingredients

WINE --Acronym for the villains’ organization that gives Invincible Hench its mission orders
Invincible -- PCs cannot die without players’ consent; also, part of the name of the PCs’ organization
Accuser -- Phase of play in which PCs’ success at evading the notice of law enforcement during the mission (i.e. avoiding being accused of crimes) is assessed

Rules Limitation: Fixed player-characters

Is completely changing the meaning of one of the Ingredient words, by turning it into an acronym, a clever tactic or a cheap trick? Since few (if any) other entries in this contest did it, I’ll consider it a clever tactic. (But be warned: if everybody and his brother does it next time around, it’ll quickly mutate into a cheap trick.) The uses of Invincible aren’t terribly original. Accuser is a bit forced, but the actual idea -- to do a post-mission assessment on witnesses and repercussions -- is quite good. (One could interrupt the play of a mission to consider such concerns, but that would be annoying. Instead, many games completely ignore the physical and legal messes that PCs make when in action, which can get implausible. The Accuser Phase is an interesting alternative to those two choices.)

The fixed player-characters meet the rules limitation requirement, and Matt deserves honor points for including his own custom artwork, something Game Chefs seem to rarely do. I wonder, though, even in a genre that calls for some over-the-top stereotyping, are these characters and images too over-the-top? For instance, was it really necessary for the German baron -- in a Victorian period game -- to be giving a Nazi salute?

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

The resolution system has some rough edges. Most notably, there is a direct contradiction about the nature of Karma points: the text states they must be spent during the mission (which is an interesting concept; I could easily see the mission simply not being allowed to be over until all the points were spent), but the rules for the accuser phase actually reward leftover (good) Karma points. Also, the relationship between the use of Karma points and the resolution of conflicts via pooled Brains, Brawn, and Bluff points is not made clear. Presumably Karma overrides the results based on the stat points, but what about opposing Karma use (such as, good and bad karma both played, perhaps by different players) in the same conflict? Given the typical number of challenges expected per mission and the range of Karma points assigned, there would appear to be a strong possibility of multiple Karma points played in every significant conflict.

The system for mission framework generates pre-determined locations, NPCs, and Challenge stats; it’s up to the GM (and the players, to some extent, though their conflict-outcome narration) to invent, on the fly, the significance of the locations and NPCs with respect to the mission at hand, and the exact nature of the challenges. It occurs to me, after several readings, that the main usefulness of Brains, Brawn, and Bluff stats might not be in resolving challenges at all but in helping to invent them. This is important because it’s one of the heaviest-lifting creative tasks in play. Some way of getting player-character stats involved in that process might be a possibility worth looking into.(Something like: Player: “Brains 3 -- there’s an intricate lock on [the intended victim]’s door.” Another player: “Brawn 2 -- and a burly bodyguard with a club waiting inside.”)

The accuser phase is a promising innovation. As described, it’s actually a continuation of play but with a retrospective viewpoint. It’ll be interesting to see how this looks in play testing. Especially, whether it stays focused on consequences of facts about the mission that are already established, or tends to shift to playing out further developments of those consequences, and what might happen if some amount of retconning by the players (establishing new information about the now-completed mission itself) were permitted.

Completeness

I think that playing the game based on the current version would be possible, but only if the group agrees to the GM taking a “benevolent dictator” approach. That is, players get to narrate results and otherwise contribute as the rules suggest, but the GM decides when (while being generous and flexible in so doing). Some tuning of the rules would allow that arrangement to be replaced by a more equitable system based more on mutual cooperation, but the system’s not there yet in its current form, because it leaves who has the final say (or how to decide who has the final say) unclear in too many cases. The fixes might be relatively simple such as “the player who first plays a Karma point has full authority to narrate the outcome of the conflict” (or “the player who bids the most Karma points...” instead) or whatever, but they do need to be clarified.


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Myrmidon
by Evangelos Paliatseas

Historical Period: inspired by mythic ancient Greece; players select historical periods for each history phase episode

Style

Beautiful. Intricate. Intriguing.

And, unfortunately, damn near incomprehensible.

Evangelos, there’s so much depth and creativity here. I feel like I’m failing to measure up to your game by having so much trouble understanding the rules. But I have to conclude that the game text must bear a good part of the blame. After more times reading through it than I can count, whole sections are still baffling, and even in the parts I think I understand, questions pop up everywhere. (Some of the problems are clear-cut. For instance, 70% of the section titled “Overview of Myrmidon” discusses variant rules that the first-time reader cannot possibly comprehend because the rules haven’t begun to describe the normal process yet.) Some of my biggest areas of confusion are how the leftover and reward draughts are brought back into play the next game; what the colors of the dice actually mean in resolution (other than matching colors determining difficulty); which cards used in bidding end up in whose hands after the bidding is over; and how the endgame (such as the example fiction in which Darius gets turned into an ant) is actually resolved in play. I’m not saying the text omits all of this information; just that I haven’t been able to figure it all out.

What I do see is enough individually innovative concepts for half a dozen games. There’s a system by which GM-like responsibilities, story setting, the themes of the story, and the balance between protagonist and storyteller resources are all established simultaneously through a bidding process that itself has some tactical depth. There’s a system for establishing character effectiveness and special powers from a mutable layout of four cards. juxtaposing numbers and color-combinations. There’s a resolution system using three dice of varying sizes and colors, in which each of the dice arises from a specific aspect of the conflict (roughly, the protagonist’s ability, the adversity, and the setting/circumstances), tied into a system of limited resources for creating adversity by the players performing the GM functions. The color rules are all tied into a color-suit schema that rivals the suits of the Tarot in its layers of meaning. There’s a strong running theme (more common in SF than in fantasy, usually) of how a created being can achieve humanlike free will; and another related (or perhaps interfering) strong running themes of the nature of stories (or history) and the primal forces that drive them. I just wish I had a better handle on how it all works, how these things work together, and what each element really means n the context of all the others.

