The New Flesh

The Enclave is a game about an isolated community separating itself from and external threat (real or imagined). Of course the community has stresses and tensions within itself that threaten the community and allow the threat to seep in a corrupt everything. The game tone is going to massively vary within this fixed frame. A cult with a charismatic leader trying to seal out the rest of the world is going to be significantly different to a medieval town trying to quarantine itself from the plague. You can also extend the basic idea to cover children on the summer vacation hiding from neighbourhood bullies in a treehouse or even the Siege of Troy. The group chooses a type of Enclave from a table of suggestions (or they can make their own). They mutually sketch out a drawing or map of the physical domain of the Enclave. Then each player creates a character, they roll to discover how loyal the character is to the community and how they view those outside the community. The rolls also dete...

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...

Era is quite an interesting game from the same people who brought you Duty & Honour. A two or three player game about a single hero and their optional sidekick performing some epic quest. Playsets are being funded via Patreon and I find it weird that James Bond style playset was not an automatic choice for the printed rulebook. Instead there is an Arabian Nights style set, think Sinbad or Aladdin. There are five game elements that represent aspects of knowledge, force and charm. Characters are made up of layered traits matching these elements with different size dice assigned to them. The characters have a base score but then have items and relationships that also have dice assigned to them. The gameplay then revolves around the elements as well with each scene creating a challenge around one of the elements. This strict scene structure means each session or adventure is closed and discrete. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in Era and it looks less demanding...