A chunkier game this week. Or, more an anthology of games. It's exactly what it says on the tin here, 24 little games! This was made back in 2010 before the term 'lyric games' came into vogue, which makes this a bit of an interesting historical document, to me, anyway. I don't know much about lyric games, but I'm going to be reading a lot of them, probably!
I'm not going to talk about all 24 games. Instead, I'll speak broadly about the collection and then highlight a few of my faves.
In general, this was a lot of fun to read, there's a really strong writing style that varies from game to game depending on the tone, where the narrator will often get 'into character' in a way that matches what the game's about. The games vary in complexity and vibes from children's games to more adult themes and subjects, a decent number of them about relationships breaking down. Most of them also have timers and are designed to only take about 15-20 minutes to play.
All The Color Has Gone: A game about the fuzziness of memory. There are two coins, and you take turns describing memories to each other, until someone interrupts when you're describing something to ask "what colour was it?" You both flip: Matching coins let you describe a colour, non-matching coins mean you don't know. Then, when everyone's gone, you flip the coins again. Matching means that colour has returned to the memories that didn't have them, and non-matching means colour has drained away from the ones that did.
Slower than Light: All the players are journeying off in different directions and writing letters to each other. But after your initial letter to one person, you have to make a mark on the letter and hand it to someone else, who then ticks the mark and gives it to its recipient. Each time, you make another mark, as the letters take longer and longer to reach the recipient. When the timer runs out, there's gonna be a lot of unsent letters left.
THE SIGN OF THE GREAT OLD ELDER GOD FROM BEYOND: This is a two player game where one player plays a Worshipper of an Elder God and the other plays its Avatar. The Avatar gives the Worshipper tasks, and the Worshipper asks questions on how to summon their god, but the Avatar then strikes out a word the Worshipper used in their question, and they have to say gibberish in its place. There's more rules than that, but it's the core conceit of eventually just ending up going "BLAURGH WAUGH FINGER GLABEBD BLRHG" that brings me joy, and the way the game is written is in such a grand and imperious tone, it's great.
The Pitch: This one's really funny. You play this with a small group of people split into the "pitchers" who are employees of a company, and the clients, who they're trying to sell things to. From there, it's basically a hidden role game but without a victory condition where you draw a card and it gives you a goal your character is trying to pursue (you're in love with another person here, you're trying to convert someone to your religion, you're SO hungry) which you're encouraged to play into in a very over the top fashion. If I was picking one of these to play at a party, it'd be this one.
First Impressions: It's fantasy adventurer speed dating in an inn! Everyone makes characters, is paired off, and has two minutes to introduce themselves to each other and RP in-character. Everyone also has tokens they can give out to the people they liked best. The one with the most tokens wins and is the party leader. It's fairly straightforward, but the thing that made me like it so much is the alternate ending, where the inn gets attacked. Everyone has to immediately pair off and anyone left over narrates their death. Then, in the duos, the person with less tokens dies, and the surviving person gets rid of the number of tokens their partner had, but if you both have equal tokens, you both survive! And then another round happens, until everyone's got equal tokens or there's one person left and everyone else is dead. May the best adventurer win!
The Leaves Will Bury: You all write down a bunch of details about a person on many little slips of paper -- this person has recently died. You spend a while talking about them using the various details on the paper, and then you timeskip, and discard a quarter of the paper. Then you do that again. And again. And again. Until you're a new generation, the ancestors of your previous characters, and soon, there's nothing left. It's a really sad and poignant way of showing how ephemeral life is.
