A lot of games pass through my doors every year. I think this is everything that arrived in 2024! And a peek at what I’m expecting to arrive in 2025 at the end. What a time to be alive and loving tabletop roleplaying.
This is a very long list! Settle in with some eggnog or whatever else you’re drinking this holiday season.
Best New Games
Deathmatch Island: Okay, jeez, I was not expecting this little Agon hack to hit so hard and so far above its punching weight. The setup, a cross between Survivor, Lost and Squid Game, is aggressively PvP and doesn’t shy away from it. Gameplay takes the players through challenge after challenge, whittling down the opposition until there’s only one winner at the end. Meanwhile, the players are pursuing their own theories about what the actual heck is going on on these weird islands. Is it a government experiment? Is it aliens? Rich people exploiting desperate amnesiacs?
Besides just being a hoot to play, Deathmatch Island is also so beautifully put together. Just brutally corporate and antiseptic.
Urban Shadows 2E: Okay, yes, a second edition but this much-delayed new version is a banger. Magpie Games continues to make astonishingly well polished, thoughtful work. Having spent a good amount of time with Mark Diaz-Truman over the years, I can also say nobody in the indie world cares more about designing toward a good, fun, and meaningful play experience. There are a few true believers, still, who haven’t either given up, worn out or sold out. Even the big licenses Magpie handles, like Avatar Legends and Root, are better-designed and more-thoughtful takes on the properties than you’d have gotten out of anyone else. It’s true and you know it.
Urban Shadows 2E iterates on the first edition’s winning model and adds a slew of new tools. Play it, love it.
Substratum Protocol: I was genuinely surprised at how much fun this solo game turned out to be. It’s based on the Fari RPG model, where the dice you use get smaller and smaller until you take a break, which is its own push-your-luck game. There are cards involved, collecting sets to cash in throughout play. The deeper into the Earth you go looking for a solution to the mysterious Anomaly that’s threatening the world above, your character gets stranger. The layers you pass through get weird, the overall fiction accumulates, and you end up with a surreal showdown. As far as solo-friendly games go (I suppose it’s formally just a standard GM-and-players game, but it comes with the best solo support I’ve seen so far) it’s a nice little package you can quickly unpack whenever you’ve got a few spare minutes. Great looking book, interesting prompts, I’m glad I played it.
Zoetrope: Death Didn’t Take: I just wrote about this charming, gonzo card-driven time travel game last week. It’s still sitting with me! I’ve played my fair share of card-driven RPGs but more often than not I don’t find them super replayable. This one’s got so much dang content, and it’s so easy-breezy to play, that I’m going to keep this in my con bag as a snappy filler forever. Go read the recent review for more details.
Most Interesting Games
Through the Hedgerow: Another game I wrote about recently, Through the Hedgerow features an interesting, surreal journey through time (via an extradimensional hedgerow, see) that our heroes travel through to face down various villains. It’s a Light-versus-Darkness setup, and it’s not that concerned with interpersonal relationships, but the time travel component crossed with the immaculate English Folklore vibes is very nice. The game looks gentle insofar as you mostly handle your challenges via riddles, negotiating and tea parties, but the system feels more like survival horror. Nice one from the folks who brought us Gaslands and Tomorrow City.
Vergence: a Forged in the Dark game about dimension-traveling families vying for power, Amber-style. The dimension-traveling bit is interesting but the default settings (called bloodlines) for the game are very weird, very bespoke. There’s a steampunk setting consisting of city-filled caves, a sky-ship setting with floating cities, the back of a living serpent, and the poor orphans whose worlds left them behind. I’m not sure the game is based on anything in particular other than this weird setting. There’s a supplement called Otherworld that features more surreal, dreamlike material to engage with. Good campaign frameworks, looks very playable.
Revolt!: this GMless game features a brewing revolution against a capricious monarch. Rather than playing individuals, each player runs a faction fighting against this monarch. You use a deck of standard cards, broken into the four suits, to generate prompts throughout the revolution. It looks a bit like a geopolitical take on For The Queen, each card asking provocative questions of a player’s faction. Get through the four stages, boom, there’s your revolution. Nice little boxed set comes with printed cards.
