*insert wacky sound effect*

Posted by Marc

One gaming mashup I’ve been wanting to try for a while involves Caroline’s incredible Fedora Noir. Sure, it’s a game about a gritty detective struggling against their inner demons amidst a sea of backstabbers, crooks, and con artists… but what if their girlfriend was a huge cartoon bear? 

I got a chance to play this ridiculous version of the game at Go Play Northwest this year. I pitched the game as the standard Fedora Noir, but with a twist: the Detective is human and the other characters are cartoons, a la Who Framed Roger Rabbit. When we got to the table, I improvised a bit to set things up. First I pulled two of the setting cards–New Amsterdam and San Savio–and asked the players which flavor they’d prefer (New York or LA). We settled on New York. Then we followed the custom setting creation rules that come in the box and created the “Toon Town” section of the city. The customization rules ask players to think of two reasons why living in this place is difficult (in our case it was the unreliable physics and the black market for the drug “ink”), then make four locations for the setting and continue on their merry way.

Reskinning the setting was a blast, and what I appreciated about it was how tight the gameplay felt because of it. Having only four named locations wasn’t a barrier at all–it kept us closely focused on the story beats and let us reincorporate the places over and over, to great comedic and dramatic effect. We wove cartoon nonsense into the story and the scenes; for example, the Detective drank from a giant jug with three X’s on the side, and there were moments of getting clobbered and seeing little stars spinning around the character’s head.

What’s the takeaway from all this? Twofold: first, Fedora Noir is great and I love it. And second, don’t be afraid to try an off-the-wall variant of one of your favorite games. Many gmless games lend themselves well to this (for example, bask in the glorious sunlight of our Aztec Polaris hack). If you are planning to reskin something, be clear about the premise up front, and make sure you get everyone on the same page about what’s changing and how it’ll work. That’s what we did for our cartoon game, and the results spoke for themselves (in a little speech bubble that said “Yipe!”).

Jacques the tuxedo cat wearing a fedora
“Meow I need a drink”

We’re bustin’ outta here

Posted by Marc

I recently played a game of Follow that used the Heist quest, and unfortunately we did the one thing you should never do when doing a heist: we got caught. Cut to our “heroes” stuck in prison, trying to figure out how to escape. The remaining challenges of the Heist playset weren’t exactly conducive to our situation, and we kind of struggled to move forward from there. We’d set out to tell the story of a theft, but instead we were stuck in lockup.

But that got me thinkin’: what if there were a quest for just such a scenario?

Introducing: the Prison Break, a quest for Follow!

“We’re prisoners locked up together. Maybe we deserve it, maybe we don’t, but either way: we’re bustin’ out of this joint.”

Exactly what it says on the tin. You and your crew are in prison. You don’t wanna be in prison. What happens next? Play to find out!

The PDF is available on our itch.io page now. Thanks to Caroline for the incredible art and Ben for making Follow!

Follow me to the Farm!

Posted by Caroline

Follow by Ben Robbins is a masterpiece – if you’ve never played it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s a great exemplar of gm-less gaming, and I always have fun running it at conventions or playing it among old friends. So I was thrilled when Ben announced that he would be releasing a new, free edition called Follow: A New Fellowship to help spread the fun.

The bonus gift is that Ben also released a template and guidelines for creating your own quest! I got started on one about a week ago (it’s a new record for me to write and send something out in the world), and I’m so excited to be able to share it with you now!

Introducing: the Farm, a quest for Follow! 

Cover for the Farm quest. It's a cartoon-style digital illustration of a little farmhouse with a small kitchen garden. Farmland extends into the distance on a sunny day.

“All this place needs is a little bit of elbow grease and a whole lot of love! Our goal is to revitalize an old, run-down farm. We are the dreamers, workers, and community members endeavoring to establish the farm and ensure it has a bright, sustainable future.”

Build a community, connect with nature, and build something new together with this cozy little quest!


You can pick up a PDF of the Farm for free over on itch.io.

It was a joy to write this cozy little quest (inspired largely by that one time we played a pastoral period during our long-running Kingdomon game), and I hope that folks will get some fun out of it! 

