Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Micro-Review of a Micro-Game: Out of Time

JB of BX Blackrazor has released a one-page RPG based on the "Land of the Lost" type setting where temporal rifts strand folks from various times in a prehistoric wilderness.  The idea is to survive long enough to find a way home.

Here's his post, and the download link is in it.

My brief thoughts on this brief game?  It looks fun.  It's the kind of game I'd love to just pull out at a bar, along with some dice and a deck of cards (lots of d6's and a standard playing card deck with jokers).  Who doesn't like lost world settings?  Time travel is cool.  Getting to play a Sengoku samurai palling around with a Norse viking and Al Capone's lowest ranking hitman and his Tommy gun?  And running away from T-Rexes together?  Again, what's not to like?

Being a one-page RPG (with plans for future expansion?), the rules are brief and have one basic resolution system involving rolling X dice and trying to get Y successes (4 or better on d6 is a success).  Your stats are determined by randomly dealing playing cards.  Each suit grants abilities in one of four skill areas, and it's up to players to make their attempts to solve any problems relevant to the skill area they wish to use.  The other cool thing is that cards can be traded for automatic successes, or damage reduction.  So there's the trade-off of needing to succeed now, but making success potentially harder in the future.

I don't know if I'll be able to play it any time soon, but it's definitely something I'd like to try out.  I'm guessing it will be as fun as the other one-page RPG I tried out a while back, All Outta Bubblegum.

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