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My friend and I played this! It was fun!! Take anything ambivalent I say with a grain of salt, since we two took 3 hours to play and started playing two characters each 1 story in, both absolutely because of our foibles as players and through no fault of the game. Here are some things I really liked:

- Route 32's mechanics are very thoughtfully targeted to produce and reward a kind, slice-of-life story of teenagers getting to know each other and telling stories in an environment that feels safe and like an out-of-time exception to everyday life. This goal dovetails really well with the game's overlapping priority to support and scaffold collaborative play that gives all players time to speak and have time in the spotlight, in ways that don't require existing player knowledge. I can imagine some of these mechanics working particularly well when playing with actual teenagers or younger children new to roleplaying games. The mechanic of everyone going around after each story someone tells and saying in-character something they found interesting or memorable is my favourite example of this: the double-duty it fills in both guiding players to make each others' experience better and in helping produce the tone and feeling of the premise feels so thoughtful and elegant. It's lovely in play to have a mechanical impetus to pay close and complimentary attention to your friend's storytelling!

It feels especially thoughtful because it's not a bolted-on 'now play nice' kind of addition - how other characters react to you and your story is how you gain the points that let you change failure to success or do something especially cool, and that makes sense for the kind of game you're playing. In general having the closest thing to your stats be determined minute-to-minute by how others are reading your roleplay is novel and awesome. It makes perfect sense for this game and its setting and feel - to maybe look too deeply into it, that Is how being a teenager felt for me a lot of the time, and this feels like the wish-fulfilment version of playing through that - but I also immediately want to see that kind of mechanic in the core of more games. I think one of the most impressive things in this game, and what I can imagine being so difficult to hit, is how fun and natural that feels instead of coercive or like uncomfortably giving up power over your character. It absolutely sells that kind of collaboration with other players. 

- The setting of a pokemon center floor at night far from home is so good. Atmospheric! The character establishing question of 'what sleeping bag/sleeping items do you have, if any?' was such a nice one for starting to establish a character. I also thought the conversational tone of the rules, all the 'while we're here, what's your name?' of them, was really nice. It felt a little strange to have So much scaffolding and support for the storytelling after essentially cold open making up a character without picklists/tables and introducing them in character creation, but perhaps if you had a firm idea already of what character you wanted to play, or were starting off essentially playing yourself, it would be easier? Maybe it's been too long since my make-believe days and I've grown too used to a bunch of gentle character-establishing questions before the first in-character scene. (Though the 'if your character is too shy, ask someone else to introduce themselves to them' option is another really thoughtful addition that helps preserve the beautiful soap bubble of the premise.)

- I love a GMless game. This game does a lot of the scene-setting and structuring of scenes for you - it kind of reminded me of Last Shooting in the way that it gets players to define things for each other to use in scenes. In a lot of places the scaffolding is so well-done it feels effortless - the section on Swapping Stories starts '"That reminds me of this one time," someone says.', and just that makes the daunting task of starting a story that flows naturally on from conversation so much easier. I also love minigames, and having essentially 4 minigames you can slot into your story to play at its climax is so cool. I imagine these could be an especially nice little section to have fun in a different way for ten minutes, like a little 'let's look at Pokemon and think about what makes sense for this character to have' detour. And foreshadowing to mechanically affect your chances of success with your single die roll in this game is an extremely cool enticement! Honestly the single dice roll for the climax/resolution of each tale was great, it felt like the perfect spot to have a little tension-building risk - like with everything in this game, it feels like nothing is here without purpose, everything is thought-through. The whole edifice of the storytelling mechanics of playing story elements etc made sense, but ultimately to us it felt like the preparation and point-to-point structure got a bit in the way when the stories started to fly on their own. However, we are probably not the target audience for this game.

- The form-fillable character sheet is great :) Ease of online play we love to see it. The visual design of the game pdf is also clear, easy to navigate and feels weirdly very Pokemon even though (because?) it's so stripped down. 

- The game is a self-contained experience that by its nature has everyone tell a story partially reacting to the previous person's story, say nice things about each others' tales, and has its characters reflect on what meaning they took away from each story and the whole night. It's like, the perfect one-shot structure. You got personal meaning And connecting to the group, you got a specifically bounded play experience that echoes the fictional premise, you got a nice ending and a cue in it to debrief about what you'll take away with you. It's really nice!

