The Festival of Deep Winter is storytelling game about collaboratively creating a winter festival, and exploring it through shared vignettes. This is a GM-less game for 2 to 6 people, and plays in about 45 minutes.
Celebrations grow out of culture and community. In The Festival of Deep Winter, you create those cultural keystones and watch a festival emerge from it. Your festival may be grounded in reality - it could be the kind of festival you might find in our world. Or your festival may be full of the fantastic and have a home in a world completely unlike our own.
Whatever your festival, may it bring you closer to the people at your table.
Grave Liasons is a PvP roleplaying game powered by chocolate where you play as nosy ghosts trying to ensure that their descendants get matched with the perfect partner (according to them).
While playing, players take on the roles of SPIRITS, who are trying to ensure or prevent a match, and DESCENDANTS, who are just normal people looking for love.
Dedicated to my Grandfather, for kindling my love of science fiction and writing.
I wish I had written you something while it still mattered.
"Our Love Can’t Save The World is a two-player role-playing game using a standard deck of playing cards. Together you play as two people in a loving, but failing, relationship. Meanwhile, the world is ending.
These are of equal importance."
In Words, Wilting you and a friend will take the role of two young lovers of the same age whose love must be concealed. To aid in this, the lovers have created a way to communicate secretly through flowers adorning their outfits, inspired by the Victorian floral language of love.
Play consists of you selecting index cards, each featuring a flower from the language you create together, and interpreting the card the other player selected, hoping to remember the hidden meaning you crafted together. You then create a scene together around what the cards meant and if the lovers remembered the language they made.
The Fool's Journey is a storytelling game based on a deck of tarot cards. Nine of the Major Arcana cards form a story waiting to be told. Bid against the other players to rearrange the cards into the story you want. Then use the cards as prompts to tell the tale of the Fool (or another character). Try the game with different tarot decks for different stories and different experiences. There is no end to the stories waiting in The Fool's Journey.
All you need to play is this instruction book, two to four players, a bunch of 6-sided dice, and any deck of tarot cards.
Empty Rivalry is a social deduction game inspired by a story from Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, in which Zhuge Liang's employs the"Empty Fort Strategy". In this game you have a friendly Twitter rivalry with someone and you end up across a table from them. You must take the role of Attacker or Defender and decide how to proceed.
A bird perches on a tree branch, singing. A snail crawls across a bed of springy moss. Sunbeams shine through the canopy, their dappled light sparkling on the forest floor.
Moss Creeps, Stone Crumbles is a game about the slow, gentle march of nature. Using drawings and words, you’ll tell the story of a forest grove and how it changes over the course of 100 years. You can play with any number of participants from 2 through 20.
You and your partner were travelling to Los Angeles when something took you and trapped you in a prison of your own minds. It reformed the prison into a reflection of LA. Until you complete the trials, you will be trapped forever inside of the hallucination.
LA Hallucination is a diceless 2 player tabletop role-playing game based on the Carly Rae Jepsen album from 2015 E•MO•TION (specifically named for the song "LA Hallucinations"). To play you will need:
You begin your time inside the hallucination as something formless, with very little defining your identity. As you face trials (each trial based on a song from E•MO•TION) you and your partner create and discover what makes up your identity. Only once you have finished your trials can you finally be free.
Wanderlust is a storytelling game for 2-4 Players. You work together to tell the story of a single protagonist—The Wanderer—who is preparing to leave on an important journey.
The Players take turns framing a scene using a series of prompts and taking notes and sketching in The Wanderer's journal as the Wanderer says good-bye to the people and places that are important to them.
This is a game about rolling dice to gather words from books to turn into new poems that you could put into new books if you wanted to.
Campfire Memories is a GMless game about a family going camping, facing unpleasant experiences while in the great outdoors, and then looking back on those difficulties fondly.
Players create a family, composed of adults, children, and dogs, filling them out with goals and resources they bring to the woods with them.
While camping things go wrong, as they do for everyone. Weather turns nasty, equipment fails, wild animals appear at the worst possible times. How does the family react?
After the trip is over, the family has time to reflect on their experiences. What did they learn? What connections were formed or strengthened with the other members of their family? What was valuable about even the worst events?