I have to mention, I appreciate the screen-friendly (landscape) page formatting though I can’t give bonus points for it.

Use of Ingredients

Wine --Ambrosia, the main currency of the game
Entomology -- Myrmindon abilities derived from their insect origin
Companion -- the Myrmidon’s patron/parasite god
Invincible -- Myrmidons are invincible
Accuser -- Myrmidons can accuse one another of violating the Lore codes

Rules Limitation: No character sheets; designer-created cards, resolution system uses colors, three distinct pieces of information from resolution roll

Wine, Entomology, and Companion are the strongest three. (“Player-characters are invincible unless...” has turned out to be the default use of Invincible in this contest, and while the Lores are a creative adaptation of Asimov’s Three Laws for the robot-like Myrmidons, the accusation of Lore violations doesn’t appear likely to become a major part of play.) The master stroke here was basing the game on Myrmidons, which naturally bring together the idea of insects (for Entomology) and mythological characters (for Wine, as Ambrosia) along with an (ancient) historical period.

I can quibble about the third of the distinct pieces of information from the resolution roll (the time taken by the action doesn’t seem likely to be relevant very often, given the absence of rounds or initiative or any other time element in resolution overall), but the uses of the Rules Limitations are still very good. The Entomology cards in particular are not just original (in the sense of custom-designed) cards; they’re a completely original kind of card used in a way I’ve never seen before in a role playing game.

Evangelos also claims fixed characters and hand gestures as Rules Limitations, but I disagree. To me, fixed characters means a pre-conceived set of specific characters, not undifferentiated characters. (And anyhow, you’d need to “generate” at least a character name, an initial Entomology card configuration, a companion choice, and possibly a Prime Motive, in order to play a Myrmidon protagonist) And many of the hand gestures in the bidding phase appear to be expressions of opinion with no direct mechanical effects in play. However, I’m not judging the Chairman’s Challenges so my opinion on this doesn’t really matter. Certainly the Rules Limitation requirement is met.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

Looking at the resolution mechanics, the success rate appears to be low at difficulty 1 or 2 unless there’s a d4, or at least a couple of d6s, in the roll. and even then the chances might be poor at difficulty 1 (most difficult). Since the protagonist’s die color is determined by what the protagonist is attempting to do, there doesn’t seem to be much opportunity for the protagonist player to arrange for the colors to match, but I night be unclear on that. Given the critical importance of matching die colors on the success rate, it appears that the order in which the various players declare which dice they’re putting into the roll makes a great deal of difference and that therefore, the sequence for doing so might need to be formalized. It’s not that the reward system requires Myrmidons to achieve a lot of successes in the story phase, but it doesn’t appear desirable to consistently depict the Myrmidons as being ineffectual either.

My main concern about play, besides the prospect of players sitting there scratching their heads over which bids are open or closed and who keeps what cards when it’s over, is that the game seems to pull in so many different directions at once. It’s hared to find the central core of what the game is really about -- that is, what above all are the players trying to do. If the game’s about weaving stories around the Motive Forces and deities currently in play, how does the intricate technology of Entomology-card manipulation and insect powers contribute to that? If the game’s about competing to win the most Wine draught tokens, doesn’t that discourage players from helping each other sate their motives, getting in the way of the cooperative storytelling aspects? Is the intricate competitive bidding process really the best way to choose a Narrator, given the preparations necessary to present a historical period well? If it’s all about the Myrmidons developing the ability to break free of their ant-origin strictures, how does building up the insect powers or having their companion accumulate Wine draught tokens (or is it the player, or the Myrmindon himself, who accumulates them? -- I’m not clear on that) help to represent or advance this process? With so much going on, I have no doubt that any group of players will be able to find something to focus in on, but what might they have to downplay or disregard in order to do so?

This game, perhaps more than any other entry in this contest, has the potential to be magnificent. But first it needs to be comprehensible, for which it needs a little more clarity and focus.

Completeness

This is a hefty entry, with little to add to. Even the cards are fully laid out and print-ready, backs and all. What it needs is more elaboration on what’s already there, including examples that describe player actions step by step, rather than portraying outcomes in fiction or dialog form.


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Jackals and Hounds
by Sean Hillman

Historical period: ancient Egypt, Fourth Dynasty

Style

This is a traditionally structured (GM-driven) secret-war-of-powers game that appears to want to break out of its traditional mold in various ways, such as by switching between time frames and by allowing players to force and frame new scenes. It never quite manages to do so. However, the game has some compelling, if not terribly original, elements: a prolonged conflict through human history to sustain human enlightenment; powerful quasi-immortal characters in the guise of human avatars struggling against equally powerful quasi-immortal enemies; and a simple resolution system that heavily rewards player-character teamwork (especially, combined-effort actions in contests).

The presentation is clear and informative, including some nice pieces of original artwork As is probably inevitable for a game with three separate settings designed for a nine-day contest, the setting information is limited, leaving a lot of work for the GM (despite the player scene framing rules). As a result, there’s not really much historical flavor to the game not even in the ancient Egypt setting. Some of the ancient-Egypt terminology -- Companion of Horus, Pharaohs and Princes in combined contests -- is actually rather jarring.

