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 seventh 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)

Born of Brier and Blood: A Game for Four

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

Players play folklore-ish creatures around a village that is moving beyond superstitious beliefs. A deck of cards and a menu of player options provide some guidance for scenes to describe and feeds into a mechanic that relates to whether your creature is ultimately remembered or is forgotten in the mists of time. Because this is mostly solo description about things your own creature does rather than back-and-forth interactions with a fictional situation it might verge more toward a storytelling than roleplaying feel. It seems like a compact and functional game to me.

Blossoms Whisper, Blades Sing, for 4-8 bushi

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

Players are samurai ain feudal Japan attending a gathering where they are plotting a conspiracy (or are possibly spies trying to infiltrate the conspiracy). It's played with a deck of Hanafuda cards. The deck is used to set up a hidden traitor element, and then can be used during play to affect conflict outcomes or, if you complete a “season set” of cards you can ask another player one question which they must answer truthfully. In a conflict players compare their Civility or Savagery stat, as appropriate, and whichever is higher wins, with card-spends adding to your stat. When you use cards you draw back up to your full hand size. The game is a little vague on how the mechanical interaction starts (it's when someone “takes action against another player”), but the most powerful use of the cards seems to be getting to the season sets, so I think the incentive structure is that people will want to engage in interactions that will justify them spending cards so they can cycle their hand looking for the sets, so I think the incentive will be for the people involved to rapidly synchronize with each other on the nature of their disputes rather than getting stuck in “so, is this a conflict?” mode. If the mechanic and the incentives work the way I think they do it seems pretty cool and clever. There's not a lot of “seed content” supplied in the game itself to build interactions around, but samurai-era Japan is a pretty rich area to draw from so I don't think would be a huge problem in play. There's a lot that I like about this game.

Be Your Best Keanu

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

A Larp, presumably somewhat comedic in tone, where all the players are some instantiation of Keanu Reeves (either a character he played or a “role” he plays in real life, like Sad Keanu), and they're working together to make a movie. It seems like a rich premise, but I can't quite tell if it's one of those things where the idea of it seems funny but the actual implementation would drag (like an absurd movie poster that gets turned into a full movie only to realize that there's basically only one joke), or if it would actually be weird yet engaging. Also, I don't know much about Larp so it's hard for me to judge how well the specifics here would work in the form. I doubt I would ever want to play something like this, but my hope would be that it would work out well and be entertaining for the more theatrically inclined.

A Regretful Duel

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

Two people who were once close are now locked in a duel. The two players aren't the duelists themselves, but a supporter on either side. A coin-flipping mechanism prompts descriptions of the in-the-moment actions in the duel or stories about the duelists from the time before whatever conflict developed between them. Because of the emotional counterpoints the game sets up it's probably going to be easy to sympathize with “your” duelist so there's likely to be an aspect of seeing the fictional world through the POV of a supporter, which might give this a roleplaying feel even though the actual action of the game is mostly descriptions or stories about another character rather than interacting through your character.

A Level-Headed Conversation

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

The players are in a small spacecraft grazing the atmosphere of an alien planet. Players take turns choosing a question from a list and answering it, and the questions are written in a way that will tend to build out their character or the situation. This continues until a timer runs out and an endgame happens. When a player answers one of the questions it gets crossed off the list, and I think that small but meaningful change to the game state on each turn will make it feel gamelike and help contribute to a sense that the situation is progressing toward something.

A Hundred Years Adoring You

Can I tell how to play: Yes-
Is there a roleplaying element: No
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 2

You gather your friends into a dark room. You walk around in the dark, occasionally saying something about one of the other players that you wouldn't say to their face. The whole thing seems more awkward and emotionally syrupy than I'd want in any activity I engage in, but maybe other people would be into it.

A Glimmering of Recognition

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

Players are Beast-Seekers hunting legendary and terrifying beasts. They stake out their beasts over a week, and at night around the campfire they talk about themselves with the other hunters. Seems like it's mostly prompted discussion, but since a lot of it would be in the form of in-character reminiscing I suspect it will feel like roleplaying rather than storytelling.

A Final Reading

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

A funeral serves as a nexus that causes the paths of the players' characters to cross. Cards from a tarot deck are used as prompts to first fill out some details about the various relationships, and then as prompts for scene descriptions from either the past, the funeral itself, or the future. It seems like the player describes this scene rather than roleplays it (there's a mechanic where another player can give their perspective on the scene), but I suspect that the initial situation setup aspect will put players strongly enough into their' character's POV that it will feel more like roleplaying than storytelling. The out-of-order time-jump-y nature of play also ought to give the whole thing a feeling like details and nuance are getting fleshed out rather than feeling directionless. Normally I prefer games to have either a strong procedural structure or clear motivations for the characters so things have a sense of direction in play, but even though this is a more meandering or meditative structure there's some elegance to it that I find appealing.

Hard Reset

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

Players are robots in a world where humans society has fallen. The robot characters have only a subset of “modules” that represent various ways of interacting with the world, such as a Subterfuge module which gives the ability to tell or detect falsehoods. Whether or not a robot has a module should inform how they roleplay their character, and feeds into the dice mechanic by getting a bonus die if they have a “relevant” module for the task they're undertaking. The dice mechanic feeds into rolls against target numbers that are set by GM judgment calls, so basically a relatively “traditional” GM setup. While I think there are some philosophical questions about whether you can realistically roleplay something truly alien like a robot who lacks some of the abilities represented by these modules, I do think there's some interesting identity stuff involved in the idea of being able to find and add these modules to yourself during play – it's working with the common RPG concept of character advancement but in a way that raises some philosophical questions, you're not just gaining the ability to cast fireball you're gaining the “ability to reason and persuade” which you didn't have before.

#WinterIntoSpring

Can I tell how to play: Yes+
Is there a roleplaying element: Yes
Is document easily readable: Maybe
Overall assessment: 5

The players are video blogger fashionistas from either a majority or minority faction in a society, and you play out glimpses into their lives before and after the revolution. A lot of the gameplay involves cutting up magazines to dress paper dolls, and you act out your fashion vlogging. I don't have a sense of how fun or engaging the “cutting clothes out of magazines” aspect of play would be, but it seems like there's a lot of good art going on in the game design of the ideas and concepts it's playing with. I think it's playing some of the presumed frivolity of fashion off against the presumed seriousness of politics, and laying that across the medium of vlogging where there's an inherent tension between humanizing authenticity and status-projecting performance, and the sense that how and what you present to the world also gives a glimpse into who you are, which might also be saying something about politics. The actual gameplay might end up being merely functional, or might be really compelling, but at least in terms of the game design of a contest game I think this has a lot going for it.