Fealty: in this GMless game, each player plays one of the members of a court trying to please a capricious monarch through the years. It uses cards and a chess set to manage resource tracking, and a Belonging Outside Belonging-style menu of moves that allow you to spend, earn or give tokens as you perform various events. There are five courtiers, four monarchs, and a set of issues before the court generated by card draws. The game is a little competitive, in that one way to end the game is to perform your character’s revolutionary move (which costs a lot of tokens, which you’ll be telegraphing around the table).
Community Radio: this is a high-speed call-and-response improv-heavy game about a very weird radio station. The cycle of play moves between two minute long slice of life scenes (with a stopwatch and everything), followed by a decree passed by the community’s City Council, followed by a recap of the events by the community radio host. The zine comes with thirteen pre-made communities, ranging from goofy (a community of Time Lords dealing with a collapsing timeline) to horrifying (a paranoid hellscape of neighborhood snitches and faceless watchers). If you’re into Welcome to Night Vale check it out.
God’s Gonna Cut You Down: I’ve played this solitaire journaling game set in the Old West several times now, and man it’s interesting. You’re always some flavor of settler, rancher, workhand, whatever, bound by ever-growing needs and temptations and the absolute knowledge that God’s gonna cut you down eventually. Play is generated by interpreting Biblical passages and the vibe gets dire after a while. Fun (?) way to spend an hour or two!
Chiron’s Doom: this solo-to-three player GMless game covers similar ground to Substratum Protocol (mentioned above), with explorers investigating a strange monument and things going badly. You build an expedition deck and three disaster decks out of a standard deck of playing cards. As you draw cards from the expedition deck, you check prompts, add cards from the various disaster decks, and watch explorers die as you draw Kings. Diamonds are the exploration suit, and as you draw them your team gets closer to ending the game. Bust out a fresh journal and get exploring.
Inevitable: ran this Arthurian-Western mashup at a recent local convention and had a blast! The kingdom is going to fall and everyone defending it will fall with it, which is not great since you start the game as a stalwart defender of the realm. The system itself is awfully thin but the setting materials are marvelous. I’d love to see what a three-shot looks like because our one-shot was hot.
Navathem’s End: I read the PDF of this but allegedly the book itself is headed my way before the end of the year. The creators of this fantasy game are both from the Philippines, and the vibe throughout is nicely non-European and anticolonial. It’s got some PbtA, some FitD, some OSR. It’s a comprehensive setting, a kitbashed system, notes from a personal campaign and just lots of stuff jammed together. Honestly I found the PDF a little hard to scan for highlights. Feels like the sort of game that needs to be read front to back, played a bit, then go back and reread the whole thing. But it’s definitely interesting!
Exile/Crescent: Currently still only available in PDF, this pair of dark fantasy RPGs share similar systems and exist in dialogue with each other. Exile is about teenage misfits wandering around a hellscape called The Below, looking for a way home. Crescent is about children lost in The Daydream and also looking for a way home. Crescent is kind of the G version and Exile is the PG-13 (maybe, possibly R) version. Both games use cards to create and track the characters. Cute art, some interesting GM-facing moves and rules, very simple resolution. Still trying to find the special sauce in this one, which I suspect is hidden in the custom decks.
The Big Store: A game about con artists carrying out an elaborate con against a rich and surely deserving mark. The game is fairly straightforward PbtA, with each character in charge of one of the four stage that every con has. I’m personally a huge fan of confidence game stories, so the material is familiar to me. Betting if you don’t come to the game knowing how con jobs work, the learning curve might be steep.
Prettiest Games
The Wildsea: Storm & Root: The Wildsea made my “very good” list last year after I ran a session of it online, and I immediately ordered the hardcopy book along with its first expansion, Storm & Root. In The Wildsea, characters belong to a ship’s crew plying a sea made of vast, miles-high treetops. The system feels very much like someone read a Forged in the Dark game, made some guesses, and filled in the blanks with their own ideas. I think it’s pretty workable but is missing some of the pressure-cooker choices a good FitD game demands. Storm & Root is about the vessels designed to go deep down under the treetops to explore the ruins of the world as it was before everything got overgrown, as well as airships that avoid the leavy overgrowth altogether.
