Seventy finalists for this year's 200 Word RPG Challenge have been posted. I'm trying to do capsule reviews of all the finalists (full disclosure: my entry is one of the finalists). This post is my review of the fourth set of ten games I read, going in reverse alphabetical order.

(logo from 200wordrpg site)

My rubric:

Can I tell how to play: No / Yes, and I know what it would be like / Yes, and I'm intrigued to see what it would be like
Is there a roleplaying element: No / Maybe / Yes
Is document easily readable: No / Maybe / Yes
Overall assessment (influenced by previous elements, but also subjective): 1 – 5 (I'm trying to use the full range, so most games should be 3s)

No Woman's Land

Can I tell how to play: Yes-
Is there a roleplaying element: Yes
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 3

The different suits of a deck of cards provide thematic hooks in a story about a pregnant woman crossing a warzone with three companions. The different players draw a hand of cards from their character-appropriate suit, and the remaining cards (I think) are the mechanical side of adversity that's dealt out by the GM. The GMing aspect of the game seems a little programmed – the cards they draw determine the difficulty of a challenge they need to present and which character to target it at – but the player side does have some mechanical choices in terms of deciding when to play which card, which can be a scarce resource since you lose the cards from your hand if you fail a challenge. They're not the most complex choices in the history of gaming, but they ought to be enough to feel gamelike, and it seems like the most natural way to interact with the challenges will be to view them from the POV of your character, which I think makes it a roleplaying game. The mechanics seem like they ought to work, and the fictional situation maps to a reliable dramatic genre, so I think this is probably a pretty decent little game.

No Devil-child May Rule Us

Can I tell how to play: Yes, but I wrote it
Is there a roleplaying element: Yes
Is document easily readable: I hope so
Overall assessment: N/A

This is my entry for the contest. It's a courtly intrigue game about a potentially disputed royal succession and demonic influence. Thematically it's exploring the idea of certainty about what people think they know. There might be a hint of political commentary embedded in it...

Nine Holes in Hell: A Damned Mini-golf RPG

Can I tell how to play: Yes-
Is there a roleplaying element: Maybe
Is document easily readable: Maybe
Overall assessment: 3

The players are the souls of a group of friends who have been damned to hell, but the winner of a Dante's Inferno-themed mini-golf game can get out of it. Dice-rolling determines your score on the golf hole, the losers of each hole fill in some backstory about why they've been damned and the winner describes how the next hole represents one of the circles of hell. Since the in-the-moment fiction of the golf-game is pretty thin, whether or not it feels like an RPG will probably depend on whether the discussion of the characters' backstories feels more like story creation or in-character reminiscing, I can potentially see that going either way. I assume the intended tone is comedic, and a lot of the fun is presumably in elaborating the backstories of the characters (which will presumably get increasingly zany over time, as N-1 players are going to have to talk about what made them a bad person in life for each hole, and having that many sins to recount will lead to some natural escalation).

Mongols and Manticores

Can I tell how to play: Yes+
Is there a roleplaying element: Yes
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 4

This is a single-player RPG where you play a manticore whose home territory is being invaded by the Mongol Horde, and you fight back. The resolution mechanic involves a bag of M&Ms. The procedural prompts are mostly to engage in description of how you do something to fight an enemy soldier, but they're funneled through evocatively specified traits of a manticore, and I suspect the most natural way to engage with that will be to incorporate your manticore-ness in your descriptions from a first-person POV, e.g. “I chomp down on his arm with my dagger-sharp teeth!”, which I think will make it more like a single-player RPG than a story-creating exercise. The bag of M&Ms thing might end up feeling hokey and gimmicky, or it might be theme-reinforcing in terms of the manticore's self-concept relative to its perceptions of the mongol invaders. Overall I'm a bit intrigued.

Maquillage

Can I tell how to play: Yes-
Is there a roleplaying element: Maybe
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 3

This is a game about makeup/cosmetics, and presumably gender, gender roles, and gender identity. By carving out applying makeup as a game element it's shining a spotlight on it and highlighting it as a significant thing, making a parallel statement about how people/society tend to regard it as a complex and fraught thing. It's not really a game I would want to engage with, but I can see some people being interested in it.

Lost Letters

Can I tell how to play: Yes+
Is there a roleplaying element: Maybe
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 3

This one is a dungeon crawler, but the twist is that the mechanic is keyed to the words you use to describe your actions. Normally you just describe how you overcome challenges, but if you use a word with one of the letters banned by your current health level you take a hit. This one was a bit challenging to fit into my rubric – I can't say for sure that I know what it would be like to play, but because I suspect it would be really frustrating I'm also not sure I'd say I'm intrigued to find out. The game has a didactic element and the probably-frustrating element seems intentional as part of that.

Letters to the Home Front

Can I tell how to play: Yes+
Is there a roleplaying element: Yes
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 4

This is a game where a WWI soldier and a loved one communicate by sending letters back and forth. There's a card mechanic and token passing system that's complex enough that I can't exactly envision what the overall effect would be even though I think I can follow all the procedures, so I'm a bit intrigued by that. It also instructs the players to play by sitting back to back, which seems like a really clever way of working with the thematic element of being close but separated. Generally I dislike “epistolary” stories, games, etc., and I suspect that the “dictate your letter” element of play would leave me creatively fatigued at needing to invent a bunch of fictional events to discuss, but there's enough other interesting stuff going on in this game to leave me with an overall positive impression.

Knights of the House of Mars

Can I tell how to play: Yes-
Is there a roleplaying element: Yes
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 4

Players are Knights of Mars on a sword-and-sorcery flavored version of the red planet. The game does a good job of communicating the vibe it wants, and seems to incorporate some mechanics that ought to function reasonably well. No element really stands out to me as especially intriguing or innovative, but it puts the parts it uses to good use and seems like a reasonably solid game (at least for people who are familiar enough with gaming to know what a phrase like “set a scene” means).

Knights and their Lances

Can I tell how to play: Yes-
Is there a roleplaying element: Maybe
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 2

Two knights will be jousting to win the favor of the princess, but one of the knights would much prefer the favor of the other knight. Play mostly involves describing things, especially the multiple rounds of the joust. According to the rules, “innuendo is encouraged.” Eh, this isn't my sort of thing.

Janus: a game for three players

Can I tell how to play: Yes-
Is there a roleplaying element: Maybe
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 2

A spy holds two colleagues at gunpoint, one or both of whom might be enemy infiltrators. The spy has ten questions to use to decide who to trust and/or kill. The writing in the game does a decent job of establishing the vibe it's going for. “Hidden traitor” games can have interesting dynamics, however in this game the potential traitors don't really have any true information until halfway through the game so it's a bit unclear to me what sort of dynamic can emerge. Since “winning” from the non-spy POV mostly involves not getting shot and that's something you'd want regardless of whether you're an enemy agent it's not clear that there's much interesting nuance or room for manipulation in the situation.