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A Touch of Glamour is an elegant, tightly designed game of playing fey creatures in a modern setting that I wish were more influential in the game design circles that I run in. I chalk my previous lack of awareness of it up to it being a PBTA game that came out in 2020 rather than the heyday of hacks in the 2010s.

The game does a lot of things that I wish more games would do: tie mechanics into each other in a way that fuels each of them further. Here, this is achieved using harm and tags. Each of the 4 attributes that a character has can suffer up to 4 Harm, and when it gets to 4 you can't use it as part of any Moves. If all 4 attributes get 4 Harm, you die. A typical consequence of using Moves is suffering Harm to your attributes, meaning that the more you play the game the more likely you are to rack up Harm. Now Harm has no other effect on your attributes, so it doesn't trigger a mechanical death spiral where you get hurt, are worse at using the attribute, are more likely to suffer Harm, etc., but what it does do is make you think hard about how much you want to use an attribute (even one you're pretty good at). Since you can use each attribute for any of the four basic Moves, you have some options at your disposal if you want to avoid using an attribute that has 3 Harm.

But say that you're still concerned about rolling low. That's where tags come in! Tags are in-narrative elements that you can use to give yourself a bonus or your opponents a penalty (or that can be turned against you, so be careful). You could be buzzing with magical energy or beset by bees, desperately in love or drunk and dizzy. Every tag has the potential to be used for your own ends or to trip you up, with clever enough fictional positioning. Some things you might only be able to accomplish by creating a tag in game, and others might be impossible to overcome without eliminating an opposing tag. The game very quickly becomes a dance of managing Harm and tags, creating the exact atmosphere that magical creatures in danger of being hunted to extinction would live under.

There is joy and danger to be found in the power of creation and destruction, and this game leverages both to great effect.