But even more than that, I’m excited to see what other quests people think of! I do know that Marc has something much less cozy up his sleeve too…

When Worlds Collide

Posted by Marc

I recently had the pleasure of attending Go Play Northwest, our beloved annual story and tabletop game convention in Seattle. Caroline and I have been regular attendees for over a decade now, making us seasoned veterans of the convention space. With that designation comes (in my mind) a solemn duty to run games and show others a good time. To that end, I pitched a game in all but one of the donuts we attended and ended up playing six different titles with seventeen unique players–not bad! I’d like to tell you about two of the games I ran and why they were, in a word, awesome.

World-building meets world-building

in this world and microscope books

I came out swinging with my first pitch of the convention: we’ll play In This World, then we’ll take out our Microscope and explore one of the worlds we made. I wasn’t totally sure how it would all work out, but work out it did. Four intrepid players joined me for the grand experiment.

We started with a list of topics, narrowing down to “tattoos” (I promise I didn’t tip the scales, despite having gotten a new tattoo two days earlier). Following the rest of the game’s steps led to three amazing worlds: World of Resumé Tattoos, where tattoos are designed and mandated by the government; World of Tattoo.gif, where tattoos are made from bioluminescent algae and nanites that can shift and morph based on your body chemistry; and World of Emotional Tattoos, a fantasy setting where strong emotional experiences cause semi-prophetic tattoos to appear on your body. Which one did we decide to Microscope? Vote now on your phones!

After a break, we picked Tattoo.gif as our setting. All of us said we could’ve done any of the three, but this one drew us in because of its cyberpunk aesthetic and the fact that one of our world-building statements referred to history already (we stipulated that tattoos of the past were made from the algae alone, and the nanites came later). We put the world description to one side for reference and started the Microscope procedure. 

play materials from the nanite-tattoos in this world/microscope game

Did it work? Oh yeah. Having the world built for us put a lot of flavor into the timeline before we even started and gave us some easy targets for periods, but as soon as we got to the palette, we expanded the world in ways none of us expected beforehand. Our world gained another sentient race, ocean-dwelling people who first shared knowledge of the algae with humanity but later cut ties when we started developing nanotech. The key was letting the original world-build serve as a starting point, rather than a prophecy (don’t want to Farnsworth it, after all); we stayed flexible as we created periods and events rather than feeling locked to precisely what we’d said during In This World. We played a few rounds and had a blast. I declare the experiment a resounding success!

I choose you!

grasping nettles cover image

We sat down to play Grasping Nettles and started discussing the setting we wanted to create. The table was silent for a beat–everyone runs a little slow on Sunday morning. Then Caroline spoke up: “When in doubt, play Pokémon.” With these wise words, she kicked off a delightful session of the unique world-building experience Grasping Nettles brings, if you’ll pardon the pun, to the table. 

We set our Pokémon-esque story on an archipelago of islands with inexplicably diverse climates (“You’re looking for the beach island? It’s right over there, between the arctic island and the red rock badlands island!”). After picking a setting, the game asks you to create three factions, so we invented: Team Riptide, a group of washouts and thugs who couldn’t hack it in the official Pokémon tournaments; Island University and Hospital, a joint research and treatment operation where professors and doctors work together; and the Puddle League, an organization of scrappy kids headed out on their first Pokémon adventures and their counselors, who are students at the University.

pokemon-inspired grasping nettles game materials

The unique world-building mechanic of Grasping Nettles is the wheel. Each faction has a pawn on the wheel, and on your turn you pick a faction, roll 1d6, and move clockwise around the wheel to determine which action you take. Only one of the actions is a Scene; everything else is world-building, from making a single character, to introducing an issue, to starting a project. It’s perfect for convention play because it allows you to essentially choose your level of engagement (making a location is much less involved than creating a new faction, for example), and every little move adds up so your contributions are constantly important to the fun.  

Tabula rasa

I’ve highlighted these two games because they share a commonality: both required or were focused on world-building. There’s something uniquely magical about starting with a blank slate and creating an entire world from scratch. I’m drawn toward games that utilize a collaborative creative process to help players create something complex, individualized, and far more unique than what they’d come up with on their own or have come up with before. The moment when players’ minds click and start humming in harmony is what I’m always seeking–and much to my delight, I found those moments again and again at Go Play this year.