We had a lot of fun playing through the different philosophies, adventures and bonds of Cade, Elise, vOLUMUP! and Ferra :) Sorry for the long review, I wanted to write it up before my memories faded. I would really love lots of people to read and/or play this and enjoy its cool mechanics. Thank you for writing and sharing! 

really cute!! n the presentation is also really cute

This game is so incredibly charming. The art is gorgeous, the UI is fantastic, and in general it's so clearly made with care and skill, and its personality comes through so clearly in the writing, the fishing gameplay, the dreamy, calming, slightly retro soundtrack, and especially the cool n funny animals you can meet in their pixel environments. Your player character looking toward the main menu option you choose is my favourite little detail, it's so unnecessary and so cute. (I also especially love Zappa's expressions!)

I love fishing games and this is a delightful one, even in its partial state. I will be eagerly looking for any updates, but if this is a project you've moved past as a group, of course no worries! I'll be thinking about it fondly regardless. It makes me want to try and make stuff! Thank you for making it and keeping it up.

We've been talking about this comic in a discord with friends and going 'this is so cool this is so cool' at each other. What gorgeous art, what intriguing worldbuilding. It feels like cracking open one of those big dense fantasy tomes but only experiencing the delight of the point where you're immersed and seeing the world unfold around you, page after page. Also really interesting gender stuff going on in here.

Candidate :) idk what that means but I guess my new friend and I can hang out next time I go on holiday! I love new experiences. I heard they have beautiful eyes?

the use of the advertising art is fantastic and that one timed question answer changing chilled me a little :)

Hi - this is a supplement for the game Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast! That game is usually played with a GM-like role, the Concierge, but can be played with evenly distributed roles. Without Yazeba’s B&B this is just a collection of characters, though I guess you could reverse engineer a system around them.

The tables in this are just fantastic. The character prompts especially are very thoughtfully made! It felt like a game I didn't need to put any particular meta-effort in to to land reliably on a satisfying, integrated story and tone - the guiding stars mechanic is definitely a big part of that, and I like the guidance to let that guiding star emerge from the starting conversation. Determining the time of day for each scene also goes soo far to easily suggest a vibe. In ours that interacted really well with a diner employee with the early riser trait :) I ended up very fond of the characters we made, and I'd definitely play more rounds as a reliable, fairly short, chill oneshot.

very cute!! chasing down endings is a fun way to spend an hour. only the fact that this was made in 7 days prevents me from assuming there are more hidden endings. stacking personality traits is absolutely the most fun part, and I love that a shiny payment gives you a double trait. that only being relevant for like 1/3 of traits and the possible infinite (?) expansion of the token box possible from particular combinations makes it feel even more fun bc it's something that feels unintended, even though... it definitely was intended. I also really like how Death starts to call you his old friend after the first few deaths. 

in my dream version of this game there's more persisting effects from previous actions, that maybe track which character you're playing (like, does seducing death in one life have an unintended bad effect on future death behaviour? if you bribe that cop enough times do they give in??... probably not.)

I had a lot of fun, thanks for sharing :3

Thank you so much for the kind & thorough comment! This is lovely to read. You finding a second unfinished construct as your First card pull is so incredible, I love that so much. That changes so much about the scope of that playbook. And then playing the second construct legacy style……. augh. I‘m glad the prompts worked for you. I‘m really feeling the joy of something going beyond me to make something I wouldn‘t have imagined. Games!!

I hope if you do/did play the second construct it‘s a good time :) I‘d written off playing this game myself until I get better at punctual epistolary but this makes me want to give it a try solo. Thanks again :3

! Hello!! Don‘t feel embarrassed, I Did see this and then ‚my reply has to be perfect‘-ed my way into not replying for a month! Nobody‘s perfect I guess :) I‘m really glad that I didn‘t accidentally start a dramatic nemesistude through having a similar idea (I didn‘t Really think this, but, you know, in my mind it was like a 10% possibility). 

Thank you for replying so thoughtfully!! I‘m glad you liked it. It Is really cool to see the divergence of ideas - it’s a nice reminder that my perspective is mostly invisible to me but nevertheless comes through in everything. I can‘t believe you played using my playbook holy shit!!! Very extremely exciting. Gonna go over there real quick.

oh my goddd the QUILT. So many lovely crafts extremely cutely and nicely presented. like reading a little booklet full of wordless love and care! the gorgug collage struck a particular chord with me. thanks for making + sharing stuff + putting it all together!

This game is so beautiful, and even though I was reading it for research I very quickly wanted to figure out a proper afternoon to sit down with a pile of old magazines and play it. The visual design is gorgeous and an immediate enticement to become engrossed in collage, and the guidance (imo) manages to strike a difficult balance seemingly effortlessly, feeling complete, supportive and inspiring without feeling constrictive, overwhelming or needlessly arbitrary. Both the experience and the physical artefact at the end are so appealing. The different Works you can devote yourself to during your character's stay at their sacred place read as fun little games in their own right - especially the Text Work, which absolutely could be its own enthralling game, while looking completely at home in this larger mechanical setting. I hope I'll find time to print and play this lovely game, I'm so glad I stumbled on it!

