The Last Hand is a TTRPG hack for poker that turns it into a framing device for a Stephen King esque Western.
The rulebook is a very well put together piece of art, easily in the top 10% of what you can find on Itch. The rules seem well structured for pushing play forward while allowing time to reflect and detail what has happened within the narrative. PC motivations and attributes are cleverly handled through a kind of question lottery at the game's beginning, the sort of round robin on-the-fly exposition session that can suddenly give a Player's character nuance and set up unexpected decisions to emerge later. While narration is handled in a distributed manner around the table, outcomes are directed by the cards and the Player's use of their limited resources. A bunch of D6 and 2D6 lists provide evocative guidance for when a player is having a hard time weaving a particular moment of the story together, and are largely framed as genre appropriate ominous art pieces rather than dull charts. The way some Player plays can have consequences, and those can be somewhat mitigated with proper timing, add a neat emergent element to the relatively simple rules. In totality, it's clear that a lot of thought, playtesting, and mindful editing went into this.
While it's going up directly against Fiasco in many ways, which is a tall order, the easy to remember mechanics (for anyone who has played Texas Holdem) make this a prime contender for game night when regulars have to drop out or newbies show up. I'll be keeping it on hand for just such an occasion.
Problems? There are a few. These are in rough order from nitpicks to potentially game ruining.
- Some images don't load with some PDF readers, rendering as semitransparent outlines instead. This only seems to affect a handful of cosmetic images though, nothing vital is lost. (Skull on cover, pg 8, 15, 22, and 25)
- Scene Steps on page 13 list the players playing their cards in reaction to The Flop as a distinct step, but don't make mention of them playing cards during The Turn or The River. A potential point of confusion, having the same action both specified and unspecified-but-implied on the same list.
- "The Last Hand" serves double duty as a proper noun/term of art here. It's clear from context which TLH is being referred to at any point, but it's still playing with fire.
- Do Jokers still trigger their effect if in a Fold-ed hand? How about face cards? My intuition says Yes and No, but I couldn't tell you why exactly, and it's not clear from the text.
- The Quickstart download is an excellent reference piece for inspirational material, but doesn't have rules summary or rules references or the like in it. It's more like a creativity assisting document than what you'd hand the Player who never reads the rulebook for a new game.
- I don't know that this is likely to be an issue with anyone who shows up to play a Cooperatively Run Narrative Horror game, but putting my Munchkin hat on... the Nash, the ideal play under all circumstances, is to just hold all your cards until the very last hand that isn't The Last Hand, right? Maybe play your 2s through 5s so they work into It's draw deck. Maximum player data, maximum control over the allocation of limited resources, no (mechanical) penalties or costs.
- Shuffling? A literal read of the rules doesn't include it, unless I missed something. With three or more players it'll be a necessity at some point, but whether that happens between every hand ala poker or when the draw deck is empty ala most card driven TTRPGs is up in the air and would have massive effects on the probabilities involved.
- This may be a matter of taste, but because of how Jokers work it's entirely possible to be fated to lose, TPK style, from the moment the deck is cut. That may align with authorial intent, to have It be such a danger that there's a real possibility that nothing the Players do could possibly save anyone or defeat it, and have that baked in to an unknowable-until-the-moment draw during the penultimate poker hand? Too oppressive for my tastes, but reasonable folk can disagree.
- The math is very, very, very different depending on how many Players show up. With two it is certain that they'll both die or be subverted to Its cause, having 4 cards per hand to deal with 5 emerging threats. Because of how It wins ties, how face cards work, Jokers, etc, a group of three players honestly wouldn't be much better off with their 6 to 5 card ratio, given the six hands they have to play through without falling 3 behind. Five might have an honest to goodness fighting chance. Six, with their 12 to 5 ratio, could very nearly Strongman their way through anything with (almost) constant Folds.
A lot of gripes above, but I did enjoy reading it, and unless I happen to have exactly the four players needed for Warrior Poet, this'll be my next "Well, we're here but we can't play the campaign tonight because of X... what else can we do?" game.