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 third 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)

Rum Runners

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

A game set in Prohibition-era Florida where the players are Rum Runners and the resolution mechanic has a drinking-game element. I'd have to make some guesses to figure out how to play – for example you're supposed to time the three acts with a stopwatch but the duration doesn't appear to be specified. Also, I'm guessing that the die-rolling mechanic is supposed to affect whether you succeed or fail at the task you're attempting, but the game only talks about whether you need to drink a shot or not. Using the number of not-yet-consumed shots of rum as a slowly-decreasing target number seems like a good idea, but that essentially makes it a pacing mechanism, which means that it's contingent upon when and how many challenge rolls are called for, which seems like it's purely up to the GM's discretion in the current rules. It seems to me that the game would be more functional if the “challenge” aspect of the game were fleshed out a bit more, or had some kind of procedural element like an obstacle budget. Also, this may just be intrinsic to the nature of drinking games (and I'm not much of a drinker so I don't know for sure), but it seems like it can be an ambiguous incentive: does “if X happens you need to drink a shot” have different effects if the player wants to drink some alcohol right now vs. wanting to avoid it? I'm not really into drinking games, but it seems like there are some ideas here that have potential. However I think the game itself needs a little more development or revision, but that's not uncommon in contest games.

Roar of the Crowd

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

Two players at a time are gladiators in an arena, armed and clad with weapons, armor, and regalia made from tape and construction paper. Play is a mix of acting out the combat and narration, with a rock/paper/scissors resolution. It's kind of in a midpoint between a rich-description indie tabletop game and a boffer Larp. It seems like it would be wacky, silly fun – I assume the point is to indulge in ostentatious posturing and braggadocio a la pro wrestling but with an ancient/classical (and maybe sword & sorcery) vibe, and the construction paper weapons and armor serve to keep the mood light and comic.

Pressure Building

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

Royal forces will soon clash with a rebel army that has formed in opposition to the kingdom's construction of a large dam. The players are the leaders of the two armies. The game presents a series of descriptive prompts which will result in fleshing out the characters and the situation before the battle begins. This part of the game is interesting, since the other player serves as your audience but the prompts aren't about interactions between the characters, serving a similar purpose to dramatic irony in other media. This part of play is mostly talking about things, which is a feature that frequently makes games feel more story-tell-y than RPG-y, but I think the way this is structured will tend to get you into the mindset of looking at the fictional world through the lens of your particular character, so I think this is going to feel more like an RPG even though it's not using a lot of standard RPG techniques. Although I like the descriptive prep phase I'm less sanguine about the way the final conflict is resolved, I suspect it might feel as arbitrary as a coin flip which might interfere with getting fully invested in the situation.

Please Silence Your Cell Phones

Can I tell how to play: Yes+
Is there a roleplaying element: No
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 3

This is a constrained communication game, with the premise that you're besieged by monsters that can sense sound and expressions of emotion so you need to avoid making any. You're trying to engage in a variety of social interactions with the other players, but you can't use speech, whole-body motion, or facial expressions to do so, you can only communicate with deliberate hand gestures and a set of 5 photos of your own facial expressions that you take with your cell phone at the start of play. While the communication constraint is interesting, and doing it in an RPG context rather than a task-focused one seems like a cool idea, I think I would have trouble with spontaneously coming up with my own goals to pursue during play. Also, I'm not sure how practical the rule of “don't show emotions” would be during play – bright line rules like “no talking” are easy to work with in constrained communication games because you can easily tell if you're doing it or not, whereas whether someone is emoting is a much fuzzier thing. The “five photos” thing is also interesting, although I'd worry that fumbling with my phone would be clunky in play. I think there are some interesting ideas here, but I don't think I'd want to play the game as-is. If there were some more structure to shore up the things that seem a bit mushy to me (e.g. who your character is, what goals to pursue, maybe a requirement to maintain a specific facial expression rather than “neutral”) I would probably find it more appealing.