This is for Your Friend in Witchcraft by Kay Marlow Allen! Here's a link: https://earthlybody.itch.io/your-friend-in-witchcraft

ooh, I‘ll check it out, thanks!

a friend & I played this yesterday and had a really awesome, 'talking afterwards about the design decisions we liked and how we wanted to play it again'-level time.

Experience needed: this was both of our first Descended from the Queen game, and neither of us have read The City and The City. It worked great. We ended up both separately referring to Bodies (2023) as a kind of style touchstone. The prompts offer a very smooth way into the world, letting you focus on cinematic details that strengthen your understanding of the story and your characters and their cities (a meal that evokes powerful emotions in one of you, a footprint leading away from the body, a political disruption in your detective's day). They also, from what we saw, don't require your characters to be cops. I think playing one detective as someone who just has a strong personal interest in the murder rather than being sent by their city could be great in this game. (Sorry, I'm planning for the next one already...)

Keeping your theories about the murder secret from the other person throughout the game is really fun. Even with two players adding increasingly specific clues, our final theories were intriguingly different.

Playing it 2-player, we got through less than a third of the cards (and so less than a sixth of the prompts), meaning it's very replayable! and we both would love to play it again. It took us about an hour and a half? You could definitely go in a more mind-bending time travel direction, or magical realism, political intrigue... I think the game gives good support for making what's happening personal for your characters, if you want to. Next time I think playing a more Inland Empire/Dale Cooper-type intuitive detective could be a lot of fun with these mechanics.

This could very easily be a framework for an epistolary game where you write the communications between your detectives... I'll stop musing out loud. I had lots of fun, thank you for writing and sharing your game! It was a great introduction to Descended From The Queen mechanics.

These supplements are lovely to read. I feel like the original preoccupations of the game come through with some new twists and additions that feel very natural. The additional questions at the end of each archetype are fantastic and open up so many interesting possibilities for play (Is your novice from a place you have schemed your way through before? Were you more skilled than your expert before you lost your powers?). The visual design also looks so polished, I'm taking Canva notes (the cover for The Foresaken is particularly awesome).

I love how you took the Charlatan in a darker, less slapstick direction than I took the Impostor, more focused on actually avoiding detection than near-inevitably being caught. I also love that both of us put in an unimpressed familiar of the previous witch. The 'problem you're facing' prompt of a magical artefact wreaking havoc almost writes the scene by itself, while keeping storytelling options wonderfully open. The idea of the Expert Charlatan as a magical shopkeeper is just perfect.

I hope me leaving a comment isn't too awkward, I think it's awesome that we saw some of the same possibilities. I would love to play the Avatar sometime. Thanks for sharing your work!

aw thank you!! that means so much coming from you. I’m really happy to have had the chance to contribute :33

I’ve had this for 3 yrs and finally played & had a really nice time with a friend the other week! We played from scratch in about 50 minutes, but it definitely feels like it would be a great modular addition to a worldbuilding game/phase - it changes and suggests interesting things about the town and world that can go in a lot of directions. I like immediately wanted to slot this into cloud empress, I think it would fit v interestingly in the lowlands in that setting. Thanks for a fun game!

I am not good at this game (tank controls...) and it's still really fun! which is a good game marker for me. I keep leaving it on in the background bc the music is so great, it reminds me of the emotion a really good mario soundtrack inspires in me, like a super mario galaxy deal. This made a couple hours of covid recovery pass like nothing, thanks :)

Thank you so much! Those are very easy guidelines to agree to. I'll let you know if I make something I like enough to publish!

I love the concept and the execution rules. These mechanics are simple to grasp and fun to play. Definitely love knowing the estimated play time (it took me about 40 minutes) and the suggested background music playlist (yayyy). I got 3 sixes pretty quick and wanted to spend more time with my killer and survivor, I'm attached now!! well, maybe I'll play a sequel movie.....

drawing scars was the only thing where I felt like I was guessing about what I was supposed to do. the examples on this page make it clearer though! definitely going to play this more.

I want to write expansion tables n alternate settings for me to play, like, as soon as it's not 2am. If I do, are you okay with me sharing them on my itch (+ any particular way you want this to be credited?) or is that the kind of thing you'd prefer to keep in house?

bc I went to put this in the actual comments: the themed DIK party & the explanation of that theme made me laugh out loud. game moments of all time to me

this made me think differently. thanks for making it!

