Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

We Three Shall Meet Again is an asynchronous 41 page game by my friend Sam Dunnewold. In it, you and 2 other players will play witches, all trapped in the same body, communicating through the written word. You communicate in each your own separate journals, as well as on a physical bulletin board where you clip post-it-notes and index cards.

You start the game together, in person. You first place your shared world-building to the bulletin board: Where do you live? What world are you living in? And then add any safety rules to the bulletin board. You make some decisions about your coven, describe yourself, and put it on the board too, and each a villager and a forest-dweller who lives in proximity to you. You do all this together, but scarcely speaking. Then, you decide together who cursed your coven, whose body you’re inhabiting, and whose home you live in.

If you found that paragraph a little meandering; it reflects this first section of the book. I found this book challenging to read, in terms of it feels like a long list of things you are to do, and things you need to get. The game is guided by the book, and there are secrets in the back of the book that none should read until instructed. In this way, it’s part of the movement of book-play (as coined by Asa Donald of Spine), that to me includes games like Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, Triangle Agency, and Spine. The meandering nature of the text is not bad, per se, but for me it makes it hard to get a sense of what has been done and what is to be done. I wonder if a game like this might be best a deck of tarot cards, given the theme, where each of these short paragraphs that run on from each other were each a numbered card, like the introduction to For The Queen.

While this is a game that in theory would work very well online – it includes instructions to that effect – but I don’t actually think it goes far enough with its’ journaling element: I think it would pack more punch, were me and my fellow players all sharing the same journal, and perhaps the bulletin board were collage in the front or back of it, and handing it to each other when each we meet in person once a week or so. The game is supposed to take a few weeks, and it’s likely to take longer like this, but I feel like the implied pastoral setting sets itself in opposition to the digital world, and that leaning into the analog-ness of it all would only enhance your experience, even if it made an already slow game slower. It also adds a trust element – if you’re all sharing the same journal, and spending large amounts of time with that journal, do you break confidence? I feel this reflects the reality of living in the same bodies and spaces.

Once you are cursed, you take turns living in the chosen witch’s body. When it’s your day to live, you read yesterdays‘ prompt, pursue and activity, and journal about it. Leave a brief bulletin board note (only 13 words~) and then write a new prompt for the player tomorrow. There is a prompt provided for the first day: It’s lovely, and sets the tone well. The activities are concrete moves you can make, there are only 4, and they involve you contributing to the bulletin board, breaking the curse, or doing something either magical or mundane that simply is what your character might choose to do. You add to the bulletin board when directed, but effectively if you meet someone new, learn something new about them, or gain a new item that the other witches might encounter on their days.

While you sleep, you often dream, together with the other sleeping witch, or alone. There are a set of dreaming prompts for dreams together, and you can write whatever you wish if you dream alone. There is no clear instruction about what happens to these dreams: I’d probably paste them in my journal on receiving or finishing them.

Your combined research into breaking the curse is hidden in a separate booklet, Research Results. You add the results of your research to the bulletin board, but cannot look further ahead. Honestly, these are the juicy, memorable things that are likely to happen and drive the story. I suppose they are related to the count of days in the front cover, although that wasn’t clear to me precisely how or when to use this count. Eventually you’ll break the curse and gather together in person again. You then share the answers to a few prompts – what happened that you were excited to share with your coven? What questions have you? And then you might resolve future threads together and narrate lasts moments.

This is a lovely game, but it feels like there’s a fog between it and I that I have trouble seeing through. Its procedures are obscured to me, even reading directly. The links are not always clear. I think it’s intentionally so, but I nevertheless struggle with it. My personal difficulty is something I’ve described before, although I can’t remember if I coined a term: When I’m answering prompts, I need a strong foundation to draw from. The designer might provide me with a very concrete and vivid character, and then vague prompts, and I find that easy to work with. Or, I might have a more amorphous character, who then emerges through concrete and vivid prompts. Either of these work well for me. Here, I and my friends must create the setting, the characters, the non-player characters, and the plot, as well as the prompts themselves for each other. I, and many people I play with, would struggle with that lack of redundancy. There are so many ways to fail, and then your friend is left with a journal and no idea how to proceed.

Thematically, though it’s really on point. The format itself has so much to say about fallible, disabled bodies. It has so much to say about relying on the people you live with for things that are essential. It has so much to say about the impacts of your actions not just on the people you live with, but on their relationships and loved ones. It has a quiet melancholy to it, that speaks deeply to those who rely deeply on others and their experience. In the aftermath of reading it, I feel like a witch, in a quiet, pastoral town, struggling with the relationships between my and my coven, while meeting the fae and mundane denizens around me, and trying to complete a ritual than might place me at odds with them, or fill them with fear. The writing fits that perfectly, even as it makes it harder for me to play. I feel like a different format of this game would be for me, or a future iteration, but I also think that there are a lot of people who could take this version of this unique, asynchronous game and produce something beautiful and memorable.

If the idea of an asynchronous, personal game that has things to say about disability and relationships, that is likely to bring out feelings in you and your friends about those things, is appealing to you, and you’re willing to put a few weeks into it, I wouldn’t hesitate to pick up We Three Shall Meet Again.

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