Justice Playthrough

For an exciting change of pace, I think I’ll actually PLAY one of these tabletop devils instead of just looking over the rules.

Page 27, Game 28: HOT GAY BRO DRAGONS, by Riverhouse Games

A game for two people totally into each other, and would like to express it. By pretending to be a pair of gay dragons.

This game is all about imagining yourselves as huge fire-breathing beasts who are totally into each other, and just can’t stop complementing each other. For real, the game is a series of guided questions about what kinds of dragons you are, with directives to tell each other why that’s AWESOME. Also, there is treasure. When you really like something your dragon-bro says about you, give him some treasure!

I found it adorable. Didn’t quite work for Jasmine, though. She didn’t appreciate the directive to get super pun-tastic with it. Like how HOT we are. Cuz dragons. Get it? It was honestly a bit TOO loosey-goosey for her liking; there’s not much here other than swapping compliments back and forth.

But even if it didn’t quite work for her, she found it to be a pleasant way to spend twenty minutes. I feel like that’s the floor for how much you’ll dig this game if you and your partner are comfortable with verbal affection: at the very least, it’s a pleasant way to hang with each someone you love.

Also, I got to describe laying back on a big ol’ glacier in Norway watching the northern lights, just melting my dragon self into the ice.

If you have a partner who’d like to pretend to be a dragon with you, it’s absolutely worth a look.

All right, what’s next?

Page 45, Game 25: Plasty: A Thing of Beauty, by Tinker Taylor Publications

“A LARP in the plastic surgeon’s waiting room”

Yeah, guessing I’m not gonna be playing this one, either. But let’s see if it makes me think that I should.

It’s a zine! About … a game? I think?

Page 30, Game 18: Prismot!: A Troikawave Zine, Issue 1, by Jared Sinclair

CONTEXT IS FOR COWARDS.

This is a zine. It is for a game. I think. The layout is done as a kind of tribute to 80’s tech. Whoever designed this appears to be quite good at graphic layout, and has devoted all their skills to making this feel awful yet somehow perfectly readable. It is offends the senses, but conveys its information cleanly. You have to be very good at what you do to be this deliberately bad at it.

The first six pages are all playable character options, I think. Living Marble Statue! Glitch Priest! Schoolgirl! Flamingo Man! Poolboy! Sexy Android!

How, precisely, are these character archetypes linked to one another such that they all deserve to be in the same zine? How do they fit within the world of this presumed game?

THESE THINGS ARE IRRELEVANT. CONTEXT IS FOR COWARDS.

There are 3-D glasses as a magic item. (Be careful not to get them wet.) The background art physically hurts. There is a d66 chart of things you find either in the trash or on the body. There are some spells, allowing you to create off-brand La Croix, or magic arrows, or snoop on what some electrons have been up to.

There are NPC/monsters — Monitor Golem and Pool Grannies. And there are 3-D glasses for you to print and cut out as a prop for use in your games!

And that’s it. That’s your zine. Just some stuff to toss into your game, or not.

YOU WANTED SOME SORT OF CONTEXT TO PUT THESE IN? SOME OBVIOUS THEME TO TIE IT ALL TOGETHER? LICK MY BALLSACK. CONTEXT IS FOR COWARDS.

A quick Google search reveals Troika is indeed an RPG. I’m guessing it’s made out of pure distilled madness, like some sort of Principia Discorida LARP.

I am the wrong person to run this game. But if I had certain friends running it, I’m thinking I want in.

I’ve been meaning to try shrooms.

Hey, is it part of the bundle?!

…

Nope.

Damn.

Okay. Let’s drop some dice, random.org:

Page 27, Game 28: HOT GAY BRO DRAGONS, by Riverhouse Games

“A game about telling your boyfriend (who is a dragon) about how much you love him.”

Why the hell not.

Okay, so now I’m a music critic too.

Dope.