Designing games for how we learn

Posted by Caroline.

I love trying new games. I’m constantly picking up new PDFs and strong-arming my friends and loved ones into learning them and playing with me. We’ve been doing this a bunch so far this year, and I’ve noticed that there are two main things that can get in the way of my learning a new game:

  • A long explanation of all the various rules I may or may not need to use throughout the whole game. I try to stay engaged but boy oh boy am I spacing out after about 20 seconds.
  • A big list of moves / prompts / stuff I’m expected to choose from as I’m playing, each with a sentence or two explaining what they are and how they work. I will not memorize these and I will be distracted trying to read them when it’s my turn to make up fiction.

In these moments I’m experiencing something I talk a lot about in my education work: cognitive overload. Very simply put, cognitive load refers to the amount of stuff you can manage in your working memory. The more moving parts a task has, the higher the cognitive load of that particular task is. And the higher the cognitive load, the lower the chance that the information will scoot over to your long-term memory. If you want people to learn and remember things, you need to make sure there isn’t too much information at a time, and you need to give them tools for reinforcing their learning.

Facilitators can help with this a little (by not info-dumping), but fundamentally I think it’s a game design challenge. With GMless games in particular, in addition to co-creating the fiction of the game, we are also co-navigating the game’s rules. In a lot of these games we’re building a setting, exploring identity, role-playing, crafting fiction, and negotiating awesome stories, all while learning and utilizing and explaining rules. It’s a lot for our working memories to process.

Reducing Cognitive Load

We can reduce some cognitive load around fiction creation by giving players choices in what they do on their turn (dictated scenes vs played scenes in Microscope, for example, or the three different moves in Epitaph), or around setting-building by giving players structured steps to build a world (like In This World, or the traditions in Downfall). Beyond specific mechanics, though, we need to think about how players learn and navigate games in general.

The easiest processes to learn are ones that are repeated a few times. In games these usually occur in “rounds”. I’ve been thinking of these as loops. A loop is a series of steps that are repeated and are performed the same way and in the same order each time. We start and proceed through the loop sequentially, following steps laid out in the text. We are able to quickly learn loops because they take advantage of one of my favorite study techniques: spaced repetition.

The hardest processes to learn are rare or one-off occurrences, things that players must actively inject into the game. I’ll call them invoked rules. These are rules that you need to either remember to do when you reach a fictional trigger, or rules that you can decide to invoke when you want to.

Loops and Invoked Rules

Most games have both of these. Let’s take Downfall as an example:

  • Loop: Escalate the Flaw, two scenes (a subloop; we’ll get to subloops later), reflect.
  • Invoked Rule: “But there’s a consequence” – triggered at player discretion when the Hero does something that you think requires a price.

You’ll notice that there’s only one invoked rule (“But there’s a consequence”). The core loop includes actions that I could have instead written as invoked rules (escalate and reflect). If I’d put those two other moves outside the loop, they would be easier to forget, and so they’d be less likely to happen at all. Putting them in the loop reduces the amount of things players need to learn and remember while they are making fiction, which makes the game smoother and more fun. Keeping processes in loops (and outside of scenes) also means we aren’t interrupting fiction to reference rules. Double fun!

The type of reinforcement that players get via loops would be called spaced repetition in the education sphere. Spaced repetition is what it sounds like: studying/learning the same bit of information over and over again at periodic intervals. It’s one of the most effective ways to move things into your long-term memory. For games, the more we can involve spaced repetition via loops, the more we can ease players’ cognitive loads and enable them to focus on playing the game rather than learning the game.