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland Redux: This very, very lightweight game is about the very primitive and ahistoric people who may have lived in Doggerland, an area of the world now covered by the North Sea. The Maskwitches are shamanic problem-solvers who battle spirits making life hard for their communities. They wear masks and amulets that make them specifically strong and weak against certain kinds of spirits. The pretty part of the game is that artist and creator Jon Hodgson completely recreated his first edition by hand-making models and sets and photographing them. You’ve never seen a game that looks like this.
Break!: There’s probably a terrific system in here, but I can’t see it past the bright anime colors, hot pink headlines, and energetic illustrations. Premise-wise it’s “an adventure game,” without much jumping out as exceptional in the system or setting. Break! features specific systems for journeying, exploring, negotiating, and fighting, so that’s nice. What stands out for me about Break! is how exceedingly clear, clean and explicit every aspect of the game is. Wishing I had a physical copy of this.
Outsiders: this expansion for the solo journaling game Notorious is all about sci-fi bounty hunters. The Boba Fett vibes are real strong right from the start. These games make my Prettiest list because they are so pretty. Wire-bound, great illustrations, extremely clean layout, easy as heck to find your way through.
Games I’m Most Excited To Get To The Table
Triangle Agency: Phew, this game. I backed Triangle Agency as a PDF and immediately reached out to the publishers to upgrade to their big briefcase with two hardbacks, custom dice, the works. This game of corporate paranormal horror feels a little like a companion work to Deathmatch Island, but where DMI is clean enough to eat off of, Triangle Agency starts friendly and goes completely unhinged throughout the GMing section. The entire last third of the book is in fact behind a “playwall,” and you’re not even allowed to read it until the content has been unlocked. I peeked.
Memento Mori: This game from Two Little Mice about medieval Italians dying of the plague – hear me out! – while growing in supernatural power could have also made the Prettiest Games list. The books are just so dang nice. But also the actual system looks interesting, and the supplemental book really builds just how strange a world the game is set in. It’s dug itself into my brain.
Wulfwald: This really nice boxed set of five booklets and a cloth map from Lost Pages is an OSR setting about Norse criminals doing their king’s dirty work in the hopes of someday returning to society. Interesting setup, good opportunity to put my Old School Essentials books to work.
Mothership: Finally got to play this recently and it’s pretty good. OSR sci-fi horror inspired by Alien. Then again the Year Zero Engine powered Alien RPG is out there as well. I do like that there’s such an extensive ecosystem of Mothership compatible settings. I’m actually even more interested in Cloud Empress if I’m going to play a Mothership-based game.
Sundered Isles: I’m a huge fan of Shawn Tomkin’s solo RPG work, it’s absolutely best in class for what I like in a solo experience. This expansion of his PbtA-based sci-fi game Starforged adds lots of stuff to play fantasy pirates, and actually requires you mix and match material from both games into one new set of character options.
Guillotine: Crown of Blood: This hack of Armour Astir looks easy-breezy to set up and play. PbtA based game of revolutionaries. Straightforward playbooks, nice tools for setting up a hateable monarch, let’s go overthrow some entitled bastards.
Bump in the Dark 2E: This new edition of Jex Thomas’ monster-hunting game looks cleaner and more fun than Monster of the Week, which covers nearly identical ground. While MotW is a PbtA based game, Bump in the Dark features a Forged in the Dark framework, with a shared enterprise pulling everyone together, clocks, downtime phases, all that. Not every game is better as FitD, but when you’ve got a clear on-the-job/off-the-job division of time in your game, FitD is a great way to play. Sure, I’d hunt me a monster. (Confession: I didn’t know about the ‘90s setting when I got this! Getting rid of cell phones seems good for horror but I was in my 20s during the 1990s and it’s not nostalgic for me.)
Across A Thousand Dead Worlds: The curse of getting PDF-only editions of things is I forget I have them. But gosh, Across a Thousand Dead Worlds is so big and so ambitious. D&D-based, solo-friendly with an included GM emulation system, AaTDW is all about heading into the unknowns of space driven by dozens and dozens of tables to randomize just about every step of the game. Has all this been put into a website or an app somewhere? It’d be pretty great to just let a machine generate this stuff and then work through it all: create an expedition, randomize what you find there, generate sites, encounters, and so on. There’s just so much stuff in this 450-page book.