Use of Ingredients

Companion -- (Horus Companion) term for an empowered entity (familiar, artifact, etc.) each Hound possesses
Invincible -- Hounds (and Jackals) are invincible unless they run out of Power
Accuser -- Name given to the hostile aliens in the Narmer setting

Rules Limitation: Designer-created cards

Disappointing here. The use of Companion is good, but Invincible... argh! I can’t think of a role playing game in this secret-war-of-powers genre where player-characters aren’t “invincible unless they run out of X points,” so while the game does get credit for the ingredient being in the dish, don’t expect much bonus for originality! And calling the aliens Accusers is completely arbitrary. There’s no reason for them to have that name. They don’t accuse anyone of anything, as far as I can tell... which is particularly disappointing given that the secret conflict in these settings is supposed to be one of opposing worldviews, enlightenment versus instinct. There must be a way for the aliens to tie into that conflict in a way that would justify their Accusers name, rather than just being hungry giant-insect monsters. (In fact, having the whole conflict come down to a brute-force battle in the end is unfortunate -- doesn’t that mean the Jackals have already won? A final confrontation inspired more by, say, Foundation and Empire and less by Starship Troopers would surely fit in better.)

The designer-created cards are, alas, incomplete. I can give minimum credit for their being in the game, meeting the requirement, but without their text it’s impossible to assess points for how well they contribute to play.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

Since the game’s most distinctive feature is the three separate time frames, the key question about play seems to be, what does that feature contribute? What is gained by the ability to interrupt a scene and begin a new scene in a different time frame? To be honest, in the game as currently written, I don’t see much point. The characters in each time frame have their own separate Power reserves, and the time frames have separate independent balances of power, so there doesn’t seem to be anything to gain tactically by moving to a new scene/time frame (e.g. build up your Persona’s power in the new time frame, and then return to the interrupted scene with a new advantage). The example on page 5 suggests that a player (Jenny) can “intervene in some way” on another character’s (Sally’s) behalf by moving to the ancient Egypt time frame. But intervene how, exactly? Perhaps I’m missing it because the text offers no rules or guidelines for when and how the interrupted scene gets resumed. (If Sally were to be summoned away from the poker game, to the new scene in ancient Egypt, she would eventually return to the poker game scene, right? Her avatar in that time frame would still be there; she wouldn’t disappear from the poker table as a result of the summoning, would she?)

Possessions and skills/abilities appear to be the only characteristics of Personas that span all the time frames. So possibly a new skill or possession could be acquired in the new scene which would then be useful after returning to the interrupted scene. But this looks awkward to arrange, requiring a lot of overt cooperation with the GM. (And could it be done against time -- that is, bringing a skill or possession from a future scene into the interrupted past scene?)

A similar question arises on the larger scale. Given that the millennia-long struggle must come down to the battle on Narmer, what can the player-characters accomplish in ancient Egypt and present-day America, other than increase their own Persona skills, that would make any difference? Can individual Jackals (unlike the Hounds) be removed or weakened in one time frame by defeating them in another? Finally, how can either side possibly win the conflict on Narmer if the Hounds and Jackals, like the Enlightenment and Ignorance they represent, are actually, as the background text clearly explains, opposite sides of the same coin, each giving rise to the other? They must annihilate one another or reach an accord, but if either of those outcomes were inevitable there’d be little point in playing out the struggle.

The d4 resolution system appears sound, though likely to give the GM a lot of control over outcomes by means of setting the skill levels of the Jackal opponents. The Power point currency appears, so far, to be reasonably balanced. Power is restored to characters at the expected rate of one net point per four die rolls, which might seem a bit slow but there also appear to be relatively few things to spend Power points on. The random fluctuation of Power points independently of the outcome of contests might be interesting, but won’t change the current situation very much very often unless a character’s Power points are already very low. (From what I can see, Power points are more a currency than a stat; the total number a character has only matters in scene-stealing contests.) The net expected Power point gain from die rolls could reward player-characters for initiating otherwise needless conflicts between themselves, in order to generate more die rolls. However, there might be other things intended to go on involving Power points, in the cards and abilities that are not yet written. It appears that at least some of the cards cost Power to use. Do abilities cost Power to use? Are there ways, using cards or abilities, to attack another character’s Power pool?

One other thing needs to be said: previously, I characterized the secret-war-of-powers background of this game as “compelling, if not terribly original.” The truth is, it’s not original because it’s compelling -- in other words, it’s a common formula because lots of role players like it and therefore lots of games get developed for them in this genre. So, I suppose this game is unlikely to win a contest organized by and around role playing’s avant-garde in which originality is a key criterion. But if fully developed, this game might very well be the most marketable entry in the contest.

Completeness

The sketchiness of the settings is not critical, because a good GM can fill in details, but since the Jackals and Hounds have their origin in the ancient Egypt setting, a bit more detail in that area would be useful, especially a run-down on what supernatural forces are real in these settings. (Clearly the Jackals and Hounds are real, and at least some of the Egyptian gods and goddesses are real. What about other magic? Or, for that matter, psychic spoon-benders or UFOs or ancient Egyptian magic in the present-day time frame? Some present-day people believe that greater enlightenment means believing less in supernatural forces, so it would be nice to clear that up.)

More important, in a game about a secret war of powers, the character abilities (whether from cards or from skill lists) are a major element of play, so the absence of text for the cards, skill costs, and rules for skill effects are serious omissions.

