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Riding the Ley Line is a simple, solo LARP to play whenever you're riding public transportation. I've read it before, but upon rereading it for my Itchmas 2024 reviews I realized that it had inadvertently served as an inspiration for a game I recently made with the help of a friend. That game is not currently available digitally, nor do I want to sully this review with a plug for my own stuff, but I wanted to say it here as it didn't make it into the acknowledgments of that game.

This phenomenon, of something half-remembered or basically forgotten bubbling under the corrugated surface of your brain's folds until it erupts unbidden days, weeks, months, even years later, is what I love about TTRPGs and the creative process in general. Even tiny games, lovingly designed, like Riding the Ley Line, can have an impact on the world, can touch people's lives in a way that was perhaps unanticipated. And games like this, that play with how you engage with the world around you and ask you to see the mundane in a different and more fantastical way, are perfectly primed to do just that. I love this game, and I love this genre of game. What a great way to round out Itchmas 2024.

This short game is perhaps the closest thing I can think of to a system-neutral storygame one-shot. The intent is clearly to play it as a sort of solo journaling experience, using a deck of tarot cards to help randomize the prompts you choose, but it could easily be turned into a duet experience with one player as the youngest mermaid venturing onto land for the first time and the other serving as a GM. You could even do something inventive and make a 5-player game out of it, with 4 people each taking on the role of one of the tarot suits and a mer-player choosing between them. It's a testament to the quality of the concise writing that I can easily imagine a number of different ways to play through this short game, each of which delivering a potentially radically different experience.

However you choose to play it, you're basically exploring Hans Christian Andersen's original Little Mermaid story as the titular character and building up to this game's titular choice: blood or foam? It's a violent and painful choice regardless of the actual outcome, and the delights of the night leading up to it will shape your view on both it and the rest of your mermaid's life. Choose wisely, but choose nonetheless.

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.

This 20-minute, single-room anti-game is maybe the best and most succinct encapsulation of the gameplay, appeal, and themes of the soulslike game genre. You play as the eponymous Dark Queen of Mortholme, reveling in the destruction of an upstart hero come to slay you and end your reign of terror. End their life by swinging a big fuckass mace, charging forward in blue flames, and/or summoning a pillar of purple energy (the evilest kind of energy) beneath their feet. But over time, the hero learns. And adapts. And gets better at dodging your attacks.

Then the dialogue begins. There's a whole world out there, beyond your throne room, and they get to experience it and grow and change. But you don't. You only have access to the same old stuff, the same old tricks. I would never call the Dark Queen an old dog, but, well...you know how the saying goes.

Anti-game is the perfect descriptor for this piece of art. It is, as far as I can tell, completely scripted, with no amount of skill or reactivity on the player's part able to change the inevitable outcome. And yet, I still found myself interested in the next part. What will the hero say on their next entrance? What more will I learn about the tragedy of power, the rot at the center of every Souls game? What new way will the hero learn to seemingly taunt me? (I may never know the same kind of frustration as me swinging my ludicrously large mace only for that little pixel fucker to be just out of reach.)

This game sounds like a shitpost (what is it like to experience Dark Souls from the boss' POV?), but it's so much more than that. It's a gorgeous little anti-game with stellar writing, and everyone should take 20 minutes out of their day to give it a try.

This game of hunting monsters in a cursed and ever-expanding city has a deceptively simple mechanic at its core: rolling a 4 or greater on a die counts as a success. With this powerful engine at its core, it can iterate almost endlessly to create mechanically distinct classes with asymmetrical ways of approaching the game. As a lover of asymmetric board games, this was immediately appealing to me and got me thinking right away about what kind of classes I could make for it.

These several years later I still have yet to actually finish designing those classes, but the core appeal of the game remains. Every aspiring TTRPG designer looking to make action-packed quick-paced games should check out Slayers (and the rest of Spencer's games tbh).

This is not the first TTRPG, nor the first indie TTRPG, I ever played, but it was probably the one that really cracked it all open for me. Although a pretty simple solo journaling game, something about it just worked for me, and shortly after playing it I found myself with a fully fleshed out world of mechas named after Greek mythology, space pirates, and a pilot trying to figure out their strange connection to their mecha.

The game itself is spare, only a cover page and a single page of rules, but those rules primed me for some serious creativity. The central premise is that you're a mecha pilot who will die at the end of a 24/32-episode anime, and the primary mechanic of the game has you roll a d6 to determine how many episodes further into the show you proceed. You start on episode 1, journal what happens to you, then jump forward by however much you roll on a d6. You could finish the whole game in 4-6 rolls if you got (un)lucky, but on average you're looking at something more like 7-9 rolls. This kind of sporadic progress through the artificial arc of a set episode count really challenges your ability to fill in the blanks in between what you explicitly see/write, which was something that I really enjoyed about it.

