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I recommend picking this up even if you have no intention of running it as an Assignment. The writing is clear, concise, and descriptive, evoking a surprisingly larger world for a document that comes in at 7 pages. You’ve got a strong villain, interesting characters, and locations that had a little movie starting in my head as I imagined what this Assignment unfolding would look like. I think this does a good job of setting up the major points while leaving plenty of room to maneuver depending on your group’s approach. 

Full review here.

If worldbuilding games of cooperation and competition where you must balance the priorities of your faction with the wellbeing of your home over the span of generations appeals to you, The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri might be for you! As much about strategy as it is about worldmaking, this latest work from momatoes offers riveting, story-driven moments against an increasingly tense backdrop as time goes on and the final moment of Inang-Uri’s life or death approaches. 

Full review on The Cozy Cauldron.

Tannic immediately inspired my imagination, and had me thinking of both the players and PCs I knew would have a fantastic time. The volume itself is beautiful, the illustration adding depth to the feeling and mood of the text, while the sheer amount of content there is to explore - presented in a way that isn't overwhelming - lends itself beautifully to a one-shot, or a shorter, drawn out adventure if your party would, for example, like to spend a bunch of time exploring the festival. Recommend it!

Full review here.

I particularly enjoyed the interconnected backgrounds of the six playable characters. I always find it easier to jump into games when characters know each other, and more information about the game world is revealed through their stories. The Referee pamphlet is packed with information about NPCs while also giving you the game’s starting situation, information about the three factions at play, and how the plot escalates. The Player pamphlet, meanwhile, is focused on the map and further information about each location you can visit – it even tells you which NPCs are in a given area.  I cannot stress enough how impressed I am with how much info is packed into these text panels. 

Full review here.

One thing I appreciate is how clear this game makes it that anyone can be a princess – gender does not matter. You want to be a Princess? You are one! You’ve got your crown, sword, beast friend, shoes – you’re ready to defend the realm! The biggest decision you make is what you’re the Princess of. Are you the Hair Metal Princess? Sci-Fi Comics Princess? Is Knitting your thing? The options are endless! It’s a light-hearted, fun game, and this comes across so well in upbeat and playful writing. 

Read my full review on The Cozy Cauldron [here].

Basking in the sun with a cup of tea is a great goal for any hedgehog, and is what Hedgie is hoping to do. The problem is that all their neighbours and friends are trying to get their attention and help for any number of tasks! Your goal is to have Hedgie make their escape to their toadstool home before the neighbourhood busybodies take up all their time and energy.

I think Tea & Toadstools is a light-hearted and charming game whose trio of alternate rules offer customizable gameplay in order to create a game that works best for your needs at the moment! There is something very relatable about just wanting to sit down and enjoy a cup of tea in peace, and that simply not happening.

Full review [here].

Group played this yesterday and it was our first time with a full group - exciting! It's lovely to have a game that can accommodate so many people and also doesn't require preparation outside of assigning characters and scheduling! The voices people adopt is truly half the fun, and the unfolding drama in the question and answer periods never ceases to entertain. This time around we have some fun flourishes as people added extra dialogue to their characters - there are some faces we've seen in past games, and references to characters we've seen, which was very cool! 

Everyone guessed the resolution in the section before the reveal, and were delighted by it - this was just good fun and, as usual, the supernatural element was a delight to engage with!

Mountaintop Isolation is the first W&A game I've played, and I couldn't be more pleased about my introduction. The rules are simple and clearly presented, allowing you to jump into play after minimal setup (you have a deck of cards, a tumbling block tower or tokens, a d6, and something to record entries with? Congratulations, you're ready to play!). 

The overarching themes of the game are present throughout the prompts, allowing you to build a narrative that is both fraught and terrible - and that promises to get worse as time goes on. One question my character kept coming back to was "where are my friends, and why did they invite me". That answer shifted slightly over time, and not for the better.

I played this game about three weeks ago and it has been on my mind ever since! Definitely suggest giving it a go, and if you'd like a more detailed review you can check mine out [here]. 

The game is divided into two phases: the Laboratory, and the Party. There are prompts associated with each location, and each player has a chance to choose a prompt for the table to engage with. Those for the lab gave the opportunity to build up the Lab and the relationships with co-workers there in a variety of ways. Those for the Party challenge the relationships and established norms of the Lab phase, urging players to consider what their characters do in a temporary space allowing them to explore their desires.

I really enjoyed the prompts in this game, and the vastly different environments introduced! I think there’s a lot of fun to be had in a masquerade party where people know they’ll be turning into their costumes. Especially contrasted to the formality and rigidity of the lab!