[Judgebot]

THESE ARE THE COMMENTS OF JUDGE DELTA. BEEP.

City of Brass

City of Brass is probably the most beautifully presented game in this year’s Game Chef, unfortunately for Clinton this isn’t part of the judging criteria. Set at the end of the nineteenth century, it is a finite RPG in which the players take the role of the French explorers aiming to track down the mysterious City of Brass.

Use of Ingredients

City of Brass makes good use of Wine as one of the resources, while Companion occupies a strong central role as one of the key positions in the game. Invincible and Accuser are also used, but only in peripheral roles. As for rules limitations: all the characters in the game are pre-defined, but this does little more than remove the need for a generation system; the use of cards, however is much stronger and, in keeping with the Judge’s guidelines this is the limitation taken towards the given score.

Style

In keeping with many of the entries this year and last, Clinton has chosen to eschew the traditional structure of RPGs and provide a GM-less game with a clearly defined and finite structure. However, the structure given is very loose with plenty of flexibility that should give the game plenty of longevity and a strong customisable feel. The cards, the concept and the setting all serve to draw you into the game and give it that elusive want-to-play factor.

Completeness

The finite nature of the game has certainly helped Clinton provide a complete and closed game even given that, however, this is an impressively complete work. Aside from a few minor instances (for example, where do the cannibalised resources come from?) the game appears to have everything needed to play.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

City of Brass’s division of roles and responsibilities, combined with the card system and a solid-seeming resolution mechanic and neatly laid out structure all lend the game a solid potential to be a lot of fun for an evening. The subtly constructed interplay between co-operation and rivalry should create an enjoyable level of player-to-player tension; I can see this game being a strong ice-breaker. However, I can’t see this being a game you bring out over and over again; rather it strikes me as the kind of game you’d bring out once in a while, have a lot of fun and then put back again.


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City of the Moon

This is a game I’d really love to love; it’s a very brave attempt at producing a role-playing completely set apart from the traditional world of action and violence choosing instead to take on the subtle courtly rivalry of the women of feudal Japan.

Use of Ingredients

Wine counters appear as a prominent mechanic, however I cannot see how the mechanic links in a logical fashion to the word. Companion falls neatly into the ‘relationship’ mechanic that serves to provide the initial tensions in the game and shape its later development. Accuser appears as ‘accusation’ which I suppose implies an accuser. The game uses cards, but their use in game doesn’t require them to be cards at all; they could just as easily appear as a list.

Completeness

Emily has unfortunately neglected to include the details of how the dice pools created in game are actually used to resolve success or failure. This oversight, unfortunately, is too central to overlook but otherwise the game seems fully complete.

Style

Few games ooze style as much as this one. Emily has taken on one of the toughest challenges in roleplaying: how to create enjoyable challenge and tension without violence or action. The reason I haven’t chosen to give it an even higher mark is that I cannot actually see myself choosing to play this game.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

The lack of description surrounding the central resolution mechanic makes this one very difficult to judge, however I have attempted to ignore this as the game as already been penalised in the completeness category for this oversight. The game is well defined as it is, with clear goals and a neat way of bringing conflict in from the start; although the creation process appears to be circular - with the Nemesis relationship both being defined by a connection and choosing it. The main difficulty I see is in bringing the players to engage with the difficult subject matter and construct interesting scenes, a problem enhanced by the fact not all players are involved in every scene.



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Founding Fathers

In Founding Fathers players take the role of those chosen to construct the rules of the new American republic. Founding fathers is a strange little game by any standards, even those of the Game Chef competition, although I imagine it would strike more of a chord with Americans.

Use of Ingredients

Like more than a few chefs, Sandy has chosen to use a variant of the given word rather than the word itself - in this case, Accuse rather than Accuser - I consider this a less than desirable practice. However, both Companion and Accuse do find strong roles within the game and the American Revolution is a tasty usage of the given genre. The use of Wine consists of little more than a suggestion that you should drink some during the game. The limitation Use of Colour and No Character Sheet make an appearance, the colours are fairly weak - cards with their meaning on would arguably serve better but the construction of a game without a Character sheet is a tough challenge and one to which this chef has well risen.

Style

Founding Fathers earns marks for its clever avoidance of traditional RPG themes and its tough subject matter. However, I find there to be little meat on its bones and there is nothing here to make me want to actually play it. As an Englishman, I know little about the subject and it has little draw for me.

Completeness

The game is complete, after a fashion, but it gives so little guidance for play and provides little more than a rather abstract resolution mechanic and an admonishment to find your own destiny with it. The game suggests that you are attempting to secure land, power, peace, prosperity or a good horse but gives no indication of what it means to do this or how to track these.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough here to provide a game. With precious little structure, no real goals and very few resources to challenge over I can’t really see how a session would blossom into anything.



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In the Name of Titania Regina

Faeries! Pirates! Action! could easily be the tag line for this game of fantasy adventure on the high seas. Light hearted, and free-flowing, this is one of the closest games in the contest to a traditional RPG.

Use of Ingredients

Companion appears in the game, but has virtually no meaning while Invincible makes a cameo appearance leaving only Wine of the words to find a safe port in the storm. Wine is cleverly woven into the resolution mechanics and provides an important dash of resource management. The resolution systems uses colours, but it’d be better off not as the colours simply correspond to named levels that lie in serial order - leaving the numbers 1-6 on the dice would make resolution simpler and clearer.

