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!”).
