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!

I just got a gift copy of Dice Forager (or digital) in the mail on Christmas Eve, from my friend Sam Dunnewold, and I’ve woken up before the kids on Christmas morning, so tune in for a bonus issue of Critique Navidad while I bake breakfast croissants. Dice Forager is a 50 page perfect bound colour zine by Sam Dunnewold, host of the exceptional Dice Exploder podcast. It consists some essays, 3 small games, and 4 tiny games. Each of the games (aside from the last 2, which are only half a page each) opens with a 1 page commentary on the game itself, meant to set you up for perspective on the game.

As Sam’s partner states in the introduction, Dice Forager is almost autobiographical, and is certainly a zine about a specific person: Sam Dunnewold. The author’s foreword is laid out like a brief hack of the GM’s advice from Apocalypse World, and encourages you to engage actively and critically in reading (and perhaps playing) the games that follow (I’ll tick off these moves as I go, play along!). The essays that fill the front few pages of the book cover general principles of creation, editing, providing feedback on art and safety. These very short essays really serve to calibrate you to the author’s stance going into the games the make up the majority of the zine. They’re short enough that I don’t think I should recap them, you should read them yourself (Update: Now, you can! Sam has posted them on his blog!): They’re a call for generous and abundant engagement and I do hope that Sam’s thoughts here are reflective of the evolving perspective of the hobby on these topics, because we’d be a better hobby for it.

The first game is Couriers, a Lasers & Feelings hack inspired by the baseline test in Bladerunner 2049. Couriers sets a theme for the zine: These are games that require you to lean into the theme, to really embody your character. The pleasure of Couriers (if pleasure is the right word) is to see the Couriers — they’re the players who are robot cops seeking robots in disguise — slowly embrace or repress their emotions until they either become aberrant themselves or until they’re retired before they do. Mechanically, this is driven by the “emotions” score, which basically represents your robot cop having any feelings, and which is driven up by having things go well, but also the more emotions you have the harder it is to kill. This is a neat gamy Lasers and Feelings spin, that works so long as you don’t think too hard about it, but you could (and I think should have) make it sing more cleanly. You could do this by either dictating what the emotions were —simply because if they’re angry, violent emotions, it shouldn’t translate to less killing in my opinion — or making it a 3-way system like we see in Fight or Fright (I have a review of that upcoming). You can see Sam’s unwritten bias coming into the design there, I suspect, in assuming that the emotions will be passion and art and love and not anger and jealousy and violence. It’s a very melancholy vibe overall, befitting the subject matter, and the aberrant players are well supported in their joint role as game master through a list of missions, that are easy to iterate on. That said, if you’re a table of more than 3 players, there are more aberrant players than couriers, and while I feel like it would thrive with 3, it’s not clear to me how well it would work with a table larger than that; while the right table could make anyone work, I think this is probably best as a referee’s game; this is implied as well by the rule that aberrant players should rotate in as couriers become aberrant.

The baseline test scene is an excellent inspiration for a game in my opinion, but because of its nature, I think the benefits of the structure here are lost: This is a game with a very tight, sub-hour loop, which if it was tackling a different topic, I think would make for an amazing structure for a pick up game. I feel like Couriers desires to be run in a bunch of jobs in a row, each sub-an-hour, and that just ends up being a few hours after all. Would love to see this direction applied to a more pick up and play premise. Overall though, this is a very cool game, and one that has a lot of potential if it were expanded, particularly if the conceptual space was expanded to embrace a recognition of the directions aberrance could take you. If you’re interested in exploring humanisation and dehumanisation in a cyberpunk future, this is good place to start.

The second game is Windfall, a larp set in the town Sam grew up in (also the setting of Northfield, making it perhaps the most designed about game in Minnesota). The concept leverages my having to travel 15 000 kilometres to play the game pretty well: By using the physical space and the locations of the town as cues for gameplay, the pacing on this otherwise fairly predictable journey is pretty fantastic, and as Sam observed the physical space prompts the roleplay in a way that imagined space cannot. Sam brings his concept of calibration into this game, concealing it in in-character phrasing “Did you hear the cops?”. The main drama in the game is held in the secret prompts, which encourages each player to engage with each other in varied and surprising ways. One of the big secrets is tied directly into the characters utilising the hidden calibration tools, and competing over their application, both disguising the admission of discomfort by players (perhaps a mistake?), but also yielding narrative impact from the application of calibration. It’s very neat. Once you’ve taken the plunge and actually “been arrested”, you begin playing a parallel game, reminiscing about what could have been, your incorrect memories contrasting with the actual events occurring as your companions all play. I’m not sure how this split works in practice — do the arrested players hang out separately? This feels like a lovely solution, albeit perhaps impractical in small groups: Perhaps an example of play would go well here, where the activity of play diverges from the expected. All in all, a lovely little game. Practically, though: Even at only 8 pages of rules, it’s kind of too many to play in the way this game wants to be played. You’d kind of need a facilitator, to be sitting in the car and reading out paragraphs then prompting everyone. While I think the format of large scale site-specific larp is really, really clever, I think the rules need to fit on something the size of an index card, or each player be handed a little A6 zine to flick to different pages in as they reach different locations, for this to work. The traditional format of “zine-based game” doesn’t cohere with the game itself, for me. Because of that, it feels far more theoretical to me than the other two games; more of a game to be considered than played, even though theoretically it could be. I do think, though, that a version of this that came in a set of playbooks for each of the characters, that walked them through the rules as it became relevant, would be actually playable. I’d definitely do this in my hometown we’re I ever to venture back, as the walk from Main Beach to the Lighthouse there is almost exactly 4.5 miles, and there are some nice spots to pause on along that route. Overall, this one has a lot of potential, and I’d love to see more of these pseudo-autobiographical games being published.

