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!

Triangle Agency is a 300-odd page roleplaying game by Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland, with a bunch of art directors and layout designers on board including Ryan Kingdom, Ben Mansky and Michael Shillingberg. In it, you play paranormal investigators in a corporate setting, seeking to apprehend distortions of reality known as anomalies, minimise loose ends however you see fit. In this pursuit, you are allowed to use anomalous abilities, but only in the line of duty. This game contains sections that only the “General Manager” may read, as well as sections not even the General Manager may read, until certain things occur in play. What this means is, given I’m not playing the game in its’ entirety, that there’s risk of spoilers in this review, if you’re going to be a player, as I’m going to review this both from the “Agent” and “General Manager” perspective, although I’ll do my best to talk about the impact of the “Playwalled Documents” without spoilers, as they’re secret from everyone at the table. You’ve been warned.

I’m going to start with the two most striking things about this book: The voice, and the layout. Triangle Agency is addressed as you, in character. It’s a rulebook disguised as a corporate onboarding manual. To me, whose experience with this genre is limited to the X-Files and Control, it feels intensely inspired by the voice of the corporate documents in Control with a dash of classic corporate comedy RPG Paranoia: Sectioned are censored, interdimensional intrusions being indicated by <> tags, and by the cheerful corporate demeanor disguising both the reality that me, the reader exists in, as well as the reality that the agent you’re playing exists in: “You get to pretend you are not living the stresses of your current moment and instead are enjoying a refreshing beverage at the imaginary table of your choice; the Agency is happy you’re happy. Win-win!” This tongue in cheek humour lays it on thicker than the source material, however, it also reflects the animal layer of fourth wall breakage occurring here (fifth wall?), so it works. I wish I could list jokes, but explaining why something is funny ruins it. Just trust me that you’ll enjoy reading this; the only challenge is making play live up to the book itself.

Triangle Agency occurs in phases: Morning Meetings, where you play your daily lives until a briefing occurs, the investigation, where you identify leads to find the Anomaly and its’ Domain, then the Encounter, where you capture it, or in extreme circumstances, neutralise it. Going through this, you’ll be awarded commendations or demerits according to your performance. The resolution mechanism is to roll 6 4-sided dice, looking for 3s. A 3 is a success, and you can either alter the recent past, or use your abilities in a safe way. If you don’t roll any 3s, you follow the failure instructions of your ability, or an inconvenient consequence occurs. Whenever a dice doesn’t show a 3, means the General Manager gets an additional chaos, which they spend to make actions against you. Luckily you can spend your Quality Assurances to turn your not-3s into 3s! If you spend them all, though, future rolls mean one of your 3s won’t count! Oh and 3 sets of 3 is a crit, with a bunch of special powers that you can choose from. Overall, this is a really thematic, neat system, and I love that you’re just kind of normal people, who are asking your corporation to overrule reality in specific ways to assist you in your role; if you’re not using your powers, then failure is assumed. You don’t have any skills to speak of, you’re not trained. You’re completely mundane apart from your connection with Triangle Agency. The only mechanical addition is that your agency provides you with a score after every mission: Commendations allow you to get cool stuff, and demerits affect your company standing, although that the latter means is concealed being the playwall.

The layout is designed to reflect the in-world’s authorial perspective, with eerily cheerful corporate graphics, bold colours and sans serif fonts, and jarring sidebars and interjections, with this combined with generous spacing, bold and clear headings and section tagging, and use of colour, numbers and judicious fonts for highlighting resulting in a really, really compelling read. The art, when it appears, is full page, bold impressionistic stuff, the kind of stuff you see on the walls of faceless corporations in movies, eerie and faceless and intimidating. It’s fantastic. The General Manager’s section becomes less coherent in its layout choices, and sadly, much less easy to read. It fit does this for reasons that make sense in the text, and i’ve you get there, the game starts breaking its own rules. I don’t love the commentary in these sections, although it’s still a striking choice, and I understand where it’s coming from. But also, I want to play the game, and it’s not helping me do that successfully anymore.

What’s interesting about the incoherence of the General Manager’s section, though, is that it reveals why there’s three layers of rules here: In Triangle Agency, the General Manager is as much of a player as the other players, and they are being manipulated by someone else. The designer, perhaps? Slowly, as you move through the General Manager’s section, you learn how to run the game, use chaos points, how using those points impacts the world, but also, the onboarding manual you’re reading slowly breaks down, crashes, and starts to be changed and manipulated by outside forces. By the time you know how to run and design a mission, the ways the Agents can retire are revealed to you, and you can access certain places in the Playwalled area if it occurs. The major issue for me with Triangle Agency, is that for me there’s just too much here, and it’ll be hard to track. But also, that too much — is it really going to matter in play? Probably not, to be honest. There’s so much jargon here — if you remove an Anomaly’s Focus, they become a Hollow, for example. I learnt that around page 150, as the General Manager. It’s just a lot of setting, and it’s interspersed with the rules in an interesting and compelling way that also makes me feel very overwhelmed trying to read through it as a General Manager.

