This is the story of a place and what happens there, not necessarily the people who live there. timespan of your game is randomly determined, and we ended up with the millennia of (and after) a giant tree. Started with a tiny monkey Bronze Age culture, ended up with genetically-modified bird-people, a space elevator in the place where the tree used to live, and a death cult. It takes roughly a couple of hours (game's timeframe ends when the fourth 10 is drawn). WOULD PLAY AGAIN.
Props: regular deck of cards, a d6 or dice roller, maybe a notepad though we didn't need it
ask and answer questions in short scenes to define a cryptid or local legend of a community. questions are very good at being freeform for a variety of settings. we misread it and tried to have a new group on the scene interact with the cryptid, rather than the sort of "oh yeah haha that's just the smoke lion from the mountain, don't leave your dog outside mate" vibe. would definitely play again. can end at any time by mutual acclaim. (note: if you're going to play via phone, download the accessible format! the other one is beautiful but very hard to read due to font/art collisions)
props: regular deck of cards
this is an interstitial game about the quiet moments of your RPG campaign that don't get played out. I think this would go better played around a current or past campaign, rather than a setting made out of whole cloth as we did. we also took them a bit literally and set our game on a traveling space shuttle, a la Lower Decks. the questions will do better if you're on a world, either fantasy, mundane (the rules suggest "maybe it's Michigan"), or a sci-fi world. Fortunately the game encourages you to reword or toss any questions that don't work for your group, so it's pretty flexible, we just hit a few times where we were like "soooo there's a religious group running this ... space buoy in the neutral zone...". our game took a little over an hour, but you can play as much of the deck as you want, or until you draw the King of Hearts.
props: regular deck of cards
this one-page rpg requires a specifically unplanned "bag of stuff" from the game runner, so it's good for mid-trip boredom. we did not play, but the idea is that the GM draws one item out of their bag, gives the players a story prompt, and off they go. if the players find a 'treasure chest' while on their quest, the GM can give them something useful (for whatever definition of useful you decide) from the bag of stuff to help. Can be played as a single scene/dungeon level, or involve side quests and further quest levels if you like.
props: the bag of whatever
did not play on this trip, not because the game is bad, we just weren't feeling it. one-page game about traveling repairpeople in a post-scarcity setting, interacting with all of the energy harvesting devices of your part of the world. Very freeform; this could be a good one with kids, as there's no conflict. (note: this game explicitly does not require accurate scientific knowledge of the machines you are repairing 
)
props: a d6 to set the scenes, or just pick stuff from the tables
we did not play this, but we liked the pitch. you are a crappy group of researchers, sent by an even crappier corp or uni, and monsters kill you. what are the monsters like? play to find out! Ten Candles by way of Douglas Adams, maybe?
props: d6s, and probably one player with either a notepad or a means to take electronic notes; can also use audio recordings, final panicked emails, etc (this would also be a good game for Discord)
this game builds a horror setting/backstory through question and answer. I love the lyrical way the questions are toned (there are only 13 questions in each phase of play, but the suit of the card determines if you answer in determination, umbrage, sorrow, shame, confusion, etc). we did not play solely because the pamphlet layout did not make for easy reading on a phone, but printed out this should be an easy one to run in a car. it is explicitly anti-colonialist, and encourages the use of the setting generated in some other larger horror game later.
props: regular deck of cards, some way to record answers
this was one of the first games I bought on itch, and I really want to get it to a table someday. it’s time-loop horror, where your characters experience their own death repeatedly until they figure out WTF is going on and - maybe - escape the loop. all potential answers, including who your character is, are generated via tarot card pulls.
props: tarot deck, somewhere to record answers, probably a safety tool or three
we did not play this because it's a little complex, but I love the pitch. essentially you are exploring the history of a surreal, magical wilderness, and the empires that rise and fall therein. In the two-player version, one person plays the Place, and one plays the Recorder of Histories (explorer POV); in the 1p version, it's a journaling game where you do both. this game uses tokens to represent the magical ebb and flow of the place, as moves either require tokens to activate, or generate one for later use.
props: roughly 10 tokens, coins, whatever. probably a notepad
we bounced off of the premise (which is pretty much laid out in the title, though the actual results will be making out, destroying each other, or some combination of the two) and did not play. Upon further reflection the next day, this game has very strong queer themes about the truth of an interaction being determined almost entirely by the reaction to what you do, not just what your intentions are, which is cool, I just wanted a little more meat on the bones. When describing it to some friends who are more into fandom and/or fanfic, they sounded much more interested. fairly short premise of three set scenes, how in-depth it gets will determine how long it runs (the game book literally suggests you might find an actual hotel to, err, role-play this game).
no props needed, intimacy/trust STRONGLY suggested, safety tools recommended
this is essentially the reverse of The Ground Beneath. players take turns describing the influential life of a particular person, and then the next player will describe a character whose life was influenced, inspired, or touched by that previous life's actions. we had a hard time engaging with this one; perhaps we were just tired, but it's pretty sparse, aside from having some generating tables for ideas to include in each phase. also because the 'jumps' between characters can be anywhere from 1-100 years, it was very challenging to tell stories of creatures with shorter lifespans (which we didn't understand before play); we quit on round 2 or 3. would probably give it another try.
props: 2d10
this one was a little nebulous, and we found it wanting maybe a little more scaffolding. it is essentially the story of two players coming into conflict, either with each other or a mutual antagonist, and resolving the conflict, all through tarot-card guided randomization. easily hackable to give it additional storyprompts though. our game took maybe an hour.
props: a tarot deck, of course; a notepad might be handy