The third game is Space Fam Mini. Of the three games included, this is the only one that feels strongly like an indie story game, in terms of its structure, pacing and mechanics. You create characters defined by their fears, you draw a ship together and then embellish and mark it up as you go through your scenes, As you go, you might gain beliefs, guilt, or camaraderie. Beliefs move your space fam towards endgame, camaraderie helps succeed on jobs, and guilt propels you towards your end. You play through a menu of scenes, like a simplified Firebrands-like game, until you’re out of scenes or your beliefs outweigh your fears. Perhaps there’s joy in building this crew and ship and world from scratch, but honestly, I think Space Fam Mini would be best if it leant right into its inspirations, rather than be coy about them. Be more like Arcane Academia, for example: Reclaim it. Give us a ship blueprint already, to mark up. Make those scenes detailed, more evocative. Make it feel real. Give us pregenerated characters, not just a menu of sparks. The prompts are hefty — they need to be for the ideal table of 5 — but they could be absolute fire. You know what property this is inspired by, if you’re choosing this game as a game to play. Lean into it. I don’t think games benefit from “it’s a little bit like this and a little bit like that”. I want more “it’s this, my bespoke universe of space cowboys and found family, make it your own”. You know we will make it our own, we do that with canon-infested properties like Star Wars. We can do it with your bespoke little world, I just want to see it. You might be familiar with Space Fam (not mini), which was also published this year — the reason Sam says he chose to publish this as well, was because “This version has something to say, even if I think that thing contains a lie. Which is better? I don’t know.” Now, while Sam has for reasons I understand chosen to avoid the most obvious comparison to Space Fam (and for good reason), the untruth it tells is the basically the mechanism by which the game ends. It’s not really a game about those other mentioned inspirations, in my opinion, although you could twist it to be. The Space Fam becomes superheroes for the oppressed, is the story. Now, this is a Hollywood falsehood, and it’s true that it doesn’t speak to the reality of activism or of end stage capitalism, but I don’t think there’s need to be embarrassed about the desire for simplicity that this ending displays. It does provide a neat bow for your experience, which is not something I dislike, but it does ring falsely if it were intended to reflect reality, but unlike stories, reality is rarely a satisfying or coherent narrative experience. I don’t think this game suffers for the potentially saccharine ending, although again, it does reflect Sam’s biases that he thinks it does. Without that, we simply need someone to make sci-fi Stewpot, instead of this game.

The fourth game is This Heart Within Me Burns, an exploration of what it’s like to have one of your family change due to illness. This is a Descended From The Queen game, 5 pages including all the card prompts, of which there are 28. The twist is that the “Queen” — here a close companion plagued with a chronic illness-like terminal curse — is played by someone at the table, and that the game is focused on what happens to everyone in that characters lives when they are finally healed. I have written extensively recently about prompts in prompt-based games, and I stand by my stance that they need to be concrete: These are not, and I wish they spoke more about was the curse was, what the world around the adventurers is like, and who the Empty Goddess who drives the gameplay is. But, unlike most prompts, to me, someone who has been very unwell, and gone through hospitalisation and near death and the chronic illness that comes with successful medical treatment, these prompts scream lived experience. But the goal of fantasy in this case, to me, is to make things more powerful through using metaphor and magnification to make more powerful the message. I think that it would do a better job of showing what it was like to be the person in hospital, not the one visiting, as Sam says is part of the intent, if it used the fantasy as a magnifying glass to make the truths here more visible, a little more. I think this is a fascinating game, that doesn’t go far enough to achieve its goals.

The last three games are experiments, basically. I’m not going to go much further than that. Two of them are available on Sam’s itch.io page: I’ll you guess which two. Experience them for yourself, if the first 4 games appealed to you. Layout here is elegant, simple and uses colour well. It’s no-art. You’ll never get lost in this book, but the layout’s goal is to get out of the way: It succeeds.

Dice Forager reminds me of the stuff being put out at the dawn of the itch.io TTRPG community back in 2018 or so. Personal, witty, and clever. But also (and by intent, I think) experimental, incomplete, half-thoughts or older drafts. These are yearnings published as games, but all of them will get you thinking if you’re into game design, and I personally think we need more essays, self-reflections (shout out to the Disc 2 Jam) and half-finished games out there. If you wish you’d been around in the era of Anti-sisyphus and Games for the Missing and Found, you can get a taste of that here. Be under no preconceptions, though: You’re picking up, if not unfinished work, work that reaches about half-way to you, that aims to get you to reach back in your own designs. The goal is as much to make you think about what games can be and say and how they do that, rather than provide you a product or content. This isn’t what I look for in my regular gaming life, but rather appeals to me as someone who thinks about games too much; if that’s not you, Dice Forager may not be for you. If it is, pick it up (either print or digital) and see what you discover.

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