Page 46, Game 8: Desktop Dungeons OST, by dannyBstyle

In this bundle, I’m not at all confident I’ve come anywhere near either the floor or the ceiling in terms of quality. In the short time I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen everything from a half-assed one-page adventure to a fully fleshed-out professional RPG that I’d give serious thought to paying full retail price for if I saw it on a shelf at Origins. (Hey, remember game conventions? Those were awesome. I hope they’re not gone forever.)

How bad can bad get here? How good is good? I have no idea.

However, I can say that the soundtrack at the heart of this entry definitely falls on the High-End Professional scale of what this bundle has to offer.

I’m totally unfamiliar with this game; based on the title, I’m thinking dungeon crawler. Based on the soundtrack alone, I’m intrigued. This is some damned fine high-fantasy background music. If I ever run a fantasy RPG again, this may well be the music I play. Hell, I may play this sucker when I’m doing one of my regular D&D games from my PC, seeing as gaming in person is SO an outdated artifact of the before-times known as February.

Maybe someone who’s played a fuckton of fantasy games would be all “Nah, bro, this is some samey bullshit; they totally ripped this off from Dragon Poker VII and GloopQuest: Heavenfall.” But to my ignorant ears, this sounds great. Lots of variety, lots of energy, lots of wacky song names; gotta appreciate a soundtrack with entries like Goats N’ Goblins, The Dragon With the Girl Tattoo, or Whaaarrgarrrbl. (I really wanna know the context of that last one.) The soundtrack is also available on Spotify, and it’s definitely on my radar now as something to listen to that isn’t gonna distract me with words and shit.

In fact, this soundtrack is so good, I’m gonna cheat! I’m not rolling the next entry at random! I’m just gonna skip directly to Desktop Dungeons!

Assuming it’s in the bundle.

… and it is not.

*sigh*

It is on Steam, though, for $15. Maybe if I hadn’t just given myself a gaming to-do list that stretches until retirement, I could check it out.

Okay. Back to the randomizer. And we go now to:

Page 30, Game 18: Prismot!: A Troikawave Zine, Issue 1, by Jared Sinclair

“Or: How to run a vaporwave campaign in Troika!”

There are zines here?

Well, why wouldn’t there be.

Let’s do a zine!

I spent most of my time tonight getting this blog up and running, so that I could put these little playthroughs somewhere other than my Facebook page. Such words! Very express!

Anyway. On to the next game. Let’s get cubey with it!

Page 57, Game 3: Cubefall, by Cavvvalry

(Edit: This game can currently be found on Page 56, Game 17.)

Back to the video game side of things, where I find a minimalist 3D puzzler in the vein of an old-school Tetris knockoff. You’re looking down a four-sided rectangular chute, with a steady supply of cubes raining down. When you fill in enough cubes at the bottom to form a complete square, poof! They vanish! And to encourage optimal cube placement, you use the arrow keys to rotate your chute.

This feels like it’s reallllllly close to being a pretty solid little game. The problem is the interface. When you rotate your chute to adjust where the incoming cubes will land, there’s no sort of easing animation to carry you from one state to the next. Just an abrupt POOF! The chute is instantly in its new location!

I found it remarkably difficult to visualize what any give state of the board was going to be, and I think that lack of transitional animation contributed to that. Or maybe it didn’t; maybe my spatial visualization just wasn’t up to the task. Regardless, I felt like I was spending most of the game flailing around more or less at random.

I suspect that if I spent enough time playing this one — like, say, the amount of time the developer has no doubt spent on it — that ability to visualize it well enough to actually be playing it would start to come. But do I actually WANT to spend that time here?

Honestly, not really. I don’t think there’s just enough there here. As far as I can tell, the base game is the entire game: cubes fall, make ’em fall as far as you can. I assume they’ll start falling faster, eventually. The harder difficulty settings cause the play area to twist around to further confound your spatial awareness, which definitely increases the challenge, but in a way that calls attention to what I find frustrating about the game in the first place.

So Cubefall winds up left in an unfortunate no-man’s land; too inaccessible for a casual time waster, not interesting enough to invest more than casual time in it.

Ah, well. They’re not all gonna be winners.