Style

To my mind, the chef has wandered far from the Historical Period genre in this game, and fitted it firmly into the realm of fantasy. For this reason I have heavily penalised it in this section. Which is a shame as the concept of faeries out causing mischief on the high seas is a strong one with plenty of room for stylish interplay.

Completeness

In the Name is woefully incomplete, even basic things such as the nature of GMing are left undefined. What crewmen do, how you find them, who plays them and how they are replaced is not clearly defined despite their apparently central role. There is no description or exposition of how sea-faring works and the magic system badly needs checks, balances and just plain description.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

Unfortunately, the lack of completeness must effect my judgement in this category also. I cannot imagine playing this game successfully, in particular, the magic system as is would simply overwhelm and trample any real attempt at play. Which is a real pity as the concept and vision behind this game is so very, very strong. Faeries on the high seas! Who wouldn’t?




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Invincible!

A game of Mongolian conquest, Invincible is sorely testing where the limits of the RPG form lie even by the standards of the Game Chef competition - there is no obvious potential for either characterisation or free choice.

Use of Ingredients

Companion and Accuser are well used, while the titular Invincible is little more than a rallying cry. The game makes use of hand gestures but I cannot see that it gains anything from them - rather it seems to me that the spoken word would work better. The characters are pre-generated but apart from removing the need to generate them yourself they add little to the game.

Style

The Mongol hoards provide an evocative setting, and the rules will lend themselves to interesting, perhaps Munchkin (the board game) style of play. However, as far as I am concerned this game has strayed too far from what an RPG is and thus I have docked points accordingly.

Completeness

Apart from a few missing hand signals, Invincible seems solidly complete.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

Invincible seems like it will enjoyable in play, there is plenty of potential for transient alliances and timely back-stabbing and there are interesting (if constrained) options for play. The hand gesture system, however, strikes me as overly clumsy and the game would be better without.



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Morpho Londinium

Coming from the notable stable of John Kim, Morpho Londinium is (I believe) the Game Chef’s competition first LARP; as I don’t myself LARP I find myself somewhat poorly placed to judge it’s merits.

Use of Ingredients

Morpho makes use of four of the ingredients (that I can see, the designers note claims all four), but most are highly peripheral or not used in the given form – e.g. although the game use Insects a lot, the word given was Entomology. Wine is excellently engaged in a clever trade-off in the Intoxication mechanic. Several of the limitations occur, but the excellent use of pre-generated characters is the best. Here we can really see the potential if well done, the characters provide personality, conflict and mechanical interplay and differentiation.

Style

The characters and setting lend a strong base to this game, while the intoxication mechanic at its heart is inspired.

Completeness

Sadly, the chef appears to have ran out of time, and the central powers granted to the different characters are either missing or inadequately described. Since these would form such an essential role in the game I am forced to judge this section harshly.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

My inexperience of the LARP genre and the large holes in the rules make it very difficult to make a solid judgement as to the effectiveness in play of this game. While the intoxication mechanic is inspired and could form the basis of a very strong game, I’m afraid I cannot lend a higher mark when there is so much missing.



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Revolution

Revolution is an engaging little game for two players inspired by the French revolution. It is simple, straightforward and strongly seated in the story telling mode.

Use of Ingredients

Each of the words Companion, Accuser and Invincible appear as a possible outcome on the dice roles. This is central and clever; I like it. The game claims to need no character sheet, but I think it would be difficult to play without keeping track on paper of the various facets as they pass.

Style

A game for two players is a tricky tightrope. One I believe Chris has crossed with some finesse. Revolution provides a flexible and powerful platform for two players to tell interesting and competitive stories. Good stuff. While the game is inspired by the French revolution it is only loosely seated in the historical genre, and it is for this reason it failed to score even more highly.

Completeness

It’s a complete and solid game. The only possible need I can see is for a mechanic to prevent ‘out-of-context’ errors (aliens in Paris, for example) and other silliness.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

I see this as a coach, or car, journey kind of game so it is a pity, perhaps, that it still uses dice. The mechanics should provide interest and challenge within the story telling style of game. It will rely heavily on the story telling abilities and quick-wits of the players but in a two-player game this is less of a problem. I could imagine both playing and enjoying this game.



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The Dinner Party

The Dinner Party is a brave, and well crafted, attempt at pushing the boundaries of what a roleplaying game can be and tackle.

Use of Ingredients

Doug’s dish makes excellent and thoughtful use of every ingredient he has chosen to add. The pre-generated characters deserve special mention for their cleverly interwoven challenges and powers.

Style

The Dinner Party is only questionably in the historical period genre, although it claims to be set in the 1970’s there is little in the game that ties it to that period and it could comfortably simply be modern day. For this reason I have not marked highly in this category, otherwise it deserves praise for its highly unusual subject matter and lack of violence.

Completeness

I can see no missing parts in this game. Excellent work in such a short time.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

The game should play well into people’s existing ideas and produce interesting play while the mechanics intermesh well. However, it frequently removes players from active play and could leave players as spectators for long periods of time. I consider this a major problem, as with as many as eight players lack of spotlight time is a serious hurdle even without being egged on by the rules.



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The Gentlemen’s Entomology Club

Michaels Sands has presented a fine gourmet dish of eccentric professors reliving former glories in the days of the enlightenment. I don’t know whether this is the first retrospective roleplaying game but it’s the first I’ve seen.

