January 7, 2025

In 2024 I played twenty-one role-playing games

Stealing an idea from Kurt Riefling,

the Golden Cobra-winning designer of A Crown of Dandelions, I wrote up a tiny review of each of the games I played in 2024.¹ Rather than doing a big ol’ thumbs up or down, I’ll just give you a little bit of my experience and thoughts, as you’ve come to expect from me.

Besides playing all those games, I had a great experience putting out the ashcan to my chambermaid mystery game—I'm looking forward to sharing the next version soon. My naughty goose simulator Foul Play got a shout-out in the last episode of Quinns Quest, reaching so many new people. Plus, of course, I deepened my engagement with roleplaying by writing this newsletter, which has been amazingly fulfilling.

2025 is starting out promising as well: Hendrik Biweekly has been nominated for a BLOGGIE, both in the review category and for best debut blog. Qua games I already played some of Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast, and, next week, I’m diving back into Blades in the Dark’s Doskvol—we’re playing with Deep Cuts’ new rules modules and I’m loving them so far.

Anyway, here is my year in gaming.

One- and twoshots

CBR+PNK

Blades in the Dark is, like a lot of games from its generation, a campaign game. Emanoel Melo zipped those scoundrels into a sleek oneshot package—literally, the box is beautiful—turning gritty episodic storytelling into a non-stop action movie. In CBR+PNK, downtime becomes a momentary breather, a short character beat before you drop right back into the action. I had a bit of a bumpy ride, but the introductory job, Mind the Gap, kept us on track towards a big finish.

Brindlewood Bay

Geriatric detectives solve murders while cosmic horror brews in the background? That's just a great pitch. I also love the way the game focuses on the texture of 80's mystery media, allowing play to focus on scrumptious character moments instead of the tight presentation of information that a deductive mystery needs. At the start of this year I played through a mystery I wrote with my partner. The local OSR afficionado really took to the game, which surprised and delighted me.

Ten Candles

It was the atmosphere and clear story goals of Ten Candles that drew me into the indie sphere: over the course of the game, the ten candles go out one by one, and once darkness reigns, every character will have found their end. This opened up a space for storytelling that was far more focused than the fantasy sandbox I was familiar with. This session's airport filled with doppelgangers was as bad a time as the game can promise. Looking forward to playing this again.

FIST

I really want to get back to FIST this year, maybe in the form of a short campaign, but there's just so much to play. That said, this genre-clusterfuck of a game about a crack team of paranormal mercenaries resulted in a session full of wacky, rambunctious fun. I'm still getting my head around its mixture of old school vibes and Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics, though. Should I let the basic conversation carry more of the game? Is that a point of overlap between PbtA and the OSR?

As the Sun Forever Sets

Talking about great pitches, what about surviving a Martian attack on Victorian England? Creator Riley Daniels helped me get my bearings when I got into game design, so I was very happy to help her test the oneshot framework she was writing up for the game. We played through a scenario about soldiers deserting after seeing the overwhelming power of the Martians. I got to do a third act betrayal, crawling over a brother-in-arms to board a ship leaving 'death spiral island', as Riley likes to call it.

A Thousand Year-Old Campfire

My playthrough of Old Morris Cave: A Continuous Use Campsite in Mammoth Cave National Park is very dear to me. This game about the excavation of the eponymous fictional cave also confirmed a suspicion of mine: in solo games, I have a preference for drawing over writing. Charting the different layers of sediment and my architectural finds was much more engrossing for me than journaling. I have yet to discover why that is, though.

The Slow Knife

I still have a lot to learn about games without a traditional GM role. Last year I got The Slow Knife to the table. Reminiscent of The Count of Monte Christo—a big story for me growing up—you play the bastards the protagonist of the story takes revenge on. The game guides you through four phases of prompts while you build out a conspiracy board of characters and relationships. I was afraid it would be overcomplicated, but I loved how the phases guided us through the story's arc while we filled in the details.

The Long Shift

What drew me to The Long Shift was its setting: a gas station at the edge of the galaxy. It's essentially an engine for setting scenes. Everyone creates a misfit employee, but also takes a turn to play a passing traveler, troubled or searching one way or another. In a way, the game has a rotating GM that plays only one NPC. Next time, I would probably bring in some of Archipelago's conversation tools to support us during the scene. Still, our troubled passers-by provided good focal points for low-stakes drama.

For the Queen

With the reprint by Critical Role's Darrington Press, For the Queen might be said to have gone mainstream. Which is interesting for a game about a pretty kinky and ethically ambiguous relationship. I mean, you all love a person who has absolute power over you. What makes the game accessible, of course, is that those themes are only softly emphasized. Players may pick up on them, choose to push their story in that direction, or stick to imaginative worldbuilding.