PLAYED VIA SNAIL MAIL
We Are Ciphers is a 2-player letter-writing game where you craft a story using coded messages sent through the mail. You and your partner both covet the Prize, which you believe will transform your lives for the better. But acquiring it is an extremely tricky operation. Many things stand in your way, including the Target.
In this game two players journey into a mysterious, restricted site known as the Zone to find a room rumored to grant people their innermost desires. One player is The Client, a person who wants to find this room and have their wish granted, and the other player is The Navigator, a person with previous experience navigating the Zone that has been hired by The Client to help them find the Room.
The game is for two players and will take around 2-4 hours to play. Players will need a deck of cards, a sheet of paper, and some pens or pencils.
Remember Me is a two player game exploring the role of memory in our identities, specifically the memories others have of us. Players take on the roles of two people who have and may still care deeply for one another, who describe the other through a memory. They listen, ask questions, and fully flesh out the memory before the listener decides if they believe their companion and integrate the memory, or if they reject it.
These memories are used to come to a decision on who they are as a person.
This game is based upon my experience as a trauma victim whose memory functions poorly and I am often told memories about myself I can no longer really remember, or only hold emotional memory of.
PLAYED VIA TEXT
A two-player, 200 word RPG about explaining vaporwave to your grandpa. Based on a true story.
One player is Casey, who kinda knows what vaporwave is. Another is Grandpa, who loves Casey and wants to understand their life. Played via text message.
The core of this zine is Labyrinthine, a self-contained storygame inspired by Greek myth, for solo or group play. Using prompts on maze tiles, you’ll tell the story of a protagonist worthy of myth as they make choices and handle consequences. You won’t explore just one series of events from beginning to end, though: you’ll traverse many branches, returning to earlier decisions to make new choices and see how events play out from there. Labyrinthine supports one to four players, with a game length of one to three hours.
Throughout your life, throughout generations of your family, throughout the various fronts of your war, you have had one great rival. Again and again you clash with them, one walking away the victor of the battle, but bearing the scars of your war.
A Duet Of Steel is a game about Rivals who engage each other in charged exchanges over an extended period of time.
When you first meet again neither of you remember what happened but what are these strange feelings? This intense sadness or longing out of nowhere? Maybe one you remembers something, but not the other. Maybe you remember different things? Then, as you interact more, you both start to remember. Every time you touch you see a significant moment from your past. Even if you try to pass it off as nothing, it becomes impossible to ignore.
You knew each other, and loved each other, a lifetime ago.
The question is, what are you going do about it in this life?
This is a game for at least 2 players, written for the #YourMoveJam
Touchstones:
Nise No Chigiri (Visual Novel)- Otomate
This time, I definitely will be happy! (Light Novel)- Riko Saiki
In Another Life (Song)- Vienna Teng
Yukarism (Manga)-Shiomi Chika
When You Meet Your Doppelganger on the Road, You Must Make Out With Them is a two-player game about meeting your doppelganger on the road and then making the decision about whether or not to make out with them. It is a game about horror and intimacy, about self-identity and self-love and self-destruction.
Orichalcum is a tabletop roleplaying map game for 1-5 players. Players will lay out a map of the Empire that oppressed their ancestors and drowned in a deluge of its own making. By remembering what was left behind, they will draw a connection from the past to the present. Their people, the Exiles, have evolved past the Empire's ways, and these differences will become features on each player's map of their island home. Orichalcum is a game about drowning empires and imagining utopias.
Cage of Sand is a time loop horror game for one or more players. You will need a deck of tarot cards, some paper and something to write with.
Cage of Sand follows a protagonist only vaguely aware of the fact that time has begun to repeat itself. They wake and begin their daily activities, interacting with and learning about other the characters that make up the story's cast. A seemingly insignificant event marks the beginning of a set of strange and gruesome murders, culminating in a deadly disaster before time repeats and the memories fade.
Play to discover the truth.
FONT is a story game for 2 to 4 players. Each session is a stand-alone story, unfolding over 1 to 3 hours. Players take on the role of travelers to a perilous landscape called the FISSURE. These travelers seek a powerful place called the FONT, which can change their dying world. The characters in each game of FONT may be wildly different, but they are always driven by a shared purpose: a hope that their world could be saved.
