Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

A Real Boy is a 1-page collaborative storytelling game, where players take turns telling the story of an artificial being struggling to become human. It’s technically for any number of people, but I feel like it would work best with 3.

The basic gist is this: You agree on a few basic worldbuilding prompts, and (in a neat simple worldbuilding technique), describe how the world you’re playing in feels about certain things.

The you take turns rolling on the encounter table and framing scenes for the player to your right, who plays the creature. At any point, another player will ask for your reaction, checking one of the four feelings you used to build your world. If the feeling gets too much use, it evolves into a new feeling, and the world changes. After 9 encounters, you look at the world, and decide what happens to the creature.

The meat of the game are the encounters, and these are pithy and metaphorical, effectively tarot-like, such as “The Crow and the Owl. The science. Why are they a danger?” I like them, but as I mentioned earlier in this year’s Critique Navidad, I like some specificity in my design: This being a 1-page game doesn’t have the space for that, so it’s going to appeal mainly to players who run on creative fumes.

A Real Boy is a lovely little game, that would benefit from being a little less little. I suspect simply expanding it to the back of the page would be sufficient to expand on the back or front end of the prompts, to add some space for the marking down you’re supposed to do, and to clarify the processes a little. It’s all here, though, and for the right table A Real Boy would honestly be a great warm-up before a similarly themed game, or perhaps even a whole evening if you were very comfortable improvisers.

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