Okay, next game:

Page 46, Game 8: Desktop Dungeons OST, by dannyBstyle

Not a game at all; an original soundtrack for a game. Maybe this game is in the bundle! Or not! Either way, I’ve finally landed on something I can knock off this list while I’m at work tomorrow.

Back to the tabletop we go, and it’s a big’un.

Page 55, Game 12: Costume Fairy Adventures by Penguin King Games

(Edit: This game can currently be found on Page 55, Game 11.)

Oh my fuck, this looks fantastic.

Based on what I’d seen elsewhere in the bundle, I was primed to expect some dashed-off pamphlet with a handful of random tables and vague admonitions to go get your mischief on, but NOPE. This is a 300+-page rulebook, with a printable deck of over 100 cards for your fairy costumes, with adorable artwork and a clean layout and and and….

This looks FUN.

Players are all fairies, looking to get into trouble. (The intro comic features fairies trying to steal a train in order to jump it over a castle, because that sounds fukkin’ RAD. They succeed! Next order of business: landing it.) The rules lay out your options very clearly, but like the best big RPGs, it looks like it’s giving you a ton of choice without an overbearing amount of mechanics. The rules themselves look simple without being trivial, and encourage creativity.

This looks like it’d be an absolute hoot with players who take a mindset that they wanna go out there and make some shit HAPPEN. I’d play a one-shot of this. I’d play a campaign of this.

Yeah. This is the sort of gem I was hoping this RNG-powered trawl would let me stumble across. When I can have people in my game room again, this is absolutely a candidate to hit the table.

Nice job, random.org. Now give me another one so I’ll know what I’m doing when I pick this back up tomorrow.

Page 57, Game 3: Cubefall, by Cavvvalry

“Rotational Row-Clearing Action!”

Looks like a potential time-gobbler if it’s fun.

And we’re back to the video games:

Page 2, Game 16: Micro Mages, by Morphcat Games

Man, do I need to get a game controller for my laptop. Between this and a game I was playing last night, if I’m going to keep doing arcade-style stuff on this machine, I need an arcade-style controller.

Micro Mages is literally made for the Nintendo Entertainment System, though the download thoughtfully comes with its own emulator, which is a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the code simulating the actual game. (But then again, that’s true of the PDF representing the game manual, too.)

It’s cute and fun, though I think having a proper controller and not just banging arrow keys would enhance the experience quite a bit. Like the games it draws inspiration from, quite unforgiving; you’re perpetually one oopsie away from death. (Though I don’t recall Mario ever ending in a blood splotch.)

It’s a side-scroller where you’re a tiny little mage dude, bouncing around and blasting skeletons and bats and stuff with your little pew-pew spell. I think you’re there to rescue a princess? There’s always a princess. I’m willing to bet she’s not in this tower.

Also, there are crates! Blast them! Some of them have treasures, which give you points! You like points, right? Or a fairy, who will allow you to take TWO hits before you die! Or a seagull you can mount on your back for in-air shenanigans!

Unlike most side-scrollers, this one progresses vertically; you need to jump your way up the tower. Through a bit of trial and error, I eventually figured out that the key mechanic is to fling yourself against a wall and press yourself against it, slowing your fall and allowing you to jump again.

Of course, before long, the game starts slowly scrolling upwards, regardless of whether or not your making progress. If you fall off the bottom, you die in an adorable spurt of 8-bit blood.

I feel like it’s a tad too unforgiving for its own good. Yeah, the games from the era didn’t fuck around with any kind of hand-holding, but even so, this one’s rough. Having the map start scrolling of its own accord is a step too far; the game is challenging enough without adding what feels like an artificial ticking clock element. At the very least, maybe don’t unleash that until the second castle?

But honestly? This is a cute, fun little game. If I could load it into the NES emulator on my Nintendo Switch, I probably would, just to see how it plays. If I do get a controller I like, I could see coming back to this.

The game is also set up to allow up to four players — SIMULTANEOUSLY. Which feels like it would be such a howling clusterfuck of boinging and pew-pewing that I actually want to try it sometime.