Let’s take a look at a more complex game, and one of my favorites: Kingdom. We have a core loop and three subloops, plus a few key invoked rules. The game takes advantage of spaced repetition by embedding invoked rules periodically throughout the loops:

  • Core Loop: Declare crossroad, play scenes (subloop A), resolve crossroad (subloop B).
    • Subloop A: Scenes. Choose characters and situation, role-play, reactions.
    • Subloop B: Crossroad resolution. Review, role moves (decide, consequences, feelings), resolve crisis if necessary (subloop C), pass time if wanted
    • Subloop C: Crisis resolution. Show it, do stuff, vote, narrate fiction
  • Invoked rules: Use role, fight or fix, overthrow, change role. (The rules remind you of these options during subloop A and subloop B)

Kingdom helps you learn and remember those invoked rules in a few ways. The most integral invoked rules in the game are the role moves, for example Perspective makes predictions during scenes. The game can run fine if you never activate any of the other invoked rules, but using your role is central to play.

Kingdom does three clever things around the role moves that makes them easier to hold in working memory. First, each role has (and is defined by) only one move, so it’s easy to remember when the move can be activated and what it does. Second, it reinforces the moves by building them into the loops in the scene instructions (subloop A in our example). If you’re Touchstone, for instance, at the start of each scene the facilitator should be reminding you that you can use your “show how the kingdom feels” power. Third, it reinforces it during crossroad resolution, as each role gets a chance to shine and tell us what happens to the kingdom.

The text you read during the crossroad resolution phase cleverly reminds you of all of the other invoked rules as well. For example, you get an opportunity to overthrow other characters and take their roles, or fight-or-fix someone else’s move. This reminder helps you learn and remember that you can use these moves in future rounds (not just in crossroad resolution). If you didn’t totally catch all the moves the first round, you’ll get them as you keep playing.

Design Takeaways

As game designers, one of the most helpful things we can do is try to keep invoked rules, loops, and subloops simple and clear. We can have as few invoked rules as are necessary for the purpose of the game. We can try to reinforce them through the loops so we aren’t info-dumping on players at the beginning of the game or giving them a big menu of things to read when they really want to be focusing on fiction.

Finding the most fundamental loops and invoked rules for your game to create the fullest embodiment of your vision is super challenging. For Marc and me, we are absolutely guilty of overloading early drafts of games with too many steps and options. Unfortunately it’s not enough to just trim those down – they all need to align to the game’s core purpose. And then they all need to be presented in a scaffolded way. It’s a lot of work!

But when I’m playing a game that has done that hard work, I have so much fun and appreciation for the writer who put it all together in a way that makes me feel like a rockstar when I play.

The fun of boring worlds

Posted by Caroline.

Lately I’ve found myself craving a certain kind of experience when I’m playing In This World. In addition to making at least one “thanks, I hate it” world together, I’ve been really enjoying creating pretty normal worlds. 

I think it all started last summer with our cozy game about furniture. We made some pretty strange worlds (teeny-tiny chairs, folding rooms, etc) that were totally delightful. Then for our last world, Ben steered it into mundane drama territory (family feuds over Granny’s armchair, Sackville-Bagginses vibes). As we added details about inheritance and knock-off portraits, a little lightbulb went off: as much as I like creating brand new worlds, I also love exploring things that are just a little removed from reality. 

For the furniture game, it went from, “Here are these interesting worlds that are visually and theoretically cool and strange, it would totally suck to live in an apartment where your only furniture was re-configurable cubes,” to “This doesn’t feel like a totally new world, it feels mostly normal. It reminds me of how my grandmother and her sisters fell out over their inheritance, and how they would feel that very little of what led to their estrangement matters to their descendants. I wish those objects hadn’t mattered so much to them. I wonder why they did…” Heavy stuff from a lighthearted, normal-ish world!

I’ve only had a few of these types of more mundane worlds pop up in recent games. The two that come to mind are:

  • A world of sustainable fashion. What would a society that values recycled and sustainable materials do about clothes? What would slow fashion look like in a modern context? Could I be more intentional about resisting consumer culture?
  • A world where we use dreams as therapeutic tools. What could we gain as a society by everyone giving themselves a period of reflection every day? Nothing magical, just a little extra thinking time. What can I learn about myself from this dream? Could I set an intention for my sleep in a productive way (so far – no, lol I sleep like garbage)? 

In all of these games, we worked together to create something new and interesting. We each contributed things to make unique worlds that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own. Each world is a testament to the magic of putting a bunch of people with different ideas together. That alone is cool as hell. But there is also this residual, solo reflection that can happen afterwards, particularly with a more normal world. 

