I. Dear Reader,
People are posting about their favourite games of the year (regardless of when they were released) using the term Endies 2025. I did this last year but Endies does have a certain ring (maybe a worse ring) than Games of the Year so let’s try it out. Here’s what I got:
One-Shot Game I Played With Everyone I Could: Last Train To Bremen by Caro Asercion
Last Train to Bremen ended up being a game I trotted out to so many people. I played with my friends, my colleagues, different gaming groups (who are also friends but you get the idea). The groups who embraced …
I. Dear Reader,
People are posting about their favourite games of the year (regardless of when they were released) using the term Endies 2025. I did this last year but Endies does have a certain ring (maybe a worse ring) than Games of the Year so let’s try it out. Here’s what I got:
One-Shot Game I Played With Everyone I Could: Last Train To Bremen by Caro Asercion
Last Train to Bremen ended up being a game I trotted out to so many people. I played with my friends, my colleagues, different gaming groups (who are also friends but you get the idea). The groups who embraced the petty drama of band members who hate each other had the most fun but mostly everyone had a good time. It’s got a lot of design that makes it easy to introduce to people: pre-written roles, a tight structure, rounds of liar’s dice as the core gameplay. And the loop of “let’s play this dice game” and “let’s do storytelling” is a steady and comforting rhythm that I’m going to seek out in more games. I think it would work particularly well for sports-themed games so if someone is looking for a project, please go for it.
**One-Shot Game I’m Going to Play With Everyone Next Year: ***Decagone *by Waco Matrixo and Bodie H
This is a one-shot *Mothership *scenario that revolves around a real-time ten minute time loop. So every ten minutes, the players restart in an elevator and have to start again (with knowledge of how the loop works). I don’t think you need any kind of system for this one-shot. You could literally toss a coin as the resolution mechanic if you don’t want to use Mothership (and want to finish it 90 minutes versus 3 hours). But it’s a very tight design. Almost too simple on the surface. But it’s just serious and silly enough in the right places to work. I’ve run it once and everyone had such a good time, a lot of laughter all around. I’m going to pre-generate some more explicitly absurd characters with secret agendas and keep them ready for when I run the game next. Maybe finesse the ending. But check this one out.
Funniest Pre-Gen Characters: False Kingdom by Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol
Because we’re on the subject, there was so much sheer delight at my table in just picking who to play in this free game. There are a dozen or so characters and each of them are either comical, gross, or both. There was a lot of laughter!
Favourite Ending of the Year: *Harvest *by Luke Jordan
I can’t believe that a GM-less game gave me a good ending. It’s a sign of good design, a great table, as well as how much better I’ve gotten at improvising over the last 5 years. Hopefully it’s not gauche to say something like that but I think it took confidence and experience I didn’t have before to play this game well. You can read more thoughts about the game on Rascal if you’d like but the gist of it is that I played around 6 sessions of this folk horror masterpiece and had a fantastic time.
Favorite Sandbox: Beyond the Pale by Yochai Gal
I played three sessions of this and thought it was an extremely well-designed town and scenario. It has the gentle charm of a morality story or wisdom tale as well as the sharp edge of commentary. Apart from Mythic Bastionland, this was my primary taste of what OSR sandbox play has to offer and that fairy tale nature of both is making me have thoughts about Dolmenwood for next year. It feels like a very good mode for this kind of adventure play. I don’t have fully formed thoughts on this but I find the room-by-room play of dungeon-based play very unappealing. I come to games for drama, character, theme, etc (not challenge or mastery of a space) and there’s something about the fairy tale aesthetic that makes it seem easier to find what I enjoy in these games.
Game That Made Me Want To Do Some Game Design: Oddfolk by Maxwell Lander
Similar to moves in PbtA, Everything is an action in Oddfolk. And the modular trick at the heart is that every action is a set of four options and you roll a 1d4, choosing a number of actions equal to the result. So if you roll a 4, you have to pick all of them. It’s really simple but see how Max and his guest writers played with the options on each action, it made me really excited to write my own. Especially because it looked so easy. I can write a list of four things! Anyone can! The action called ‘Try A Weird Sex Thing’ made me laugh. The four options are: – It’s good, actually – You get an inopportune cramp – It becomes named after you – Someone is trying to have it banned
Oddfolk is free and you should check it out and see if it inspires you to write your own little game-poems.
Well, that’s it for me.
If you want more lists, check out posts from Chris Longhurst aka Potatocubed (who has some really cool picks including a Microscope-based game I hadn’t heard of before) and Caradoc (who among other games played 30 sessions of Candela Obscura).
Yours best-of-ly,
Thomas
PS. Rascal has a Christmas sale and you can get a subscription for 1$. That’s literally as low as we could go. I’ve written about a lot of these games already at great length on that site and you could read all of that for basically free!
II. Media of the Week
-
Weird Place have a slick vlog-style peek into their time at PAX Unplugged.
-
Quinns did a very cool video about four boxed games. This one is one of my favourites because I love the weirdness of the games on display. Tacklebox sounds amazing. And for a very brief second, you can see my name in the credits of *Lovecraftesque 2e. *
- You too can support the newsletter on patreon!
- If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.
III. Links of the Week
-
Sigh, I forgot to link Valeria’s house-rule for Mythic Bastionland about making promises so here it is. Apologies,will make sure this doesn’t happen EVERY week.
-
Judd has a new crew for *Blades in the Dark *that I really like called Necronauts, basically rogue scientists doing crime to fund their experiments to maybe, if you want, save the world. I really like this campaign idea and I’m reminded me again how much “design a crew sheet” is a great way of expanding the game towards new horizons.
-
It Came From The Bookshelf reviews Arms of the Chosen, a supplement for Exalted: “Arms of the Chosen is one of those rare books where I love everything about it except certain fundamental, load-bearing design decisions so I kind of feel obligated to effusively praise it even as I propose tearing it down to its foundations and rebuilding it from scratch.”
-
The problem is, of course, the idea that of grand power that you will spend a year playing to unlock so you can use it once, maybe.
-
Walking Mind has a nice“wheel of values” as a tool for worldbuilding. Instead of good and evil, by building out communities based on values, you get to map out natural alliances and divisions to inspire the political dynamics of the setting.
-
Ben Robbins is organizing his website with over 20 years of blogging through an index that highlights his best work.
-
Cannibal Halfling Gaming write up a review on Last Kiss by Brian Liberge: “Ever feel like the world is out to get you? It is. Five radical teens with attitude should not be responsible for saving the world. …. What will you do before it all ends? Perhaps there’s enough time for one Last Kiss…”
-
The Make Moves Jam is a year-long jam to write one (or more) PbtA-style move.
IV. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
- Nothing this week!
This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:
- From the creator of Stars without Number, here’s Worlds without Number and its two supplements in one bundle.
- *Shadowrun *bundles continue with an adventure / mission collection showcasing what fifth edition has to offer.
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.