Use of Ingredients

Entomology clearly takes a central role, and a clever one at that, Companion is well used forming part of the story telling trio. Invincible occurs as the players cannot die as they’re telling the story while Wine is involved only in that the players are intended to drink it - however, the drinking feel is strongly evoked by the game as a whole so I have not judged this too harshly. The game makes strong use of custom cards and no character sheet.

Style

Brilliant. Both evocative of the period and at the same time innovative in its mechanics and concepts. Retroactive roleplaying is a nice touch. Everything about the game brings forth that “I want to play” feel. It is simple, and elegant and combines competition and co-operation in equal measure. It reminds me of Once Upon a Time but without the same potential for abuse.

Completeness

Every area of play is well defined, while the rules find time for examples of play, advice to players and a glossary - very impressive for a weeks work.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

With the right players, I think there is no doubt this offers hours of top quality fun. The game seems well balanced, the cards to offer endless possibilities while still keeping things tight and the neat switching of co-operation and competition should offer constantly switching allegiances to the tactical side of the game. The only caveat is ‘with the right players’, the largely freestyle story telling nature of the game places strong demands on the players to be willing to step up to the plate and able to spin a good yarn at the drop of the hat.



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The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach

Jason Morningstar, apart from having a very cool name, has offered up a dish of horror set against the background of university in-fighting in the early years of the twentieth century.

Use of Ingredients

The custom cards are very, very well done offering a complex interplay of options. Very nice. Among the other ingredients used, Wine is particularly worthy of mention for its clever play-off mechanic.

Style

Shab-Al-Hiri Roach is certainly stylish, with a menacing evil and a nice caricature of academic life. However, it like a fair few other dishes has skittered to the edges of the historical period genre and, perhaps, beyond and I have thusly limited its score.

Completeness

A long and detailed game, there is much here. But in among them there is a glaring hole. While it tells you how many and which dice to roll it does not tell you how to translate that roll into a result.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play

Without knowing how exactly resolution works this is difficult to judge, however I imagine in any obvious system the d12s offered by the Roach would swiftly overwhelm all opposition. While I understand the Roach is supposed to power up the players I believe this influence will be too strong and undermine the trade-offs inherent in the game. Played against this however are the clever cards and trade-offs woven through the fabric of the game - take the Roach and win the battle but, perhaps, lose the war in the process and the neat temptations written large on every card.


BEEP.

[Judgebot]

THESE ARE THE COMMENTS OF JUDGE EPSILON. BEEP.

1984 Prime, Mischa Krilov

Use of Ingredients
The ingredients tend to be used thematically. Entomology is addressed interestingly through giant ants. Some of the uses are a little sketchy, but if you drop the worst, you get a reasonable use.

Style
Almost got low marks for this not being period because of the post apocalyptic nature, but somehow it manages to evoke a very cold war feeling, mostly by the characters. So it redeems itself as a sort of transplanted period. The feel it projects is pretty pronounced. I particularly like how racism is addressed, as appropriate to the atomic horror feel.

Completeness
A very complete and interesting system. There is a question about whether the random adventure generator will be inspiring enough to produce real adventures. But it’s likely that the real drama is between the preset PCs and their conflicting POVs. So as a limited play game, it might just go by itself. Playtest needed here.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
Overall it seems like it’ll probably play pretty well, much in the way that pregen LARPS tend to work well.



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City of the Moon, Emily Care Boss

Use of Ingredients
Not much attempt made to incorporate the ingredients. This was probably the right thing to do in this case. Bad score, but a good game.

Style
Very interesting choice of period, and very interesting rules to represent it. Focuses on the particulars very tightly.

Completeness
One glaring omission, how to resolve the dice pools (though it could presumably be a comparison of totals). Otherwise it seems to have quite a lot included in very little text.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
Very difficult to guage without play. Likely to have some very unstable moments until it’s playtested a lot.



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Companion Fever, Tobias op den Brouw

Use of Ingredients
The selected ingredients are incorporated mostly as color, but pretty well from that POV.

Style
The game focuses a lot on the mechanics, and only has some flavor text to really make it period. The game could be played completely without the period color.

Completeness
The game is complete in terms of not missing any component needed to play through. But it doesn’t go very far in terms of it’s goals.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
Probably fun as a one shot, but with questionable amounts of role-playing incentive.



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Dueling Papers: San Francisco Edition, TJ333

Use of Ingredients
There seem to be a lack of ingredients used. Companion and Accuser are used pretty well.

Style
An interesting choice of period, and, more interestingly what happens in it. But sans a good structure, it’s hard to say if the rules will convey any of this.

Completeness
Could use some more samples of thing like ideals, and who companions are. Also there seems to be some sort of play cycle like that in MLWM, but the game doesn’t seem to have anything written about that. Also there seem to be very few cards. The dueling rules look fascinating, but one isn’t sure how to apply them.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
If there was a sensible order to how things happen, the game might be interesting. As it stands, it’ll need substantial work to produce good play.



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Founding Fathers, Sandy Antunes

Use of Ingredients
The selected ingredients are pretty well incorporated. One has to wonder if the founding fathers didn’t drink more beer than wine, however.

Style
A classic period, and the ironic addressing of it is interesting. But beyond the humorous approach, it doesn’t say a lot about the period.

Completeness
Almost more a single mechanic than an entire game, it doesn’t really look complete at all. Some of the mechanisms seem to be pointlessly added. An interesting addition to another game perhaps.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
Might be fun for a few rounds, and as the author suggest more so when drunk than not. But probably not really for long. Worse, it’s hard to say for sure, but it looks somewhat like the mechanic may not even work correctly.