Astroprisma: This very stylish solo RPG of space exploration in a post-apocalyptic universe practically jumps off the page at you with its layout and artwork. It’s meant to be a journaling game, which honestly? Every solo RPG is a journaling game if you write stuff down. Astroprisma starts you on a blank map of a single solar system, with three rings of hexes you’ll eventually fill with something or nothing depending on rolls as you travel. Covers similar ground to Starforged but the setting is much more specific and focused.
Moria: Through the Doors of Durin: This expansion from Free League for The One Ring has me excited to dive into TOR all over again. Loved the first edition of TOR, loving the second edition a little less…but that may just be because it’s unfamiliar. Heard good things about the changes made between editions. Moria is less about providing lots of canonical information about the underground city than it is about providing tools to build out your own version. It’s also a smaller volume than I was expecting! It’s not a megadungeon.
Games I’m Never Getting To The Table
Knave 2e: Not sure I needed another D&D! Although this one looks pretty solid. Super compact, lots of material in a very small book. I’ve already got so many D&Ds.
Cities Without Number: But not because it’s bad! It’s just that OSR stuff just doesn’t work here very well. And I’ve already used it to generate cyberpunk city and faction material for other games. Everything Crawford comes out with is an instant buy for me.
Nefertiti Overdrive: One of those games that got me excited when I backed it, then I forgot about it, and then it came out so much later that I can’t remember what was exciting about it the first time. Heck, maybe this game of Ancient Egypt Wushu will get one-shotted at a con at some point. Credit to Fraser Ronald for having a distinctive vision and running with it.
Oceania 2084: It’s basically 1984, the RPG. Orwellian right out of the gate, oppressive, dystopic. Love that this exists and was happy to back it! It’s important for strongly editorial games to be in the world. It’s also a game about fighting against an authority that can’t be beaten, and it’s grim. Great read, not sure I have the bandwidth for this in my life.
Xenolanguage: I liked the previous game from these creators, Dialect, so I was all in to back this game heavily inspired by The Arrival. But it’s not a game that’s about what The Arrival did so well. Instead, you use an ouija board-like process to randomly pick symbols that your characters then use to address aspects of their relationships and lives. Seems okay. I’m skeptical of the ouija board element. It’s also in a huge box for what could/should have been a ‘zine. Not loving how much space it’s taking up.
The Revenant Society: This PbtA boxed set RPG is about dead people trying to solve mysteries about their murders while caught in a time loop. I love time loops! I don’t love how the settings – either 1910s Paris or 1920s New York – are conveyed. Nor do I especially understand the core holding environment of the game. If 3-5 people, ie the PC group, all died in the same night in either city, it’d be a major story! Having read the book several times, I have no idea what keeps everyone together and engaged with each other. Wildly overproduced and expensive.
Looking Ahead to 2025…
Coriolis 2e: Frickin’ adored the original Coriolis for its setting, premise and art. Normally I love Year Zero Engine games, but there were some problems with the first edition’s “darkness points” economy. Very, very stoked to jump back into this one.
Ashes Without Number: I’ll back everything Kevin Crawford produces even if I never really play his stuff. The support materials are always worth the money.
FiveEvil: You know, I was honestly very impressed with this horror-focused iteration of the 5e chassis. I reviewed the “splinters” booklets a while back.
Thunder Road: Vendetta (the RPG): Fingers crossed this is as much stupid popcorn fun as the board game it’s based on. Based on Polymorph (the engine under Mazes and Return to Dark Tower), which is pretty nifty.
GOLD TEETH: Don’t know that I’ll actually play this but, gosh, TEETH is such a fun read. Rossignol and Davies are some of the best writers out there. TEETH wasn’t especially system-ambitious but it looks like they’re taking some more chances with GOLD TEETH.
Root: Ruins and Rolls (expansion for Root): Root’s always a good time. Nice to see them taking on the Ruins bit of the board game. Felt conspicuously absent given how central ruin-clearing is to the Vagabond in the boardgame.