If I have any criticism of the game, it's that it really relies on you already knowing the tropes of mecha anime since its framework is so spare and simple. It certainly made it a little difficult for me, someone who isn't super well-versed in the genre, but solo journaling games like this have helped me start to let go of the idea that things have to be 'correct' or 'perfect' or even 'all that good' for me to still get enjoyment out of them. I salute you, plot ARMOR, for your service to the hobby.

I've had my eye on this adventure for over a year, ever since Idle Cartulary reviewed it in September 2023. While obviously inspired by Princess Mononoke (namechecked on the first page of the adventure), the adventure is much more than just that story translated into an RPG. Perhaps the best intervention it makes is trapping the locals in between the colonizing Conquistadors and the enraged mass of boars. Unlike the citizens of Iron Town, who are actively participating in the destruction of the forest in Princess Mononoke, the people of Barangay Tindigan are faced with a fundamental lifestyle change due to the arrival of colonizers. They're not the ones who shot the Ancient Boar, but it's their village and not the Conquistadors' stone fort that will get trampled in retaliation. This change makes for a very different dilemma at play: how can you protect the innocent townsfolk without also protecting the Conquistadors who are clearly at fault for everything that happened?

This is a question with no easy answer, if your group is even interested in answering that specific question (maybe they'll work for the Conquistadors; they are offering 1000 gp as a reward after all). Still, whatever they want to do they had better act fast because as the Ancient Boar lays dying, its death throes are causing literal earthquakes. The mechanic that underlies this clock is pretty ingenious actually: an earthquake triggers every time you roll doubles on the 2d6 Wilderness Encounters table, and the Ancient Boar dies after the fifth earthquake. This means there's a 1-in-6 chance of an earthquake, so you're looking at an average of 30 wilderness encounters before everything comes down around your players' ears. That's theoretically more than enough time to explore the 20 hexes on the given hexmaps if they're really booking it through the forest.

The Wilderness Encounters is perhaps a little lacking, and for me the least inspiring part of the adventure. I particularly like the giant hermit crab using an overturned boat as its shell, but many of the other encounters don't feel like they add all that much context to the world. In particular, I would love to have some interesting people to happen upon in the forest, because the people in the keyed hexes are by and large pretty compelling.

All in all, the adventure is deceptively simple and really gives players the space they need to mull over how to resolve the presented dilemma. There are no easy answers presented in the text (because god knows that killing the Ancient Boar isn't going to be easy even though it's technically the most obvious 'solution') and that's just the way I like it. Newer GMs might find that aspect of the game a bit frustrating or confusing on first glance, but if you just venture into the Rumbling Forest I think that an answer will present itself to you one way or another if you just let it happen.

This adventure has everything that's great about RAD: archival Soviet art/ads, clean two-column layout, bizarre mutations you can acquire, etc. What does it add? A monster called That Fucking Frog. Need I say more?

Turns out, yes, I do need. Because I love me some mushrooms, and this adventure is chock full of them. The titular technicolor forest is something straight out of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a forest of giant fungus that sits smack-dab in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. On the one hand, its constant expansion poses a threat to human life around it. On the other hand, isn't it nice that something is actually growing and thriving in the nuclear winter?

Throw in three factions that all have direct connections to the Forest, several settlements at various levels of wealth, and a small dungeon at the Heart of the Forest, and you've got a compelling adventure location that will ask some big questions of your wasteland adventurers.

I have unfortunately not played this LARP, but I found it incredibly impactful when designing the game that my friend and I submitted to the Golden Cobras this year. It's a game about intimacy that was released in 2020 when intimacy was so hard to come by. To play, you take on one of the 6 roles from the game (a combination of one member of a group of friends and the god they used to pretend to be as part of a game) and go take a bath together. Well not together together. See, you're all playing on a voice/video chat and taking a bath separately, but you're pretending that you're unpacking your past while bathing together in the titular bathhouse.

The fantasy that this game sells to me is being the kind of person who would go to a bathhouse with their friends. As a USian (derogatory), I was not brought up in a culture that sees that as a particularly normal thing, and I wish that weren't the case. There is something really titillating and almost taboo about the idea of taking a bath 'with' someone, like the mediating element of the voicechat gives it a particular thrill. Games like this that explore new ways of being with other people, whether in person or not, are extremely my shit and I'm always looking for things that play with my expectations of what's possible.