I played this with a friend (having literally just searched 'slime' in physical games) and had a lot of fun!! There are some great tables in here, and the way you set up the area you start in before starting roleplaying helped us really quickly make a setting we were excited to play around in. The range of starting creatures, being able to choose from a wide range of strengths and weaknesses with roleplaying implications and being able to choose which level of the dungeon to start on were things that helped this feel particularly fun and un-punishing. I particularly liked the list of potential PC motivations! Our dungeon is built into a massive volcano and our Dark Lord is big on micromanagement, especially of the deeper levels within their stolen castle; our characters are a finely decorated roaming mimic and a jealous, ambitious slime created to clean, and we are Rival Predators of our floor. I'm excited to play out more and see what we can do - and especially excited to play around with the dice-swapping mechanic, that's really cool.

If you are interested in fiddling with this, it took a bit of guesswork to figure out what order to do things in after character creation and when roleplaying was supposed to start. We still figured it out and had fun though.

Thank you for sharing!

I played this with a friend and had a lot of fun doing that. It seems like it's going to be very simple and then patterns and ideas come out in play and it's really really cool. Playing it with a boardgame fiend we both had an urge to complexify it and add 200 different mechanics, and I might still do that for fun! but I think the simplicity in this game is really powerful, and helps get across ideas about cycles of connected life in a way that's really easy to just start playing. Hopefully I can play this some more!

I played two games of this anthology with a friend, 15-30 minutes each, and really enjoyed them!

In FULL MOON: Destroy // Embrace, we took the game in an anime body horror kind of direction, which was a lot of fun. The moon called to us like a howling, like a distant song, but when we looked at her we knew it was a call to us. Our powers mostly revolved around gravity. She entered our eye from long looking, so everything we saw we saw through her. We tried to shrink her to our size, but lost heart, and died when the gravity debt we owed came due and we plummeted down to her rapidly growing surface. It rocked.

The Traveler's Cloak is just a great concept. I love the stuff it makes you think about. Early on, my friend made one of the high-value Curious creatures a piece of old technology lost down here on the sea floor, that has just enough consciousness to want up and to whisper questions of the surface from its seat at the top of the traveller's spine. It makes me want to play a version of this where you start with stuff defined about you before the fall and blot, replace, eat, decay it over time. Got me to imagine things I love imagining :)

Thank you for sharing! We will probably play more of these conveniently brief & randomisable & interesting games when we next have too little time for a longer one.

I enjoyed this a lot! love the stan rogers cairn. I absolutely thought they were dogs all the way through even when two of them fell in love.

:]] thank you sasha!! that means a lot!

this is fantastic!! Thanks so much for making and sharing this, I‘m definitely going to use it.

Oh, I immediately want to know what happens next. It's always nice when it's hard to choose a favourite cast member! I think..... Cassidy...... but maybe that's just the ghost hunter allure......

The alternate Sappho is a really fun worldbuilding detail. And how come Lirion seems to have the same mysterious problem you do ??

Excited to play more of this sometime! Thanks for sharing!

Wow this rules!!

This is so beautiful, and the movement is so cohesive with the art...! The part at the end felt really magical and mysterious. I'm glad to have seen this!!

I came here from the Zines and Zinesters discord! you got this done so quickly, it makes me want to make something for the jam too.

The aesthetic of this zine is really fun - I love the use of little pieces of text characters as a colourful decorative element, I feel like I haven't seen that before, and it works especially well on top of that sick Circe painting. The background of this itch page is a nice touch. I also LOVE (this is actually why I decided to write a longer comment) the links for further reading and your fiction recommendations. To me that kind of interlinking between stuff, especially online text, is always what I'm hoping for in online zines. Circe has been on my radar for a while, maybe I should finally read it... 

ahh this makes me want to make stuff!! I'm going to go try and do that. thanks for sharing!

https://worshipthesquid.itch.io/trans-trio

ow! this looks simple and does a lot. I hope it is like this less and less.

!! I want to play this!! thank you for the playdough recipe :)

The section describing Flow of Play is short - if you're coming from games with a strong GM or a tighter framework of play then you might be looking for more guidance; what made this kind of play make sense to me was listening to people play, for example, belonging outside belonging games like dream askew. Once you're familiar with that there's plenty of structure here - the threat pages especially have a lot of tools for progressing the story.

I don't think I could play this safely at the moment, but ohh I want to see it played. This is a clear and beautifully written set of instructions for character creation, setup and progression of Threats. I spent way longer than I intended reading every bit of it, because every bit of it is aimed at the heart of the matter.

pretty! crisp! cathartic! full of cats and cool backgrounds! this scratched an itch to read. thank you for sharing!