Deep dives backed by actual play.
Broke a 3-week-long RPG fast with The Facility last night. Felt good to touch dice again! The Facility is a zine-sized game by Galen Pejeau built on Breathless, a game framework I've been digging into since starting through a solo game called Substratum Protocol. It's a very basic push-your-luck kind of game, where each time… Continue reading A Short Deep Dive into The Facility
If you could win unlimited wealth and freedom and all you had to do was murder some strangers, would you? What if you grew close to those strangers through days of adversity and teamwork? Would you fight against the injustice of this sadistic game, or stab your new friends in the back? What if their… Continue reading Deathmatch Island: The Deep Dive
I've been slowly working through a big stack of really great looking little zine-sized games that all arrived at once. Finally got to play my buddy Keith Stetson’s God’s Gonna Cut You Down, a solo journaling game about the inevitability of misery in the old west. I’ve come to really enjoy solo games like this,… Continue reading Review and AP: God’s Gonna Cut You Down
Every game makes you a promise: the game will be about this thing and will support you this way. Some games wisely under-promise and over-deliver. That’s just good life advice. But under-promising is hard to do when you need to generate excitement for your game, otherwise people won’t buy and, hopefully, play it. So we… Continue reading Apocalypse Keys: the Deep Dive
I have a theory: there are two kinds of licensed games. Or, perhaps, licensed games fall on a continuum. The first kind is where the rules provide as little friction as possible while you Do License Things. The game expects you to bring lots of knowledge of the license to bear, and the system does… Continue reading Deep Dive: Cowboy Bebop