I'd suggest this for tables of 3-5 people, based on the numbers of availble prompts.

Read my full review [here].

I love this premise. I have always enjoyed the idea that deities exist only for as long as they are remembered/stories are told about them. That this game sits you down and goes “okay, you want to be remembered? Tell the best stories of your existences” delights me. I think it also really allows for the creativity and spontaneity of a table to shine as there really isn’t much time to prepare these stories, or sentences with which to tell them!

Each round, part of what you are weighing is whether you want to try and win the round or be the person choosing the victor. It encourages each player to make use of their story tokens, as your chances of being remembered increase by not being the person with the most tokens at the end of the round! Read my full review [here]!

Well Wishers is a beautiful, moving game promoting strong collaboration and, sometimes, sacrifice for the possibility of a better future. Best suited to smaller tables (I'd sugget 3-5), the layout is simple and easy to follow, and the gameplay loop promotes conversation and consideration around the table. There’s an aching feeling with it and each prompt poses new, difficult questions for the Pillars to decide on together. Each action has consequences that impact not only the Pillars, but their community at large. It is only a matter of time until Truth emerges from their well to pass judgement on humanity. What will you choose when humanity’s future is in your hands?

Read my full review [here].

Quick, fun, and punchy!

I really liked the layout of this game, it felt flashy and fun. The prompts associated with each fight were as ridiculous as advertised, and the sense of “uh-oh, I’m in danger” persisted throughout – especially when boss fights came up! 

Gaining modifiers to Wands and Lasgerguns definitely, absolutely, made me feel like my character was getting stronger. It also by no means meant I was out of danger as even with my modifiers there were boss fights I just could not beat. And that felt good, it felt fitting for ‘I just got dropped into this world and am trying to keep my head down and survive’. 

You can read my full review [here]!

Monster Adoption Center has you or your group working together to build an adoption center, and then find your bundles of joy their forever homes. After figuring out your center (where it is, what it looks like, the general feel of it), you move onto character creation. M.A.C. has no limits on what you can play, or who you can be: even three slimes in a trench coat fit in here! 

I really love that this game is designed for solo or small group play. I thought character stats were really clever, the page layout charming, and the light-hearted feel of the game to be reflected throughout the book itself. I'm looking forward to playing this at one of my tables - we're going to have our characters make a center as a team building exercise!

Fun release, glad I had the chance to look it over! My full review can be found [here]!

I just finished playing this for the first time, and we immediately have plans to play it at least twice more with different characters! We used it is a way to build character connections, and it's such a lovely way to build relationships and moments between characters within a larger story, or start telling an entirely new one!

I think what was most fun for us was the quips between our characters themselves as the jar began to come together. The dice really seemed intent on telling their own story and it was delightful to be along for that journey. 

Instructions are very clear, and our game - with some detours - took us about 2.5 hours. We were playing in discord so just made a new channel for this game and got to it! Very much looking forward to playing again, this was as cozy as I had hoped it would be and allowed for some lovely moments between characters. 

The Ice Cream Wagon makes me want to play Mausritter. The inclusion of a film in this experience is such a novel idea, and one I haven't encountered before - it immediately made me excited to think about the level of immersion that could bring to my players in what is already a very charming shop!

There are several quests available, and I appreciate that they all fit on one page. You have exactly the information required to build up each quest in more detail if you like, which is a freedom I enjoy when running sessions. That I can also just go back to reference a quick paragraph instead of scrolling through multiple pages is a huge plus for me. I appreciate how relationship points with Goodie are tied into quest outcomes. It isn't just "if you fail, you lose them” - the choices you make and how you answer questions make a difference!

The relationship tracker on the final page is, again, delightfully concise. Everything I absolutely need to run this shop is included in an easy to access and read format. I'm also quite keen on the design choices made and appreciate the wintery feel evoked by the page backgrounds and text. Well done!

I found Simpler DnD to be well-organised and easy to grasp after a few reads, which takes a lot less time than reading over its source material! I think this will be a particularly useful tool for people new to this system in particular and who are looking to get a feel for it, but without dedication hours upon hours to character creation and trying to entangle rules spread out over 300+ pages.

I particularly appreciate the token system, which is the part of Simpler DnD I find most different from the source material! I think these modifiers being able to change (and even impacting your ability to use magic at all if sufficiently injured) fascinating. 

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to figure out that the numbers by each class were linked to corresponding items, and I think I would give my players an option to shop before doing ANYTHING else given that only one class has the option to pick up the first aid kit, and I wouldn't want anyone feeling like they had to pick X class for that reason. 

