A downloadable game.
Just finished a two-session game of Take My Revolution and it was incredible and cathartic for all of us, the game really encouraged us to be on our most dramatic and messy bullshit.
Pros:
I love how the game revolves around duels, making other games, including disagreements and violence, a source of rising tension while the duels are a dramatic release. Most of the other games having an explicit invitaton to lead directly into a duel helps this too.
The options for the minigames are fantastic, especially Rising Tensions in an Elevator, Resorting to Violence, and Duel with Swords & Hearts. The emotional range from biting, passive-aggressive words, to intense but unspoken emotions, to dramatic and open confrontation made for great dynamics between the characters across different scenes.
I also love the the setup to each duel. Having someone pick a song for their character before each duel was great (though I don't have much music knowledge and in in the first case had to pass and come back later once I thought of something between sessions). So is asking if we enter the arena with someone and who releases our swords from our hearts (not always the same person).
Cons:
One issue we ran into is that there's no instructions for what happens if a duel ends in a tie. We ended up just picking a fifth exchange as a tiebreaker.
It was kind of hard to think of what our characters' ideas of "revolution" were when for most of us we would think of concrete ways we'd want to change the world, while the one the characters lived in was abstract and ungrounded.
It did feel a bit weird to me that winning a duel has no impact on your cards, simply challenging and/or accepting had the same result. But in the end we had one of the swordblooms duel every other once and win every time, including the final duel just before the endgame, and was not the Sword's Chosen in the end, which worked really well for their story, so it worked out well in this case.
It also felt like it's maybe too easy for everybody to have a full set of suites so the group is simply one Chosen and n-1 deities (that's what happened in our game). We figured out how to make it work for us as well but it also feels less impactful to have someone revealed to be a deity if everyone else is, too, I guess?
Some favorite moments from our game:
Our first two scenes were tense conversations between two of the characters then the other two characters, separately, and the first duel was between someone from the first scene and someone from the second, each having their sword released by their opponent's conversation partner out of spite. (I'm not sure if I'm describing that in a way that makes sense but it was very petty and fun)
One player starting the 2nd session by having their character surrender, having died, but passing their sword to "someone else", a "new student" that looked the same, had a similar name, and different pronouns/gender. All of their questions about "Who you truly loved" were about "the girl in the mirror" that they loved and wanted to set free but couldn't be with if they did (I cried, it was great)
My character's first duel having bright green grass and trees as the duels gave her a newfound purpose and confidence, and her second duel having dried grass and bare trees as she became obsessed with the duels to the exclusion of all else and increasingly nihilistic.
The one I loved ascending to another place, and me leaving behind my divinity, separating us, but leaving the school on foot to find them (the other player suggested this and I asked if she'd seen the end of Utena and she said no, lol). Then playing the two of hearts afterward to describe my character arriving at her otherworldly garden.
Discussing after the game ended, if that game was a dreamlike metaphor for a tumultous friend group in the real world, what was it a metaphor for? How did they change and grow and break free of where they were before?
