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 sixth 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)

ENVOY

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

A human envoy interacts with alien representatives to learn about their culture. There's a token economy which the alien players can use to answer questions, so the game is mostly in the “declare a fact” genre of RPGs. Because there's no established baseline reality or any real reason to convince the envoy of any particular view I think I'd have trouble finding any interesting tension to make this feel gamelike. If I disagree with another alien player, is one of us trying to intentionally deceive the human? Do we just have a different view of what our alien culture is like? Is that because of in-fiction tension between our viewpoints, or just not being on the same page creatively? Those seem like they all blur together to me. I think the idea of the human ambassador trying to form an impression of the alien culture (a perhaps skewed and reductive one) is an interesting premise, but my sense is that the game needs a little more structure to build up some nuance and complexity of the alien society and the positions of various alien players before ramming the outsider's impression into it.

Dungeon Roommates

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

You're one of the monsters that lives in an RPG-style dungeon, which basically makes the other monsters your roommates. This isn't a game about fending off raiding adventurers, it's about living in this place with all your annoying roommates. The game has a cute premise, and has a fun theme-appropriate constrained communication mechanic in that you leave post-it notes with requests for the other monsters to do tasks or chores. It doesn't have complex mechanics or deep roleplaying, but it's probably a light, fun, comedic beer-and-pretzels kind of game. It seems pretty solid and I'd expect it to work well for the experience it's trying to produce.

Dear Elizabeth...

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

Two players play the type of women who are featured in Regency or Victorian novels. They sit in separate rooms and communicate by hand-written letters. I'm not really a fan of the source material this game is based on, and as I mentioned in a previous review I'm not really a fan of “epistolary” stuff, so this game doesn't hold a lot of appeal for me. Someone who really liked those things might find this more appealing than I do, the procedures here probably work fine to facilitate this style of play if you are already invested in it. The part of the text where it discusses appropriate pens and the idea of needing to slide your letters under the door to each other are nice touches.

Children | Caretakers

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

There's some somewhat poetic writing to get you into the vibe the game is going for, but some clarity about the situation the characters are in may have been a casualty of the highly stylish approach. I'm guessing this is mostly freeform roleplaying as human space colonists and their robotic caretakers?

Childish Things

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

Players are soldiers on some sort of mission. Each player also has some toys or other mementos in front of them. Mechanically, these serve as a depletable resource for doing “something no one should have to do”, and that prompts explaining why one of the mementos is meaningful and then putting it away. (I'm a little unclear if these mementos are supposed to be things that are genuinely meaningful to the players, or representations of things that are meaningful to the characters). This seems like it will deliver some emotional punch to the classic premise of exploring people's humanity in wartime. If anything it might be a little heavy-handed. Other than the reminiscence elements the game is mostly freeforming with some coin-flip oracular resolution as the soldiers go on a mission assigned by the GM. This aspect seems a little bit thin to me, and may not feel as “significant” a part of the game as the reminiscing aspect, although I think the game wants them to both be important so they can play off each other. There are some good ideas here, but it doesn't feel perfectly jelled to me.

Chance Goodbyes

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

One player's character is leaving somewhere forever, and on the way they encounter a few people and have slightly-dice-guided conversations with each of them. This seems functional for what it is, which is mostly prompted freeforming.

Can you hear me?

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 someone investigating a haunted house and the ghost trying to communicate with them. It has a somewhat interesting idea of a mechanic involving a container of water to which drops of dark liquid are added, slowly obscuring things. The ghost is trying to get the investigator to know some keyword or phrase related to their unfinished business, and coins flipped into the container with the increasingly-obscuring liquid control whether they can send clear or distorted/horrifying imagery. I'm a little unsure about how some of these things would work in a practical sense, such as what sort of liquids would work well to obscure things, how many drops it would take before things get obscured, how to flip coins into liquid without making a mess, etc. However, the idea of hooking a physical “obscuring” element into the mechanics of a ghost game strikes me as a really good idea, and I'm needing to resist the urge to riff on other ways that physically obscured information could be incorporated into game mechanics.

CLIMB the SPIRE!

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

This is more like an analog roguelike than a regular RPG. I'm having trouble parsing how the dice mechanic is supposed to work, and most of the document is a big list of mechanical elements, so it didn't do very well against my rubric. However, there's one super interesting element to the mechanics: you're rolling a pool of dice, but you roll them onto a sheet of paper and any dice that don't stay on the paper don't count toward your result. Then mechanics can modify the size of the paper (in this case the paper gets smaller as you ascend to more challenging levels of the dungeon).

But for the Grace of God

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

The pilot and engineer of a damaged spacecraft falling toward a singularity are trapped in separate compartments and making a last ditch effort to survive. Over the intercom the two of you talk about your lives for a few minutes while trying to do whatever repairs/maneuvers will save you (that happens in the background, the game's focus is on the conversation). As you talk you can manipulate two bits of information (the heads up/down state of two coins) which, at the end of the game, feed into a game-theory-like decision matrix that determines the ultimate result. In terms of my rubric I'm not completely sure I can say what it would be like to play, since I don't have a sense of how various “strategies” would play against the decision matrix, but I also don't feel very intrigued to find out. I'm also not sure how well the “talk about your lives” aspect of it would work – I can envision a scene in a movie that works like that, but I'm not sure you can start at that point in medias res without building character investment first.

Boyz II Men in Black

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

Wacky hijinks as R&B stars combat a nefarious alien invasion in 1994. I'm not really familiar with R&B music, but the “celebrities are also super-agents” thing is a classic premise so it ought to work here. Mechanically, the game uses cards to feed into a traditional degree-of-success mechanic. It probably works fine as a light comedic game for people who understand and care about the references, presumably people will be able to figure out pretty easily if they're the target market for this game or not (I'm not, but that's fine, not everybody likes or is familiar with the same kind of music).