Monthly Archives: June 2015

Cheat Your Own Adventure

Posted on June 29, 2015 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Go Play NW is a Seattle-based con for playing games; there’s an emphasis on indie and narrative-oriented role-playing games, but there are usually some board and card games in the mix. I love it because, not having any vendors, it’s … Continue reading →

Posted in cyoa, review, rpg, storygames | Tagged | 1 Comment

Hollywood Visionary

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

I have been greatly looking forwards to Aaron Reed’s Hollywood Visionary, in which you play the founder of an ambitious new Hollywood studio in the 1950s, trying to make your first independent movie. Visionary is a long way from the kind of … Continue reading →

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The RPG Death Spiral

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Possibly you’ve been here: the heroic PCs, on entering a village, smell something suspicious. They were meant to smell something suspicious, but they get the wrong end of the stick somehow, decide that the headman is a doppelganger spy, and attack him. … Continue reading →

Posted in rpg, storygames | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Starry Seeksorrow

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Starry Seeksorrow, by Caleb Wilson, is one of the Commended entries from Shufflecomp Disc 2. The player-character is a doll, animated by magic to protect the child of two wizards – sometimes a Klaus, sometimes a Klara. The action is confined … Continue reading →

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Spring Thing 2015: Mere Anarchy

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

(Belated, but better than never, no?) Mere Anarchy (Bruno Dias) is an Undum piece. It feels like more of a short-story-with-aesthetic-variations than a branching plot: the prose is confident and attractive, though, and the aesthetic choices are about aesthetics pleasing enough to … Continue reading →

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A Year Without Zombies 6: Summer Cannibals

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

(For 2015, I am trying to avoid playing any games or consuming any static media with zombies in them. My reasons, and other fun things like ‘what exactly counts as a zombie?’, are explained here.) They dog my heels. I was reading A.S. Byatt’s The … Continue reading →

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MASSIVE CHALICE

Posted on June 7, 2015 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

MASSIVE CHALICE is, according to every reviewer ever, XCOM squad tactics meets Crusader Kings eugenics. These are two of my very favourite games, so obviously I had to check the thing out. For many, many years I have had an Ideal … Continue reading →

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Naming and NPCsity

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Last post discussed player-directed – or, at least, not directly author-mandated – naming for individual player characters. But there’s another important use-case: naming lots of characters, using generated names. The Simple End of Things Creepy narrative block-puzzler Road Not Taken has a town populated by … Continue reading →

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