Perseus V

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

This game is set on a deep space mission to another planet. One player is the ship's AI, who has woken the crew (the other players) from cryosleep to deal with an emergency situation. Whether the AI is benign or hostile is a random factor, determined by the mix of cards that the AI player draws to start the game. The AI's cards determine whether individual situations go well or poorly, and at the end the crew will need to decide whether to keep trusting the AI or to deactivate it. This seems like it would be a functional game in terms of it evoking rich descriptions, but my impression is that the fictional situation is mostly downstream from the AI's cards rather than being the central basis for play.

PSYCHIC CHILDREN ON THE RUN FROM DANGER

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

The title for this one is very good at communicating what it's about. The resolution mechanism has the player try to predict the next card drawn from a deck, the closer the prediction the better the result. It seems to me that the “partial matches” are pretty heavily weighted toward failure. That seems like there'd be very little success during play given the low odds of exactly predicting a card are, but maybe the “card counting” factor of predictions getting easier as the game progresses takes care of that. The “roleplaying” elements of play are rather thinly drawn in the rules (Is there a GM? Does solo play work?), and there's not much guidance about how to set up particular situations or play the adversity of the agents chasing the psychic children. In practice most gamers would probably be able to “fill in the blanks” with habits and techniques drawn from other games.

One Last Night Together

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

In this game players are soldiers on two sides of a war, in trenches waiting for the order to attack. While waiting they find a way to interact with each other. The game juxtaposes that humaizing element with a mechanic that evokes the idea that war is “boredom, punctuated by moments of terror”, which is likely to be very effective even if you know it's coming. I might worry that the situation where you're interacting with the other side's soldiers across the trench line might seem a bit contrived. Overall it seems like a pretty solid entry, but it feels to me like the ideas the game conveying are so clear that that actually playing might be superfluous relative to just reading the game and imagining what it would be like to play.

On the Eve of a Wedding

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

This game does a good job at being readable despite big chunks of it expressing itself via random tables. It's meant to build a “Shakespearean” situation in Verona in 1591. I haven't tested it, but it seems like rolling on the tables will produce enough hooks that seem to fit together that a roleplaying-facilitating situation will emerge. While the game has some stats and mechanics they basically just feed into the GM's judgment calls about how things ought to go. While there are plenty of RPGs that work that way I tend to prefer when a game takes a stronger hand at shaping the play experience rather than just relying on traditional techniques.

Ogre in the Court!

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

A comedic game in a fantasy world where a public defender is representing an ogre with rage issues. The players play out courtroom scenes, and the public defender is trying to win their case but also keeping their client calm enough so he doesn't lose his temper and go on a rampage. A judge player assigns dice based on their assessment of the roleplaying, which feed into a mechanic that determines whether the ogre flies into a rage. I think the game does a good job of communicating its intended tone via its text, and the situation it sets up seems like a comedically rich one. I'm not fond of the part where the judge hands out dice based on “how the role playing was” – I suspect that feeling like my “performance” as a roleplayer is being judged would be at odds with engaging in freewheeling fun, which is what I think this game wants. I suspect the game would be more comedic if there was something more procedural that would cause the ogre to make unexpected outbursts that change the direction of scenes rather than relying on retrospective judgement calls by the judge (for example, a list of words that are unknown to the other players that set the ogre off if anyone mentions them).

Occupational Safety and Health Adventures

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

A workplace comedy game about occupational safety. Players are a group of workers in a catastrophically unsafe work environment. Their boss is breathing down their neck to get their big project done, but complaining to the boss about the safety problems just results in cumbersome and counterproductive new safety regulations. It's mostly freeform roleplaying satirizing cumbersome safety compliance programs that miss the forest for the trees, or how employees get stuck in the double bind of needing to get their jobs done to make the boss happy but doing things the way the boss wants them done gets in the way of getting the job done. It probably works well for people who have a grasp on what kind of things are conducive to this sort of comedy, but since all the content is generated by the players themselves rather than any external seed content it's somewhat dependent on everybody being on the right page from the beginning.