Questlandia

Questlandia feels like a mix of familiar elements: the quest structure and map building of Intrepid, the community focus and key characters concept of Kingdom and the heroes journey of games like Becoming.

The game is designed to be zero-prep, discover through playing with resolution in a single session.

Players create a kingdom or land through a mixture drawing cards that represent the troubles the kingdom faces and free play.

One interesting part of the shared creative responsibility is that as aspects of the world come up they are assigned to players. The players then have complete creative authority over that aspect of the game world, answering questions from the others as to how it works.

With the world established then the players create characters trying to achieve goals within the world, which might be orthogonal to the problems or directly inspired by them.

Characters go through three rounds of play to discover whether they will achieve their goals or not. The rounds involve free play directed by the character's player and the other players trying to create obstacles to the character's success. Once the action has reached the crisis point there is a dice mechanism for resolving the obstacle.The dice mechanism is deliberately weighted against the players so to get re-rolls and edges they need to have indulge their character flaws.

The card mechanic for the kingdom seems to guarantee that if the characters are successful in their goal then it will be against a backdrop of great strife. The secret weapon would appear to be the fact that each player gets a Kingdom Epilogue statement that will allow them to explain how their success or failure impacts on the wider community.

Looks fun.

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