itch.io

We played this at Big Bad Con and it was the funniest game, note perfect vibes, lots of ridiculous revenge-fueled violence that emerged from a very straightforward core mechanic. I had a great time!

We played this at Big Bad Con and it was very fun. A simple premise that is poised for weird action that really delivered. Highly recommended.

Thanks! It turns out nothing is boring, but it's still a good exercise.

I set out to make a short larp about the most boring thing I could think of, as a reaction to lurid genre-inflected (popular, fun) games, and the most boring thing I could think of was evaporated milk. I looked into the history of evaporated milk and, as is always the case, it isn't boring at all. It is tied up with colonialism and it is tied up with American poverty, and I guess I could have written games that hit on those points, but before I got there I read about the Helvetia Milk Condensing Company and its 1907 coup d'etat. And that was that.

In '07 there was a sort of palace coup at Helvetia, and one of the founders of the company was both decorously and perfidiously forced out. It's a good story and I don't know which side was in the right, but it makes for instant drama and really got my wheels spinning. Luckily there's a ton of information out there, enough to build a juicy relationship map from. I love a good relationship map!

The game features a bidding mechanic - each of the three player characters is a contender to take control of the entire company - and rather than have a sit-around GM or a fourth player who does nothing but decide the winning bid, I built a sort of bot to do the deciding. Each item one might bid - be it money or a promise or information - gets written down, and it is easy to tabulate a score based on the three bids. High bid wins.

I didn't set out to make this a snappy little three-player game (originally I thought it'd be a big sprawling family drama with eight players) but the more I fussed with it, the more I realized it could be very, very tight. And three player games are a rarity, so why not find a way to make that work?

Hopefully you will give Helvetia a try. It won't take more than an hour and I think it will generate a little drama! Let me know who wins it all. -- Jason

Hey thanks! You play both an adventurer and a villager, each of whom needs things that are more or less impossible to get without inconvenience and calamity to the opposite group. It's a short freeform one-shot game with a very simple set of rules that center the fundamental imbalance in power between dungeon-crawling knuckleheads and somewhat innocent villagers who just want to be left alone. Time Possum and Four Liars would be good play-alikes generally.

Perfect Viewscream backdrop!

Thanks Keith, that means a lot to me -- Jason

Thank you! Balance wasn't a consideration - in a game like this that's a social contract issue - but lots of people have played and enjoyed it. It's pretty unstructured, so adjust your expectations accordingly! I hope you get a chance to give it a try, the wonderful things your friends  come up with are always really delightful. - Jason

We've uploaded a corrected PDF- thanks for spotting that! -Jenn

Thanks for letting us know! -Jenn

Ah, OK! We'll see what we can do.

 Thanks for asking! Yes, we price our games fairly to compensate the designers for the work that went into them.

Thank you!