I’ve been calling these “boring worlds” in my head (while also feeling a little sheepish when I feel like I’m contributing boring stuff to a game), but I think that attitude does them a disservice.

“Boring worlds” give me a way to try to understand the world I’m in and a way to envision how to get to a world I want to be in. I’m curious about what a world one step closer toward a gentler, more humane world would be. I’m curious about understanding something about the world that I’m in by exploring something just one step to the side. Maybe I’m trying to answer “why are we like this” and “how can things be better?” 

Boring worlds for exploring big questions.

Award a Noir

Fedora Noir is one of the winners of the 2023 Awards, an annual award given to twenty of the coolest games of the year! I’m incredibly proud of the work that Morgan, Scott, Alex, Marc, Maxine, Orion, Rainbow, Robert, Sharang, Sythana, and I put into the game. It was a long journey from Morgan’s original conception of a game about a noir as hell Hat to the final product, and I am deeply honored that it was selected to be recognized in this way.

I hope you’ll go over to The Awards and check out the other winners as well! For my part, I’m looking forward to playing as many as I can in the coming year. 

In other Fedora Noir news, Alex White of Plane Sailing Games recently did a really thoughtful write-up of a recent game they played. There’s nothing better than knowing your game is helping make the fun! 

<3 Caroline

Mommy, Let’s Play Dungeons and Dragons

Posted by Caroline aka Mom

I didn’t expect to play any sort of Dungeons and Dragons with our kid, ever, much less when he was only five years old. Heck, the last time I played any real DnD was like twenty years ago and I have zero interest in playing it myself. Yet here I am: a dungeon mommy. Let me weave you the tale of how it began… but without good voices because I am not a Real Dungeon Master.

We were cleaning out his room trying to make a donate pile of toys that he doesn’t play with anymore. A big plush d20 that someone gifted us a million years ago came into consideration. Marc suggested donating it, and I foolishly said aloud, “Well… maybe he’ll want to play Dungeons and Dragons someday.” To which the Hobblet immediately attached ignorant but strong desire. 

I moved on to organizing puzzles, but his attention was secure. “Is that Dungeons and Dragons?” he asked as I sorted an alphabet puzzle (not DnD) from a Paddington Bear puzzle (… could we make a Paddington DnD??!) . “Can I play Dungeons and Dragons? I want to play Dungeons and Dragons. Mommy let’s play Dungeons and Dragons.” And if you’ve ever heard a five year old say “Dungeons and Dragons” over and over again in his irresistibly cute voice you can understand that I was powerless to say no. And so our DnD campaign began.

His first character was a human rogue named “I Squished Your Cake.” Over the course of an afternoon he fought a bunch of dragons (by which I mean he narrated doing something, rolled the plush d20, and was given results by me, the worst dungeon master of all time) and then moved on to the next activity.

A few days later, we were making a new character — an elf warrior named “I chopped down your house”, which transformed to “Chop Housedown” and finally landed on the lovable “Chop Downhouse.”

Of course we aren’t really playing Dungeons and Dragons as written. We don’t have character sheets and I certainly haven’t read any books. We use a d20 (or rock-paper-scissors if we are out and about) for success/fail conflict resolution (of course something interesting always happens on failure, I’m a modern parent). We aren’t keeping track of abilities or levels or any of that, just doing some fighty-make-believe.

At this point in our campaign, Chop Downhouse has lost his axe (he kept throwing it at monsters and finally a dragon just flew off with it), and so has his first real mission. He’s following a Sand Dragon’s tunnel to some promised treasure with his friend, the enemy wizard lizard turned friend, Quake. 

Some children are very interested in world-building. Right now, our child is excited about throwing his axe and getting sweet treas’. (So far the treasure has been a magical apple that never runs out, a magical cheese that never runs out, and magical bread that never runs out. These are all good things.) Beyond the battling and the treasure, we will sometimes have a very nice conversation between his character and an NPC (again, with no voices because I don’t really DM).