Under Hollow Hills

There’s a lot to admire about the Bakers’ traveling fae circus. I’m currently fascinated by the wealth of material the book comes with. As the MC, I got to prep a fantastical goblin market by answering questions and choosing from lists. The players did much the same with the evocative descriptions on their character sheets. Really, during play, while we did use some of the mechanics, we were playing the game mostly on the basis of all these prompts. The influence on a game like Wanderhome really shows.

The Wassailing of Claus Manor

For the holiday edition of my local meetup, I wrangled The Wassailing into a oneshot. As servants in Santa’s mansion, the players were tasked to solve and, preferably, survive increasingly fucked up tasks given to them by the Clauses. While the game could’ve really used more time to breathe—another session or two, maybe—some great moments emerged during our afternoon, like a haunted bear trap and and a cook unstuck in Christmas time.

Campaigns

Pasión de las Pasiones

Honestly, only the final session of this campaign was played in 2024, but I’m not missing a chance to talk about Pasión. We played a game of jealous bastards associated with a ballet academy, twisting and turning the narrative to come out on top. The flashback move is only topped by the fantastic “come back from death’s brink changed” move. On our way to watch Conclave last December, me and my partner started fantasizing about a Pasión hack to play scheming cardinals. The idea hasn’t left me yet.

Crescent 2e

At the beginning of last year, I helped playtest the update of Ema Acosta’s game of kids lost in a land of dreams. Ema cooked up a fun pirate harbor for our balloon to land in while we got to play around with the game’s card-based equipment and magic. I was especially taken by the way each kid is dealt their dreamlike powers face down. It’s a delight to flip that card at the height of a session and figure out a way to use your newfound power to your advantage. The game is out on itch, much like its tragic sister Exile.

Two-Hand Path

Like a lot of people, I played Slay the Spire, the card game about slaying monsters on your way to the top. I'm not very good at it, but I enjoy the feeling of at least getting better for a while. Two-Hand Path, a game in which you play yahtzee to cast spells and kill monster on your way through the post-apocalypse, gives me that same feeling. I try, and try again, although I'm still not very good at it.

Eat the Reich

This overproduced zine about killing nazi's hit the right spot with me—just dumb, exuberant fun. Eat the Reich is a good example of how far evocative writing can take a game. Everything from the player characters to the Parisian locations to the endbosses supplies an endless stream of prompts to elaborate on. Who knew the skeleton of Napoleon's horse is in a museum? What vampiric necromancer wouldn't want to animate it?

Blade Runner

After I gifted the core book to a member of my play group, we kind of had to give the introductory mission a try. It was what I'll call a neo-trad experience, with a very detailed module, beautiful handouts, chase rules, and open space in between to role-play in. What really brought the game alive were the secrets the GM gave each of us, a little cybernoir idea of his own.

The Girls of the Genziana Hotel

I ran a couple more of playtests of my game about nineteenth-century chambermaids this year and each short campaign taught me more about what the game needed. I'm especially proud of how I've expanded the GM's materials for running the central mystery. All of the suspects' and locations' information is on cards now, each of which has a dangerous nightly side. Reflecting on the process of playtesting, I think I'd like to try testing earlier next time. I've grown less nervous about it.

Trophy Gold

Right now, I can't think of another game I'd play fantasy modules with. It gave me that perfect feeling of getting out by the skin of my teeth after going farther and farther down a weird hole because my tragic non-binary bastard needed just a little more gold. Not everyone was so lucky, though. My partner's characters both met very definitive ends. Anyway, I can't wait to feed a module to Into the Blind and do it all again—in space.

The Details of Our Escape

Combining the macroscopic perspective of a map-drawing game and with some unique mechanics, The Details of Our Escape is a pretty surprising. You narrate the experience of hundreds of refugees at the same time, while deciding the twists and turns of their caravans' journey by linking together dominoes. What I didn't go into in my blog on the game is the focused selection of scenes you'll narrate: evading obstacles, arriving at settlements, communal events, and communities of refugees finding a place to stay behind.

Fight With Spirit

I picked up Storybrewers' scent last year. Me and my partner started working on a possible hack of Jane Austen simulator Good Society: Ordinary Friends, a game about trouble millennials à la Sally Rooney. Meanwhile, my play group got into another Storybrewers game: Fight with Spirit. We played through the winter tournament with our team of windjammers², with all the drama and passion that you'd expect from a sports anime. The summer tournament is around the corner—I'm ready for a new year of games.

That's it for now,
Hendrik ten Napel