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Guilty Before God, Judd Karlman

Use of Ingredients
Generally mediocre incorporations, but none terrible. Accuser the best of them as the one starting the duel.

Style
The era enumerated could be interesting, and there’s interesting mechanics present. But the game text doesn’t seem to really take steps to define the era it’s supposed to be emulating. The few examples seek to do this, but come up somewhat short. One moment it reads like the end of the nineteenth century, and in other parts the beginning.

Completeness
Another single mechanic game. Possibly good for insertion into another game, but a game that constantly forces duels simply can’t go very far.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
For what it is, the mechanic is very interesting. Again, possibly a good addition to another game.


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In a Grove, Kenji Baugham

Use of Ingredients
Only wine is directly included (sake) and only as one of the elements. The other elements are somewhat present in theory, but only tenuously.


Style
Less period than a specific situation, the game manages to capture some style with it’s very short presentation.

Completeness
The game seems to be complete internally, but it doesn’t seem like what’s there will meet even it’s meager goals.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
There seems to be some sort of mechanism to produce outcome, but it’s far from clear that it’ll produce what is intended (in fact it seems unlikely). Interesting concept, but simply needs to be reworked.



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In The Name of Titania Regina, Brenna Beattie

Use of Ingredients
Wine as Faewine has some interesting effects, but there are no rules on obtaining it. Invincibility is somewhat interesting in that it’s only achievable for part of a day and then you explode. Companion is very tenuous.

Style
Not really a period game, the very rich style the game is trying to promote isn’t supported at all by the rules.

Completeness
The quests seem at once central to the game, and tacked on at the same time. All rather haphazard.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
A good concept in search of better execution.



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Invincible Hench, Matt Cowens

Use of Ingredients
Pretty good incoporation. WINE as an acronym is a bit forced and out of place. But accuser as a phase, and invincible indicating the inability of the henchmen to die all taste good.

Style
Somehow, despite not much support, the situation set up does manage to provide for the period elements. As a comedic Victorian game it comes across nicely.

Completeness
Looks like everything needed is there to do what the game sets out to do.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
Some of the rules don’t look quite right. Seems like this one might need a bit more baking. But the structure should help some.



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Invincible!, Kenneth Bailey

Use of Ingredients
Good use of ingredients, invincible not only being the title, but something you can try to prove in the game. Wine, companion and accuser (modes) have interesting mechanics about them.

Style
The game has an interesting period with a lot to suggest itself, but the mechanics seem to relegate it to being about the politics involved. It’s hard to see where the colorful setting material would come into play. Are the hand signs really a Mongol thing?

Completeness
Lots of interesting options in play, and the required hand signs are an interesting addition. Still does it all promote any real role-playing? Possibly, but play testing is probably going to be telling.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
Very interesting how the game considers battle as a political tool. There seems to be a lot going on here, and the game should be pretty interesting. The only question is whether or not it will “go” as an RPG, or simply become an odd tactical game. Otherwise a very strong entry.



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Worker's Paradise, Judson Lester

Use of Ingredients
The ingredients are fairly well incorporated, but a tad forced seeming. Like they’re there only because of the contest requirements and not because the game needs them.

Style
The idea of a fictional setting to demonstrate a period from real life that may have itself been fictional is intriguing. That is, the game seems to be about the idealized evil Soviet state. Interesting. The entomology addition is almost jarring, but it works in the end.

Completeness
At first glance it seems like playing out nothing but prosecutions is limiting. But seen as a framework for the overall themes of the game, it’s like the framework for MLWM, and very complete.

Estimated Effectiveness in Play
Playing off of the effectiveness of DitV, the game should work pretty well. While there are some surface similarities to that game, there are some real innovations here. The game sounds like a blast to play.

BEEP.

[Judgebot]

THESE ARE THE COMMENTS OF JUDGE THETA. BEEP.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

It's an interesting game, and I like the "This is What I Meant" in the back- Sure, with polish this could really turn into something. But as is? Incomplete.

On Ingredients: Wine? Tenuous at best. Color of dice for "Use color" subrule? Weak.

"Play continues like this until one player can not, or will not, defend himself." It's not really explained how one can not "defend himself", or what choosing not to entails.

Rules: Kinda weak. Game Chef Ingredients: Really weak. Subject Matter: Pure awesome. This would make a great, and powerful, one-shot game if ironed out properly.



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The Governor's Report Concerning the Doomed Assault on the Fire Moon

Upon reading this, I found this game to be the most playable in its current form of the group of games I was assigned to review. Incredible. Enlighting. Wholly Interesting. This game needs to be published. I dunno if the "regular gaming group" would put down the dice long enough to hammer through a session, but this stuff is SOLID GOLD for the Host a Murder Mystery crowd. It got my highest marks for Style.

On Characters: There should be more written about affecting character personalities- you give examples, I think this section could be expanded a little.

I noticed other judges were a little strong against it because it didn't adhere to a specific historic event- But since the rules were "INSPIRED by a historical period" and not "BASED ON a historical period", I see no problem with the ingredients or rules used.

Publish this game, or I will beat you.



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Myrmidon broke my brain.

Yes, it did successfully use all the rules and ingredients it set out to use. It did so successfully, too, not just as a one-word reference or anything like that. However, in the end what we have is a game that plays out like three German board games lashed together with a solid roleplaying foundation. Going through the rules was like taking a jackhammer to my skull.