Not bad at all.

All right, random.org. Roll me a good one:

Page 55, Game 12: Costume Fairy Adventures by Penguin King Games

“A tabletop RPG about fairies. In costumes. Having adventures.”

I’mma guess this one is exactly what it says on the tin.

Time for an adventure!

Page 42, Game 24: Na Escuridão (In the Darkness), by Minakie

(Edit: This game can currently be found on Page 42, Game 23.)

“Look, it’s a Hundred Floors of Frights. They’re not all gonna be winners.”

Negative reviews are fun when you’re punching up; most of the people responsible for Cats being the nightmare clusterfuck it is are wealthy and powerful, and will likely never know I even existed; that shit is fair game.

But going HAM on something that was basically donated to charity by someone who worked on it largely just for the love? That’s … that’s just mean.

So I’ll go easy on In The Darkness.

It’s a system-agnostic one-shot adventure that fits onto a single sheet of paper by virtue of teeny tiny print. And….

Some tropes you embrace, some tropes you avoid. The Big Twist in this adventure would be one of the latter — for very good reason. It’s not offensive or in bad taste; I just worry that if I ran this, the rest of the table would come away thinking I’d just wasted their damn time.

Though to be fair, I HAVE seen this twist pulled-off successfully before; my friend did it in a D&D game, and it was kinda fuckin’ epic. The context was radically different, but still, he made it work. So maybe it’s worth a look if you’re GM and you’re in a challenge-yourself kinda mood.

I’ll pass, though.

Okay, who’s next…..

Page 2, Game 16: Micro Mages, by Morphcat Games

“A platformer developed for the NES. Now available on PC! ROM included.”

Ooh. This looks promising.

And the first properly randomized entry in the playthrough is:

Page 18, Game 15: Two Years of Mini-RPGs, 2017—2019, by Emojk

(Edit: This game can currently be found on Page 18, Game 14.)

Not one game, but a sub-bundle of 32 pen-and-paper mini-games!

Obviously, this is not one I actually played.

I was a little thrown and honestly a bit scornful when my first random toss of the bundle-dice landed me on something that wasn’t a video game — but as my friend pointed out, Itch.io is becoming a big venue for indie tabletop RPG aficionados, and including those games in this bundle put it on more people’s radar. Which can only be a good thing.

Okay, very fair points.

But what to do when my RNG traipse through the bundle lands me on these spaces? Just reroll and pretend they don’t exist? That doesn’t seem fair, but it’s not as though I can sit down and spend an hour or two playing them myself, unless I stumble across something I think my wife would really be into.

I can at least give ’em a look and report back.

This bundle-within-the-bundle comes from an indie game dev named Come Martin. He challenged himself to do a single-(ish)-sheet RPG per month, and wound up sticking with it for about two years, producing 32 games in total. They’re presented as either individual downloads, or rolled into a single mega-PDF.

The presentation is … rough. Even for casually perusing them, the individual PDFs are the way to go. Some are laid out in portrait, others as landscape, but no effort has been made to normalize them for the master PDF, so a whole bunch of it will appear sideways on your screen. The author also has occasionally unfortunate tastes in font selection.

This particular bundle is for people who are already heavy into one-shot indie RPGs; little to no effort is made to ease you into the conventions of the genre. Which I guess makes sense, really. It’s not like someone’s gonna go “You know, binging The Office has gotten kinda stale. Whaddya say we head down to the dining room table and pretend we’re magic trees?”

It’s been a while since I played games like this (ie, Fiasco) with anything approaching regularity. I feel like there’s a kind of group storytelling mindset you and the other players have to get yourselves in for any of these to work — but if you can get yourself into that headspace for one, getting into it for the rest shouldn’t be that hard.

