Let me say up front that I love everything Magpie Games has ever put out. I go out of my way to play their stuff, and I’ve run nearly everything they’ve ever put out. Starting with Epyllion way back in the day, through Urban Shadows, Bluebeard’s Bride, Cartel, Zombie World, Pasión de las Pasiones, all… The post Masks: A Late, Deepish Dive appeared first on The Indie Game Reading Club ..read more

Something interesting happened at our regular game night this week. It’s personal, not a sweeping theory or a review although there’s a bit of both in there as well. Summer is really hard to schedule and it’s worse if your group has kids. So I typically try to have a big campaign in the fall,… The post Drawing a Blank appeared first on The Indie Game Reading Club ..read more

Broke a 3-week-long RPG fast with The Facility last night. Felt good to touch dice again! The Facility is a zine-sized game by Galen Pejeau built on Breathless, a game framework I’ve been digging into since starting through a solo game called Substratum Protocol. It’s a very basic push-your-luck kind of game, where each time… The post A Short Deep Dive into The Facility appeared first on The Indie Game Reading Club ..read more

Note from Paul: This week we have guest writer Slade Stolar’s interview with long-time indie Notable Paul Czege. Czege has a Kickstarter for Inscapes, a zine sequel to The Ink That Bleeds, both about getting the most out of solo journaling games. Slade is no slouch either: he’s the author of The Indie Hack (2016), Dust, Fog and Glowing Embers (2017) and ANNA-X66 (2021). Fun format! Let us know if we should do more of these sort of guest interviews. I am Slade Stolar, here with Paul Czege talking about Inscapes, his zine about solo journaling games that’s funding right now on Kickstarter. So Pa ..read more

If you could win unlimited wealth and freedom and all you had to do was murder some strangers, would you? What if you grew close to those strangers through days of adversity and teamwork? Would you fight against the injustice of this sadistic game, or stab your new friends in the back? What if their back was covered in mind-altering red slugs, half the competitors were paid actors, and you can’t remember who you are? What year is it anyway? Sounds like you’re ready for a ticket to Deathmatch Island. A recruiter will be in touch with you shortly. Be sure to hydrate before the competitor intake ..read more

Posted on May 12, 2024 by Paul Beakley I’ve been slowly working through a big stack of really great looking little zine-sized games that all arrived at once. Finally got to play my buddy Keith Stetson’s God’s Gonna Cut You Down, a solo journaling game about the inevitability of misery in the old west. I’ve come to really enjoy solo games like this, particularly on evenings when the rest of my family is occupied with something and I just cannot bring myself to boot up some Steam game. God’s Gonna Cut You Down PDF is available on DriveThru The premise of the game (based on this horror ..read more

I’ve been slowly working through a big stack of really great looking little zine-sized games that all arrived at once. Finally got to play my buddy Keith Stetson’s God’s Gonna Cut You Down, a solo journaling game about the inevitability of misery in the old west. I’ve come to really enjoy solo games like this, particularly on evenings when the rest of my family is occupied with something and I just cannot bring myself to boot up some Steam game. God’s Gonna Cut You Down PDF is available on DriveThru The premise of the game (based on this horror of a folk song) is that your character starts ..read more

This is part 10 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted part 9 a couple weeks ago, and if you want to start from the beginning here’s part 1. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy: it’s our grand finale! It had been another long, long break since our last session of Stonetop, about six weeks. I always forget that the holiday season is where campaigns go to die. And with a game with as much narrative going on as this one, it’s just so hard to keep the fizz in the bottle ..read more

Every game makes you a promise: the game will be about this thing and will support you this way. Some games wisely under-promise and over-deliver. That’s just good life advice. But under-promising is hard to do when you need to generate excitement for your game, otherwise people won’t buy and, hopefully, play it. So we live in a world where games frequently over-promise and under-deliver. I’ve never liked writing critique that lands on “this is good” or “this is bad.” My interests don’t lie in making purchase recommendations. Instead, I look at the game’s promises, how it delivers on that, and ..read more

This is part 9 of our 10-part text AP of Stonetop. We posted part 8 a few weeks back, and if you want to start from the beginning here’s part 1. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s the deep dive on Stonetop I posted a few weeks ago. Enjoy! Sometimes I get very excited to nail down all the fun details of our sessions right away. Sometimes I just want to sit with what happened for a while. This session was one of those: emotional, fraught, as intense as anything I’ve played at any table. Honestly, a level of intensity I found a bit s ..read more