FONT is a highly collaborative, GM-less game. It requires no prep, and the concise ruleset is easy to learn on the fly. During a session, players take turns introducing tests that the group encounters in the FISSURE. Another player then describes what must be done to overcome the test. This shared authorship over the dramatic beats prompts players to collaborate on the tone and pace of play, leading to a level of detail that makes the FISSURE feel more alive.
FONT focuses strongly on the inner life of characters and ties character development closely to the resolution system. Over the course of a session, characters are changed by the FISSURE, gaining marks that they carry with them. These marks may eventually end a character's journey, as they abandon their quest or even die. Players can take respite from the journey to remove each other's marks, creating moments of shared solace in a harrowing journey.
FONT's arc is inspired by other fictional forays into strange landscapes, notably Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker and Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation.
A tabletop roleplaying game that uses chess instead of dice. You are two neighboring countries in conflict. One by one, different parts begin to move, and tell their share of a bigger story. For 2 players (or more in teams).
Across the twisting sea of fates, a glance catches yours and sets your heart aflame. You reach your hand out only to feel the weight of heaven disappearing beneath you, sending you hurtling down and down and down. You see their eyes, feel the threads wrapped around your hearts growing tighter as you fall. Your bodies will change. Your names, memories, and lives as well. But you will meet again. And again. And again. As many times as it takes to reach each other.
Crossing the Seven Stars is a 2-player game about useless lesbians mutually pining for each other across lifetimes, unable to muster the courage to confess first. The game is played over the course of 7 Lifetimes, with the final one containing the inevitable confession.
Probably the only game on Itch to ask you to go out and play 5 other people's games.
Standoff is a game where everyone works together to tell a ridiculous story full of twists, ripostes, counter-feints, and triple-double-crosses. Mediveal and magical setting :)
Number of Players: A small gang (2-6 players). Time to Play: Approximately 60 minutes.
Savage Blood is a story-game for 1-5 players about revenge and colonial ultraviolence - a revisionist fantasy story that flips the script and humanizes the plight and homogenization of the drow and orc civilizations by the dominant "races", especially in lieu of the real-world allusions to real-life colonization and racism present in traditional fantasy genre.
This game is best played with the intention to explore the darker side of adventuring parties in a culture that rewards treasure-hunting loners trespassing into the homelands of other civilizations and killing whoever they deem hostile.
It can also be used as a light worldbuilding exercise to add complexity to your existing fantasy world or campaign.
You are taking a walk with a friend the day before they will die. You know they will die because you keep getting transported back to this day, over and over, and today is the day you decide you’re going to give up on trying to divert their fate by warning or dissuading them from what will happen. You are going to savor the time you have and enjoy looking at the trees and the birds with them. You are going to say goodbye.
A short, elegaic game for two players about the grief and beauty of impermanence as reflected through your connection to each other and to the natural world around you, witnessed on your final walk together. Tone: warm, intimate, melancholy
Over the Moon is a 2-player role-playing dating game of dark lunar obsession, awkward online dating Q&A, and tantalisingly limited information that's designed for play via online messaging apps!
Each of you plays a moon cultist, witch, or other dark creature who loves the moon a little too much, and whose comrades decided to ‘fix’ this by online dating with ‘normal’ people… but you’ve just been matched with each other instead, and it’s up to you to see if you can make this work. Is the moon your one true love, a third wheel in the sky, or the ultimate wingmoon? Play to find out!
Arch! Angel! Dating! Simulator! Need I say more??
Collaborative story telling game, with tarot/oracle/art cards used as a story telling mechanic.
You were assigned to one another. Neither of you had a choice in the matter. Perhaps you have had a hundred pilots before, perhaps you are fresh off the factory line. Maybe you are a seasoned fighter, maybe you have never seen combat outside training. Whatever the case, the powers that be who keep you in this bitter war have decided it is unnecessary for you to communicate. You will do your jobs, never quite knowing if the other is there, or how they might feel…
Beyond Reach is a two person play by post game about falling in love with someone unattainable to you. One player is a mech, the other their pilot. You will write letters that the other character may never see, but will inform your epilogues in compelling, and often heartbreaking, ways.