It's NOT messy. It certainly did a great job of explanation, considering what the game involves (it read, appropriately, like my rules of the Tigris and Euphrates board game). It's not "too many ingredients" spoiling the thing- I've seen board games that try to use too much, like Cards, Board, Dice, Spinner, Pieces, Points and the like, and Myrmidon isn't like that.

But it IS Just Too Much. For me anyway. Too much stuff. Clearly clever, but this thing put me in a headlock as I tried to read through the rules three times to try to understand how to play. I couldn't imagine trying to explain even part of this game to someone else. It's good, and it shows, but it's Just Too Much. IMO, anyway.



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ONE HUNDRED FLOWERS

This game is very mysterious (I know little about China), and that made it interesting. There were a lot of games this year that looked like they were half-boardgame, half-RPG, but this one looks like All Board Game with a tiny bit of RPG added in for spice.

It says "Role-playing scenes are the core of the game, which the rest revolves around. This is the most important section", however it just doesn't feel that way- I don't want to get into the debate of "Is this a Storytelling Game? Is this a Board Game?" But it genuinely felt that, compared to ALL the other stuff happening in the game which have rules and support, this section was the smallest, playwise, of the overall game IMO. I think it needs some real work to turn it into a game of playing a role. I don't know how, but something to think about.

Very interesting. And the boardgamey parts seem to fit together (a map of the area would have helped, but I saw on the forums that the author couldn't find one in time, totally understandable). But needs more support for scenes, IMO.



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Dueling Papers: San Francisco Edition

Hmmm. Out of all the games I reviewed, this was the one where I thought to myself most "What ingredients did this author use? I can't seem to find them".

This game was short: Short games are fine, if they make sure to explain everything well. However, it seemed to be all rules about making characters, advancement, and conflict (duels), but I don't see where the roleplaying happens. It seems like it could totally just be a game that consists of a series of dice rolls. Def needs polish, but I do like the nascent ideas behind it.



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BARQUEST

Holy nostalgia! Anyone ever remember those Lone Wolf books? There was this "Magnamund Companion" or something, a glossy book filled with fun and cute backstory stuff, including a cross-section of Lone Wolf's order's castle, writing in the "Orc Language", etc. In there, there was a short multiplayer game with tokens and characters that totally plays out like Barquest (right down to Characer Missions). Barquest has more roleplaying in it, but I did feel a wash of nostalgia. Overall, the game is like that Hero Quest boardgame, but in a tavern, and with Booty instead of Treasure.

The use of Hand Signals I thought was a little weak, they really didn't seem to do anything ("Catch someone's attention"). But the other ingredients were used well.

All in all, I think if you polish it up, print it out on glossy paper and get a decent artist, you'd have a mini-hit. Heck, you could start marketing it on the down-and-low as "That Game from the Magnamund/Lone Wolf Companion... Only BETTER!" and that would probably sell it right there.



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Jackals and Hounds

Holy Literal Use of the Ingredients, Batman! The bad guys are called "The Accusers", the good guys are called "Immortal" (capital-I).

All in all, I REALLY liked this game, but I'm a sucker for multiple-lifeline (Nephilim) or time travel games.

Not sure how the Hieroglyph cards are used ("as powers"... but how?), so a little point deduction there, but again the concept is grand and it works. Just needs a little polish.

Also needs a lot more examples of play. I'm not sure how to bridge scenes that span time as a GM. Also, I'm not sure what the Horus Companion is there for- What purpose does it serve, other than comic relief or Kewlness? Also, I'm still unclear of Balance of Power, why that rule is there, what its importance is, and generally how it works ("+1 Power to Each Personal on that Side" ... which side? The side that has more victories, or the other one? etc). An idea of why this rule is important, and more importantly how it makes the game more fun, will turn it from a "quirty rule that players ignore" to "the core of the story".

Also, they didn't count, but Nice Use of Pictures and layout!


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The Shab-al-Hiri Roach

Wow. Very interesting. Everything seems to have come together quite well for this. In the end, it feels like a mini-campaign for Call of Cthulhu (but with more Cronenberg, but that's not a bad thing really.

Good use of ingredients, cool setup and rules. This is one of two entries by Jason Morningstar- and while this one definitely has more effort and time put into it, conceptually I dig Fire Moon a little more. Stilll, definitely a game I wouldn't mind playing. it is oozing with Style.

I liked the cards a lot, as well as the directed scenes.


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The Stalk Across All Worlds

Cavemen AND Vampires? Together?
"Hey, you got my Vampires in your Cavemen!"
"No, YOU got YOUR Vampires in my Cavemen!"
"MMMMMMMmmmmmmm!!!!"

All in all, I love the ideas behind the game, but the rules need a lot of work. The dice mechnics were really hard to adjust to, and I required the chart to make sense of it- If I played at the table, looking at the chart would have been faster than trying to figure it out myself.

Not specifying how the cards work (how they are actually put down and used for the 3d6 bonus) was a setback, IMO.

Great concept, cool story fiction- But the rest, like the cards and dice, need some overhaulin'.


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THE LAST SUPPER

Christtastic! 10 pounds of regligious heresy coolness in a 5 pound bag.

Unfortunately, I'm a "play example" kind of guy when it comes to new concepts and new styles of play in RPGs, so the use of solid play examples would have made the whole package easier to swallow.

Again, I'm reminded of the "Board Game mixed with RPG" that we've seen a lot of this year, but this one is firmly planted on the RPG side of the hizzy, and the cards and board help accentuate and kick off the roleplaying, rather than compete against it.

Probably one of the most solid contenders for this year's winner.



BEEP.