The New Flesh

Reunification is about a society being divided and then reunited with individual storylines reflecting families and groups that end up on either side of the divide. The obvious examples are the Cold War east-west divisions of countries and colonial-era border drawing of colonies and states. Places like Germany, Vietnam, Korea and more recently divisions like Crimea and South Sudan. It has a kind of strange pitch for a tabletop game as players are not allowed to talk to one another until the end of the game. This is because they are playing members of a family that have been divided by war. Instead the players communicate by "letters" or rather abstractions of letters that a written on that storygame staple of index cards or scraps of paper. The game is set in the year before reunification. This idea of the "last year" combined with the silence at the tabletop reminded me of a Quiet Year. The letters though echo the letters that form the core of Slower than Li

Mothership is a game of sci-fi horror/survival. It has an old-school element in that it is a collection of rules with an implied background. That background is kind of like Aliens and Dead Space . The rules allow you to create crew members on a ship that is exploring a huge and dangerous universe. Core mechanics The main dice used are d10s are the main mechanism is a d% check as per so many Runequest-inspired games. The other elements such as saves and advantage and disadvantage will probably be familiar to most people through Dungeons and Dragons though. Skills The skills are maybe the most distinctive thing about the system as they are setup in a tree with three tiers where higher-tier skills have prerequisites. Higher-tier skills cost more to buy and offer a bigger percentage towards checks (which seems like a sensible way of dealing with percentile whiff). While a bit involved (and with the naturally debatable choices about whether given skills sit in the right tier

Electric Sheep is a fantasy cyberpunk hack based on the extremely influential Lady Blackbird game but it's a bit of a strange Frankenstein of other games. Unlike Lady Blackbird the game doesn't strongly define a situation or a clear relationship setup between the characters. Even more strangely it doesn't really describe the character very much at all. It's clearly intended to be a much blanker canvas than Lady Blackbird. The basic system is the same, you build pools of dice (d6) based on the traits on your character sheet that are relevant to what you are trying to do. Rolls of 4 to 6 are a success and the GM decides how many successes are required to achieve the character's outcome. Failing a roll either allows the GM to escalate the situation or the GM can give a character a Condition (this part of the game is drawn directly from Masks) which can only be cleared by taking a specified action in a downtime scene. The pool refresh scenes were something I r

Electra before the throne is a three player, three character shortform freeform game that wraps Greek classical mythology over the throne room confrontation scene in Return of the Jedi. Electra face Hades, the King of the Dead, who has raised her father Agamemnon from the dead to serve him. Each character has a goal for the scene, an understanding of the situation (which may be wrong) and a kind of tic-tac-toe of abilities regarding the other characters. Around them the city of Argos is under attack by the dead, the three protagonists must find a resolution to their conflict in 20 minutes of gameplay, after which Argos will be destroyed and its people slain. This game is entirely a riff on the confrontation between Luke, Darth Vader and the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, re-imagined through classical literature. The blend of high and lowbrow culture makes it seem immediately comprehensible. The requirements of the game: short play, exactly three players; means this has been ki

Two quick things about Do not let us die in the dark night of this cold winter : firstly whatever bet existed on the length of a supplement title, it has been won. Secondly, the cover of the book is one of the most beautiful things I've seen. Do not let us die is a mini-game for D&D-style games that focuses on a small community trying to survive a harsh winter in the wilderness. The game requires the player characters to keep as many NPCs as they can alive, keeping them healthy, fed and warm. Doing so requires food, wood and medicine. Each of the PC archetypes is skilled at gathering one of these resources. The players also have to manage how many buildings are being used in the settlement and how many people are in each building. Each round a random event happens, which feels quite a lot like the Quiet Year. In generally the events are all bad, like people falling sick or having accidents. As this is a more crunch than narrative game, generally the events deplete your