This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

Expect Three Visitors is a 36 page GM-less roleplaying game by Alex White. In it, you tell a story inspired by Charles Dickens’ a Christmas Carol. Each player is a client, haunted by a spirit of one of the deadly sins, while they also play one of those spirits for the other player’s clients.

You create a client — the person you imagine will experience the visions. And you create a spirit — the ghost who will visit the player to your left. You discuss the key temptation that your spirit will be offering to the player to the left. You each have a blind hand of 3 to 4 cards. When it is your turn, frame a scene for the person on your left based on the suit. The nature of the scene will be determined by the phase of play, which each of the players goes through in turn, but in that scene, your client will be played by one of the other players, not by you. That’s the whole of the rules! I don’t think this is a lot, but if it does seem complicated, most of the text is an example of play, for each phase and suit, based on A Christmas Carol, for the purposes of illustration.

You will notice I breezed over a few things, though: There’s no system for helping you create either your spirit or your client: You’re expect to “be inspired by A Christmas Carol” or “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and the only prompt you get from the game is your sin, which you discuss with your neighbour who plays your spirit. Similarly, you have no prompts for the nature of your scenes, except for the sin prompt; there’s a decent chance that all four of your prompts will be identical by suit, as it’s determined by chance.

This month, I’ve read a lot of prompt-based games, and my repeated refrain is that they provide not enough support for players, and expect too much design work of them. See my review of Dead After Dinner for the main discussion, but also Hwaet! and The Cog That Remains. For me, this provides perhaps the least support out of all of these: I must create two characters with little to support it but the concept of a sin and my familiarity with the subject matter, and then I’m given a vague prompt to combine with the subject matter, and have to hope that the fact that different players are interpreting my character through different lenses in different scenes is enough to bring the game to fruition. It’s just not enough for me, I’m afraid.

But I can see the design intent here, and I suspect in this specific case, someone else might have a very different experience. The support provided me here just doesn’t work for me: It’s the huge number of examples of play. By telling me what others have chosen to do, you’re in fact locking my brain out of options; I’m looking for the remaining items in the list, but those items given aren’t an option. Reframe those lists as “Choose these, or create your own…” and suddenly it’s more supportive. The same goes for the extended example of play. Simply switch perspectives, and ask the questions that these are the answers to, and ask me to answer three of them to establish a scene, and I have a game to play, I am not floundering just asked to create a scene. A lot of work went into these examples of play, but for me and the people I play with, the chosen, open-ended structure isn’t inspiring of the emotional journey the author is expecting, but rather causes us to freeze. This game can scaffold its players so much better, just by changing its perspective — by reframing the same content. Make it easier for players to engage with the content by considering the text. If they don’t need to feel the fear of a plunge, don’t make them feel it.

This is a clever, heartfelt game to play at this time of year. It’s a perfect antidote to the superficiality and chintziness of the season. But I just can’t bring it to any of my tables, because it requires more of me and my friends than we are able to bring. I just wish the kind of people interested in making this kind of game, were also considerate of people who don’t have a lot of energy or capacity to participate in these without scaffolding, and who want to just do the play, without the work. If this exploration of perspectives, temptation and flaws, and complex character exploration with your friends, is compelling Christmas fare to you, and you and your friends feel confident to create all of this from close to scratch and a few examples, Expect Three Visitors is a perfect Christmas game for you.

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