Colours are easy on the eyes and I think this system allows for something eas to print out for your table so they can have the rules before them and jump right into the fun: playing!

I decided to use this game to get a better feel for a character who has been rolling around in my head for the last few weeks. I knew ahead of time that I was going to play for an in-game week and this, along with the game encouraging you not to pressure yourself into writing long entries all the time, made it extra enjoyable! 

The combination of prompts and rolls, along with an undetermined number of events happening per day, gave a nice sense of pacing to the week. If you have a few hours, One Day At A Thyme is a great way to spend some of them!

I think this game did a great job of channelling the atmosphere of its inspiration and allowed me to play in a fun space of “something’s not quite right” and a creeping, building sense of horror. The whimsy was clear throughout and I'm genuinely looking forward to playing it again sometime, maybe in a small group so we get different character perspectives going!

They were a blast - thanks for making them possible! It was not streamed so unfortunately there is no VOD but should ever that change in future I'll reach out.

I ran Anomaly Hunters for a group of four and we had a great time with it! It was the first time any of us had used the Breathless system and found it worked well for this! There was an underlying tension that could be, and was, alleviated by Role Skills and seeing PCs work together to up the show's Cool Factor was an absolute delight.

We took about 30 minutes at the start to go over questions and make minor adjustments to ensure the comfort of everyone in the group. From there we played our first episode, where my notes amounted to: Ghost - Haunted Mansion, Clown. Group found a tarot deck and decided to do a reading in the house with everyone drawing a card, and that wound up really shaping the story of this ghost, a circus clown who had been upstaged by a charlatan magician and who wanted quite badly to be the Best Act and make people laugh. Part of why the episode did so well was because of the appreciative comments made by the National Clown Assc. about how this Ghost Clown had not been adhering to their standards with his frightful behaviour. It was funny, it was fun, and took us about 90 minutes!

A quick break later and we decided to play a second episode where the issue was Zombies at a farm. I'd been apple picking the day before so based the setting off of that place, and this episode was entirelllyy different to the first in that where the first was more intrigue and vague interactions until the very end, this one saw the group encounter - and fight - a zombie within the first 15 minutes! It was a really different tone, and both me and my players enjoyed the vastly different stories we were able to tell. (Group wound up setting nearly the entire farm on fire, which made some of the ending shots harder to see due to smoke, but they still did a fantastic job with making it a Cool Episode.)

Anomaly Hunters is currently on hiatus in our story universe due to the Face ending Ep. 2 with 4 stress and needing to go spend a bit of time decompressing, and healing from his injuries. 

This was a fun game for our group, especially because any creepy content was scary for the PCs, but not for the players themselves. There were plenty of opportunities for people to use their Role Skills and Items and, in our second episode, their Skills proper. Seeing how the group managed item use and worked together to keep their equipment (and themselves) in good working order was satisfying from a facilitator's perspective, and despite the high-stress the PCs were in, we as the people behind them had a good 3.5 hours laughing, joking, and making a cool limited series tv show! 

I ran this with friends over the weekend, and while scheduling made it so we were down to four people total, we made it work! It was a little bit chaotic because of it, but very much still doable! Everyone had a fantastic time putting on different character voices, and some character accents changed halfway throughout the game or, in my case, halfway through a monologue. 

We had two people sitting in who wanted to see what it was about before jumping in, and they're both going to join for episode 2 which we'll be doing at month's end! Had a great time with this game, cannot stress enough how nice it is to just give people scripts and have that be the extent of what needs doing for setup! 

We play online through a discord call and there's no problem with that whatsoever. The characters all have distinct personalities and, in our group, people spent a few minutes deciding which aspect of their character's personality they wanted to play up the most. We all had fun talking through the 'whodunnit' at the end, and the conclusion was delightfully fun. The Wytecliffs are a fascinating family and if you've got 90-120 minutes and a desire to run through a fun story, I'd suggest giving The Ghost of Northwood House a go! 

I just ran this for a small group of friends to see how it went and if we'd be interested in going through the Fables collection, and it was great! Really easy to get started, and everyone was excited about aspects of their character and immediately got into them. Towards the end people started adding more to what their characters were saying, which was fun to see.

There was a lot of chatter and excitement when it came time to talk about who we thought did it out of character, and that lead to a lot of laughter. That we were able to quickly pick this up and jump RIGHT in with all of 10-15 minutes of prep to read over the information at the start definitely helped. 

Short, sweet and fun I'd recommend this to anyone looking to try out this kind of game! It took us about 30-35 minutes once we got started. Great to pick up and play with friends - we were online, but it'd be really easy to do in person, and the short length makes it easy to find a time to slot it in! 

Looking forward to playing the others!