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 fifth 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)

It's Always Been a Dive

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

A game about a struggling bar and the employees thereof. Players are sort of encouraged to play into toxic interactions with each other, as doing so feeds into a token economy. However it's not clear to me that the token economy does much besides set the pace toward the endgame. The game talks about “the Owner” as a rotating game role, but the owner is also presumably an NPC, or maybe a series of NPCs? Or maybe the employee characters take over as owner? That part reads as a little fuzzy to me. Mostly the game seems to be focused on freeform scene playing between the various employees, with a more procedural element around periodically re-branding or re-theming the bar.

Hush A Bye

Can I tell how to play: Yes-
Is there a roleplaying element: Maybe
Is document easily readable: Yes
Overall assessment: 1

This is a two-player game that sets up a terrible human situation and then calls for competitive emotional manipulation: whichever player gets the other to cry first “wins”. It seems like it's in pretty poor taste.

Hold My Hand & Tell Me It's Okay

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

This is a game about a characters in an emotionally charged situation. It's played standing in a circle with your hands touching the hands of the players on either side, and the need to continuously maintain that contact presumably creates a slightly emotionally charged situation in resonance with the fictional situation. There's a mechanic involving how your hands are touching each other and switching hand positions that I'm not sure I follow – when you flip your hand over do you rotate it in place? Rotate it around the hand you're holding (maybe that's what “switch hand location” means?)? I'm also not sure how to read all the I/You pronouns in the hand-switching rules. It seems to me that the hand-touching thing is the core of this game and I get the sense that will work to achieve the emotional effect the game is going for, but I think it could use a bit more procedural clarity in the hand placement/switching rules.

Hell-Ride Equipped

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

This is a game about being a demonic trucker delivering a truckload of souls to hell. It has a dice mechanic that theoretically talks about engaging with a fictional situation, but functionally this looks more like a dice game to me since you can choose to do things that would cause you to roll the dice at any time and rolling the dice seems to be the only thing that changes the game state. There's nothing wrong with designing a dice game, but I'm trying to look at these games in terms of their RPG design and I don't think this will feel much like an RPG in play.

Half-Blood

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

This is a game about being a half-blood fae, with elements of being both a rigid-yet-powerful supernatural creature and a free-willed mortal. The dual nature of the characters is theoretically represented in the mechanics: in your unique area of supernatural Mastery you always succeed (but then you need to satisfy a Compulsion to recharge it), but in other areas you need to spend Free Will points based on the category of challenge you're facing in order to overcome it. I really like the idea of this dual system reflecting the dual nature, but the way you gain Free Will points is also tied into the Compulsion system, so the two aspects don't seem like they'd feel very distinct to me – you still succeed and then need to recharge yourself by following your Compulsions, for both the supernatural and mundane way of succeeding. The prospect of adding more Compulsions in order to get Free Will points also struck me as a little odd – I had assumed that these were pretty central character-defining elements, but if you can end up with lots of them that seems like it would dilute the impact. Overall I think there are some interesting ideas here, but I'm not sure they're hitting their full potential in the current rules.

HOA: The RPG

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

This is a game about petty neighborhood disputes. Players build houses out of Lego, and then there are neighborhood meetings in which people air their grievances about their neighbors, and some social status points change hands. Perhaps this is an artifact of the Lego sets I've had, but my impression is that houses are some of the harder things to build out of Lego – building lots of walls, etc., is a pain and takes lots of pieces. Since I think that would cause some genuine annoyance/frustration in me, I'm not sure that's a good pairing with trying to roleplay comedic fake annoyance/frustration with the other characters.

Gods of Darkness, Gods of Light

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

Each player plays a set of gods who are creating a world, but some of the gods fall to darkness and the gods of light must go to war with them to protect the world. The mechanic of the game revolves around the physical operation of matches and candles, and there's a really interesting use of wax from the candles as part of the mechanic. That part seems really cool, although I don't know how much variability there is on things like how often a match lights on the first strike which could skew the game if it almost always or almost never happens. I also like the way the writing of the game evokes the feel for the kind of gameplay it's going for. I'm not sure there will be much roleplaying – each player will be portraying three gods, each of whom show up and do one thing before the next one is introduced, and who can all be light or dark independently. Without much chance to get invested in any particular character I suspect the feel of the game will be more in telling stories about the gods rather than roleplaying as them. But even if it's probably more a storytelling game than an RPG it still seems interesting to me, although I worry I'd struggle a bit coming up with interesting gods since there's not a lot of seed content to work with.

Fuck! It's Dracula

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

In the far future, an alien vampire pod crash-lands on a human colony, and the nearby villagers must deal with the vampire. The text is very sparely written, with several lists and random tables, but gets the job done. The juxtaposition of classic vampire tropes and a sci-fi setting probably does enough in combination with the bare-bones system to be able to support play long enough to get to the end of the phase progression the game calls for. Overall it seems like a pretty elegantly designed little game. (Although the non-success result in the dice mechanics might be verging on trying to be too cute).

Filling the Void

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

A large number of small objects are spread on a large piece of paper to form stars in the sky, which players then connect into constellations, and they tell stories about the constellations. Personally, I find that the patterns in “constellations” almost never seem to suggest shapes to me, and I also find whole-cloth story authoring to be somewhat draining, so I think I'd find this game to be creatively fatiguing in play. Others might have different reactions.

FADED

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

The game starts off with some writing that does a good job of delivering tone. It's playing with a double-meaning of “faded” by setting up a Hangover-esque “what happened last night?” situation, but whatever happened last night also seems to have caused you to fade from normal existence. But then the gameplay is explained in what seems more like an artistic flourish than a machine that works when you engage with it. I guess it's mostly freeforming with an unusual oracle for guidance? The opening part didn't really appeal to me as something I was interested in experiencing, but the writing was interesting enough that I wanted to see where it was going. But where it ended up going was to game procedures that seem totally unengaging to me.