So, what does this Playwall achieve, then? So far, it’s just been used as a joke, or to move things that would usually be just in the rules, so as a gimmick. Is it more than that? I guess it is…kind of? To answer this question, you have to have realised I skipped over character creation. Creating your mundane character involves picking the anomaly that changed you, the reality you came from, some relationships, and your agency competency. These give you a bunch of special abilities that you can use, with their own specific rules. They’re all very cool, and thematic. I’m not going to talk much about them, though, except to say that I’m pretty excited to use some of these powers. Throughout these powers, primarily, are references to things you can do that are Playwalled. Basically, rolling certain results will cause unexpected consequences. Some of these unexpected consequences have further progressions — for example, if 3 people choose one option in C6, V1 is triggered. Like in a legacy game or a choose your own adventure book, kind of? Some of them are anomalous items, that you can only find if you reach certain ranks or have certain qualities. Some of them break the fourth wall. A bunch of them allow you to unlock new sets of rules that don’t exist until you become aware of certain things; however, only you, the character, are allowed to know this fact, and you can’t share it, even with the General Manager. They’re intentionally difficult to read, I think: You’re not supposed to do what I’m doing. And I think that’s the key: What these do, from a game design perspective, is to add in story and layer in the Too Much I mentioned earlier so that you’re discovering things without the load of Knowing falling entirely on the General Manager; bringing all the players a sense of the unknown. It also brings that sense of the voice of the authors that is in the book and is so attractive, into the game proper. It’s a clever but big mechanic, and I feel like the core mechanical structure of the game is in contrast to the complexity of what lies behind the playwall. It is possible this is intentional: Storing the complexity off screen, acting as a tutorial system of sorts. But I feel like the welcoming basic rules are undetermined by the complexity that collects in the General Manager’s and Playwall sections.

The competing needs of these sections results in what I consider poor information design. It’s difficult to navigate the PDF (I’m told there’ll be a better hyperlinked version which will help), it loads slowly because of its’ graphic intensity, the nature of the Playwall means that it’s hard to find the right page without spoiling yourself. The navigational choices are designed to work on paper, not in digital. This is intended to be a book. Buy it in print, if you can. But. But, it’s also hard to find things without search. Wait, so commendations can buy requisitions. Where is that? It’s not in the contents page, so I don’t know. What’s standing? I don’t know. It’s not in any contents page, and what’s more, the book constantly uses the term understanding, so I can’t even search for it efficiency in digital. Wait, actually the place where I discovered standing exists is the place where it’s defined, and I just thought that the Standing table was a throwaway joke, rather? These issues recur, and in combination with the layout swerves it takes that I’ve mentioned, just make this game very, very difficult to understand for someone like me. I feel like I need to take notes to run it.

Phew, ok. Triangle Agency is so incredibly complicated. Firstly, it’s beautiful. It’s a work of art, both in terms of writing, in layout, in art choices. Just remarkable. It’s on par with Tim Hutching’s work in terms of creating something of absolute beauty and compelling form. However, the compromises made to create that beauty and form — just as I maintain with Thousand Year Old Vampire — oftentimes compromise the capacity for it to be used as a game. Is this worth it? Well, I think so, at least for some people. My brain simply can’t process this as something to play. I sat with this game for almost 3 hours, went away, stewed on it, and came back. It’s incomprehensible to me. I simply could not run it, because huge swathes of the General Managers section are quite literally unreadable to me without the kind of focus I never have available in my life. It sacrifices usability — and for someone with a brain like mine, accessibility — to achieve its’ artistic vision. If you have a brain that struggles with visual complexity, noise, and focus, I recommend you consider that carefully before picking this up.

But! More buts! The game design here is also top notch. The systems reflect the world and themes extremely well. The Playwall introduces a bunch of mysteries and twists and a soft sense of player vs. player, as well as bringing the General Manager and the rest of the players into the same team, at the mercy of the author. It’s doing a bunch of interesting things, clever intuitive, and smart extensions of its inspirations. They’re just buried in a challenging text, and right now in my life, I’m not looking for a text to struggle with. And they’re trying to alleviate that struggle, for example, with the Vault, the additional book that features 12 anomalies that you can just use with Triangle Agency. That’s a lot of additional content that you could just play through until you’ve gotten the hang of it. You don’t even need get all the way through the General Manager’s section to run it! You can ignore all of those building the adventure bits until you get the hang of it!

Triangle Agency is a complicated masterpiece. Is it for me? No, I don’t think so. In terms of the way it’s organised and displayed, it’s actively hostile to me and people like me. But I can recognise the care and thought, and the joy and love of the games and properties that inspired it, which radiate off every page here. I could definitely play in this, because someone would be dealing with the incoherence for me, interpreting it for me. But the load placed on me as General Manager is way too much for me to take on; it would be like going back to 5th edition. Shudder. If you’re willing to take on that load to bring something as massive, messy and magnificent as this to the table, or you have a friend who is foolish enough to, and you love the genres and referents here, gosh, Triangle Agency is a hell of a game. And, to be honest, this is one book that could sit on your shelf as a conversation piece, as it’s striking, weird and gorgeous enough, that you might rope people into playing with you just based on the cover and layout. I’d definitely consider Triangle Agency, but consider carefully what you want out of a roleplaying game first.

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