Unfortunately, as someone who hasn't played many LARPs, I do think I would have some difficulty with this. The prompts given for what to talk about with the other players, while poetic, don't give much direction for how to actually spend the 1.5 hours or so of the meat of gameplay. More experienced LARPers probably wouldn't have too much of a problem here, but I have a hard time imagining exactly what is supposed to happen in each section. That said, the game works almost exclusively on the level of having you take a bath with friends via voicechat. I don't think it needs much else.

I picked up the physical version of this game at Big Bad Con at Aaron Lim's small publisher table and was very excited about it. I myself had briefly considered making a game based on blackout poetry before abandoning that idea and moving in a different direction, so I was very happy to see that someone had more conviction than I and saw it through.

My favorite part of the game are the simple instructions that it lays out in the letter:

1. Remove all words that start with the letters of your initials.
2. Pick a number between 1 and 9, count forward in the letter and remove every word on that number.
3. Use the same number but count from the end of the letter this time.
4. Figure out the rest.

The rules are really simple and direct, and by doing so they free you from the anxiety of trying to find something interesting in the text. Just do what you're told, and then try to find something from what you're left with. By starting with a formula for what to get rid of, it became much easier to find my eventual spell. I might try these same rules again with other texts just to see what kind of spells I can find!

In the meantime, I leave you with the spell that I found:

recognize your future

start enclosed with quill as your secret declares itself

be proficient and remove each sense

complete your power

look forward

I have not played this yet but I am BUZZING with anticipation for roping some friends into it. It's such an elegant system for emulating your favorite cooking reality shows and feels so hackable.

The basics: what does it claim to be? It's a competitive rpg (don't see many of those) but it's also "a game you tell with your friends." Immediately there is some friction here: a quasi-storygame that asks you to be in conflict with each other? But it works.

This friction helps create the feeling of a show like Chopped, where there's competition but also the awareness (on the part of the editors at least) that everyone is contributing to an overall story. The game puts us in the seat of the contestant, judge, and editor all at once.

The basic mechanics: use d6s to create target numbers for 3 courses that the chefs are trying to hit. They roll dice themselves and during each round have the chance to reroll one of their dice (Transform), reroll someone else's die (Sabotage), or simply vibe (Savor).

I want to draw attention to the Savor action. Each of the 3 actions have associated questions to help develop roleplaying, but Savor is unique in that there is no benefit to be gained. This is a fantastic rp moment. Are you cocky? Panicking? Non-confrontational? You decide!

Transform lets you live out your Top Chef fantasy. Sabotage lets you live out your Cutthroat Kitchen fantasy. Savor lets you find out more about your Chef and opens you up to all sorts of possibilities.

Now let's talk about modularity. This game is endlessly hackable. It's a rare game that feels both like a complete game and its own SRD, but this one does. 5 bonus game modes to accommodate different playstyles and # of players.

Each action can be switched up to create different vibes too! Want something like the Great British Bake Off? Take out Sabotage. Emphasize Transform. Stack dice to create new shapes! Add new targets beyond the course ingredients! Have recurring judges!

Want Cutthroat Kitchen? Emphasize Sabotage. Let the action take out dice! Hide them around your playspace! Make others roll w/ their non-dominant hand!

There's even room to add types of chefs w/ fun abilities based on reality show archetypes: Novice, Food Truck, Won't-Stop-Talking-About-Being-Italian, Molecular Gastronomist! Not to mention creating Judges with different tastes and ways to judge final dishes.

Perhaps the best part about the game is the "Judging and Tasting" section. It breaks down how you might describe a dish, provides adjectives (tags) that Judges can use, and makes describing art more accessible to players that might be intimidated by it.

This game has it all: Hackability! Fun! Food! Support for describing art! Simple elegant mechanics! Please please please buy this IMMEDIATELY

You, an Astronaut is a very different kind of game. Like another of the commenters on the game page, I was initially confused by the format. Sure, it's an interactive story but there isn't much to do beyond choose from some preset options. But where the game shines is in the layout of those options. The choices you make are thought-provoking and freeform to the point of being revelatory about yourself. When presented with multiple options, are you allowed to pick more than one? All of them? What happens if you are drawn to contradictory choices? There is no one there to tell you what the rules are, so you have to make them up yourself, if you even want to have rules.

The best part about the game might be the ending. Without giving anything away, the introduction of a new voice to the world really hits hard. It's unexpected, just as jarring in-game as out-of-game. And the open-ended final question, with no options presented? Fantastic. Even with a new voice present, the game ends with just you. An astronaut.

Hi, I'm Nico! This is also my first jam, and will probably be my first game that I will make and actually put out into the world. I'm generally trying to dip my toes into indie TTRPG design and I love Tom Lehrer so this seemed like the perfect place to start.