All in all, I have been pleasantly surprised at how much fun I’m having playing our version of “Dungeons and Dragons” together. We share our creativity at the level that we can, inhabiting made-up worlds that we imagine in our own ways. We call it Dungeons and Dragons, but like all DnD, it’s something else that only exists within the experience of the players – a goofy little kid and his proud mama.

I live in terror of the day he learns to read and discovers that there are actual rules and maths.

In this Camp

Posted by Caroline

When we go camping but forget to pack any paper, does that keep us from gaming? No way!

Games on plates!

Once again In This World helps us unlock our creative powers!

Introducing four new ways to camp:

World 1: World of Crab Camp, where we are crab creatures from the far future. We camp in the semi-flooded ruins of humanity and sleep in *shudders* sliming bags.

World 2: World of Dream Pod Ships, where we sleep away the long voyage to new planets to escape a dying Earth. We dream of camping so that we can develop the skills we will need once we reach our new homes.

World 3: World of the Great Camp Off, where we camp competitively. Best camper for World President!

World 4: World of the Ghost Mammoth, where we are ancient peoples, leaving our caves to camp out in the wilderness. You come of age when you discover something new, but beware the Ghost Mammoth, a mysterious monster in these days where we believe our scary camp stories and begin to weave mythology.  Ghost mammoth – he’ll getcha!

Big thanks to Marc, Kelly, and Fina for making the magic happen!

In This World by Ben Robbins is on Kickstarter until June 20.

In This World

Posted by Caroline

One of the nicest things that I’ve been doing this year is getting a coffee at a very quiet cafe with Marc and playing a story game together. We are able to snag an auntie or grandparent maybe once a month to make this happen, and it’s always delightful. I’ve always been a big fan of the morning con slot, so the coffee games are a special treat.

Far and away my favorite game of the year has been In This World, the new gem from our dear friend Ben Robbins. I think I’ve played it at least 6 times in as many months. In In This World, you choose a topic, describe facts about the topic in the real world, and then make various imaginary worlds by changing and remixing those facts. It’s creative candy to someone who likes world-building as much as I do.

This weekend Marc and I were big cute dorks and took it to the meta level — In This World: Story Games. 

World 1: World of Endless Role-Play

We started by changing “Story games aren’t about winning,” to “well, actually they are, and the way you win is by being the last to break character.” Starting a game was a big deal, because once you started being Eldrock the Elf, you couldn’t stop or you would lose. Started a game of Monsterhearts? Sorry, but every time you see Helen at yoga, you both have to pretend to have teen monster problems.

World 2: World of Worldcraft

This was my favorite of the worlds just for being cozy and a world I might actually enjoy. We started by changing “Players play characters” to “Players create worlds.” Story games were all only world-building games, and they always ended before a story began. Instead of playing out the story, a player might take the setting and use it to write a novel. Good vibes.

World 3: World of Bleed

And now for some yikes, in this world, players don’t play characters, they play themselves, and everything is a metaphor for real life. If I want to break up with you, my elf will break up with your elf in the game. And if you aren’t playing? I’ll record my elf playing with an NPC and send it to you. Yikes yikes yikes.

At that point our babysitting time was quickly running out, so we ended the game there, and went for a walk around the lake. But like all games of In This World, you can’t really stop thinking about it, so we made a bonus world on the move (no index cards babyyyyy we’re wild).

World 4: World of Jumanj-ish

In this world, what happens in the game happens in the real world. And designers don’t make games, they were unearthed from ancient tablets. But what happens in the game doesn’t happen to you, it happens to strangers. The players know it’s happening, they just don’t know to whom. But the godlike power is cursed, and the circle of who your game affects shrinks over time, first strangers, then friends, then finally, on your final game, yourself. oooOOOOOooo!

It was about an hour and a half of total play, for four very different and interesting worlds.

In This World, like all of Ben’s games, is expertly designed to get us exploring big ideas. But what I most appreciate about In This World is how it makes me feel that the magic of each and every game is us — people getting together and sharing our unique perspectives to make something new. 

In this world, story games are joy.

In This World is on Kickstarter till June 20th, and is 1000% worth backing. Do yourself a solid and check it out!