Each game starts with a setting/situation of varying degrees of wackiness — You’re incompetent time travelers setting out to solve the paradoxes you probably caused! You’re plushies protecting your children from nightmares! You’re basically Wall-E, except your batteries are dying and soon the world will truly become lifeless! You’re old folks trying to escape the nursing home! From there come rules of varying degrees of complexity; some of them involve rolling dice and looking up stuff on a chart, others have some element of resource management and risk/reward thing going on. The most prep-heavy one I saw, Murder in the Quantum Monastery, involves printing out three decks of reality-shattering cards (“The monastery is now a giant robot fighting the forces of evil”) players can use to spruce-up their medieval whodunnit.

The overall effect is a set of games I’d be CURIOUS to play, but not necessarily EXCITED to play, you know? Like, if I already had a group that was meeting regularly to play these kind of indie one-shots, I’d be glad to print a few out to toss into the mix just to see what happens. But I’m not making a list of who I’d wanna invite to assemble that group myself post-Covid.

I feel like doing this particular entry justice involves doing a sub-crawl on its own 32 individual components, and … nah, I think I’ll pass. But what the hell, it’s a thing that exists — on my hard drive, no less. I could see coming back to this if I was on an indie RPG kick. There’s a wacky low-fi charm to the whole thing that I kinda like.

All right, who’s next….

Page 42, Game 24 (ooh, nice palindrome, random.org): Na Escuridão (In the Darkness), by Minakie

Dang, another tabletop; I think those are more heavily represented in this bundle than I realized. But this looks like it’s one ruleset, not 32; I think I’ll take a peek.

And my big randomized playthrough begins with:

Page 1, Game 26: One Night Stand, by Kinmoku

Okay, maybe this first one wasn’t exactly chosen at random.

A point-and-click adventure game where you (assumed to be a male-bodied sort whose sexual preferences include women) wake up in bed hung-over as fuck and next to a stranger who’s as naked as you are. Feels like it’s part of a genre I’m simply not familiar with; sort of a slow-moving interactive novel kind of thing?

You wake up, and try to piece together just WTF happened last night. (You were, apparently, already visibly drunk AF by the time you met the lady you hooked up with, which is honestly not cool; but what the hell, my avatar clearly wasn’t processing the event as a sexual violation, so I wasn’t going to overlay that narrative on him.) You click on things. You make decisions. And you need to make those decisions count, because she’s not gonna be asleep forever, bro.

The game ended with me getting thrown the hell out of her house. Protip: if you’re going to violate someone’s privacy in the name of trying to reduce the overbearing awkwardness, make sure you don’t call her by the name that’s on her fake ID.

At least I had gotten my shirt and pants on and left with my phone — which had just died. No Uber here — old-school walk of shame for me. And she was nice enough to give me some aspirin before I left, which I clearly needed very desperately.

For such inherently salacious and potentially sleazy subject matter, the game presents itself gently, with soft, warm graphics. This girl had clearly had a really shitty night last night, and I was sincerely motivated to try and keep from making it worse — and obviously failed, super hard. I’m also intrigued by the mystery of just what the hell happened to “me” as well.

It was a pleasant little experience, even if the ending I got was … probably not the WORST possible, but still not good. I may well come back to it.

Next game: Page 18, Game 15: that’s gonna be….

Two Years of Mini-RPGs, 2017—2019, by Emojk

“32 RPGs in a single collection!”

Erm. Kinda flying in the face of this whole VIDEO game thing, aren’t we.

Eh, what the hell. I can at least give ’em a look.

It’s June, 2020. The world is sick as hell and kinda sorta on fire. Massive protests against rampant police violence are so commonplace they’re scarcely newsworthy anymore.

And Itch.io is offering a metric fuckton of games under the Bundle for Racial Justice And Equality.

“All proceeds will be donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund split 50/50.”

As a middle-class white dude, throwing money at problems is kind of my core skillset. And I’m a gamer to boot! So, I got it.

… and now have over a thousand indie games to play.

That’s … a lot.

So I’m gonna play ’em. Not all of them; I still have a job. But what the hell, I’ll pull some games at random and post about ’em. Maybe this gigantic masterpiece of gamer slacktivism will be available for you to buy yourself! Or maybe you can just spot some cool shit you wanna check out a la carte.