Plasmodics: I liked This Discord Has Ghosts In It and Torq, so I took a flyer on this new game from Good Luck Press. They describe it as “post apocalyptic gonzi sci-fi” and apparently it’ll be based on Into the Odd. Sounds like it’ll have a hyper-random mutant creation system. Maybe cool? I don’t often love weird for weird’s sake, but Torq in particular I found charming.
Mythomorphosis: A “GMless myth-making tabletop RPG” according to the Kickstarter page. Sounds like the secret sauce is that the fable you create gets changed over time as society changes and events pass into history.
Threadcutters: Occult assassin game with a setting that sprawls across four interconnected worlds. Feeling a little worn out by Victorian era stuff but that’s only one of the four worlds. Spy shit plus magic! Based on LUMEN by Spencer Campbell.
The Perilous Void: Jason Lutes’ next generic supplement will do for sci-fi what his previous work, The Perilous Wilds, did for fantasy. Criminally underpriced, hope he can actually afford to produce and send it out.
Atma Season III: I’ve gotten some good play out of Atma, although I confess it’s hit-or-miss depending on how my improv brain is feeling that day. Sometimes the cards just don’t sketch out a good storyline. But what the heck, let’s get a ton more cards.
Starscape: felt a little allergic to the “found family” marketing language around this but the rest of the pitch for this PbtA based sci fi game is good. Tons, tons of media references. My buddy Emily St. James also wrote a thing for it so I felt compelled to back the work.
Elder Mythos: This one I backed entirely on the strength of the publisher’s former work. Neat premise: you play a Lovecraftian Elder God!
Legends in the Mist: This will be a gigantic box of books and honestly I’m feeling a little intimidated. City of Mist was okay, not great, but I’m hoping/betting on them learning stuff from that first effort. I do continue to love ambitious swings for the fences in the fantasy world.
Mythic Bastionland: Inevitable whetted my Arthuriana whistle this year, now I just want more Arthuriana! Hopefully mid-next-year. I was intrigued by Electric Bastionland, curious to see how the game has evolved since then.
King Beowulf: Maybe I’ll finally wrangle that one special player for a long-form run at Handiwork’s 1-player 1-GM masterwork based very loosely on 5e.
Garbage & Glory: Got it because my kid and her friends are crazy for raccoons! Maybe they will still be in a year. These are the publishers of Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, which was really exceptional.
Household: Welcome to the Garden: finally going to dig into this after a lot of positive hype from friends. What a great premise: you play fairy folk who live in a literal, vast household, Arrietty style. Welcome to the Garden extends the setting to the grounds of the eponymous household; mostly it was my shot at buying the hardbacks all at once and maybe a little cheaper.
Drifted: I barely remember backing this but the Lost inspiration sounds pretty great! I love Lost.
Eldritch Automata: Year Zero Engine horror-mecha! Maybe I need to run a bunch of mecha games alongside each other, Lancer and Beam Saber and Armour Astir and so on.
Rapscallion: Magical pirates! More magical pirates! Magpie’s development and production! Between this, GOLD TEETH and Sundered Isles my appetite for magical pirates will be thoroughly sated.
Hollows: new thing from Rowan, Rook & Deckard. Heavy focus on boss fights but apparently there’s real roleplaying happening as well? Heck, I’ll give it a go. Love RR&D’s stuff.
Valraven: The Chronicles of Blood and Iron: Another example of games I back on Backerkit and promptly forget about until they show up. Honestly can’t remember why I backed it. Sounds like it’s going for grim and heavy, more A Game of Thrones than Middle-Earth.
Invisible Sun: The Wellspring: This fucking game, man. Invisible Sun continues to live rent-free, and if I was fully retired and had a batch of fellow retiree roleplayers, this is the long low-key campaign I would probably set up for us. Maybe this new book will prompt new excitement from my local folks?
Lovecraftesque 2E: Genuinely excited to see how they do “emergent mystery” in a non-Brindlewood Bay kind of way. GMless, single character run by 2-5 players, card driven…the whole package sounds pretty innovative.
And That’s It!
An intimidating list to be sure, but I hope your next year brings more great games, more great gaming, and plenty of inspiration. Games are good, y’all. Play ‘em.
