Game Review: For the Queen

An imaginative, prompt-driven, story-generating fun time

We needed to fill in for a Friday D&D night where we wouldn’t be at full strength. So …

I’ve played For the Queen a few times before — with actual cards and a table-top — and enjoyed it. In this case, with our band of friends, it was still easier to do in Roll20 on a VTT, and it so happens that the game has a Roll20 version.

The Basics

The game is GM-less (except for someone to kind of help with rules, VTT oddities, etc.), so everybody plays. That’s a bonus for me.

The group decides on a queen from a deck of pictures, all of them interesting and with possibilities just visually.

The story setting is literally this simple:

The land you live in has been at war for as long as any of you have been alive.
The Queen has decided to undertake a long and perilous journey to broker an alliance with a distant power.
The Queen has chosen all of you, and no one else, to be her retinue, and accompany her on this journey.
She chose you because she knows that you love her.

And that’s it. The setting, the war, the journey, the time period, the nature of the queen, the nature and roles of the characters, all come out from the players as, one at a time, they draw Prompt cards that ask questions. E.g.,

You were summoned to a private meeting with the Queen once. Why did you feel disappointed afterward?
What do you do for the Queen that no one else can do?
Who is this distant power you are travleing to, and why do they make you uneasy?

Other players can expand on those questions with suggestions or follow-ups. A player can also pass a card on if they can’t think of an answer … or they can use an X-Card option to delete a card (or answer) that is problematic or that they simply don’t want to see in the game.

Players can give their answers in whatever tone or voice they like (“Jason was really upset when …” or “I always look forward to …” or “Dear Diary …”). Most folk (in my limited experience) to third person.

The focus of most of the cards (explicitly or implicitly) is the character’s relationship with the Queen. We know the Queen has chosen you for this trip because she knows you love her. But … is she correct? Do you? Why? Why not? Is that feeling pragmatic? Romantic? Dutiful? A clever (or desperate) facade? How unalloyed is that love? What, if any, are its limits?

And how does each further answer given by someone else color what you think?

All that’s going to be tested, at the very end …

Play goes around the table, slowly building up and riffing off of each other’s answers and what facts (or opinions) have been established. This goes for 30-120 minutes until the game-ending card is drawn:

The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?

At which point play proceeds around the table one more time, with all the players/characters each answering that question. It could be a description of a staunch defense. It could be a sketchy partial defense short of death. Heck, I’ve seen videos of games where one of the players was the attacker, taking their vengeance with a knife to the back.

I.e., just like everything else, the nature, and possibly the result, of the attack is dependent on the story being told. The aftermath may never be known (or may be discussed later over beers). But at that point the game is over.

Playing on a VTT

This game works very neatly in Roll20 (you can buy it from the Roll20 store) because it’s rules-light and functions on card decks — an instructions deck, a deck of queens to select from, and a deck of 46 prompts.

(You could, if you have a boxed set, actually recreate it in Roll20, but it might not be worth the effort.)

Roll20’s card deck mechanics can be a little wonky, but the pre-settings of the mechanics worked neatly for players drawing Prompt cards, and the GM can take care of the shuffling and bringing out and hiding the decks, which is really all you need.

The other advantage that Roll20 provides, to my mind, is a desktop to write down notes as people expand the mythos of their characters, the world, and the Queen.

Our Game

We ran in Roll20 with a group of five (was to be six, but someone was under the weather at the last moment).

I decided it would be more expeditious to simply pull the rules into a single handout, rather than walk through people reading each individual rule card. That’s a charming mechanism, and would work well getting a group of players used to talking aloud with card draws, but it seemed unnecessary. Plus I was busy tweaking some of the rule actions and notes (e.g., just asserting that the GM would flip three Queen cards and that the players could then choose).

The standard timing mechanism is to slide the “The Queen Is Under Attack” card into the Prompt deck manually — about halfway down for a 30 minute game, or lower down for something longer (as the canon established become more elaborate, the game slows down some). I used a suggestion I saw from the game’s creator and simply set a timer for the group-desired time (an hour). When the “The Queen Is Under Attack” card came up, I simply pulled it aside until the time went off (in retrospect, I should have just dealt it to myself to hold until then).

I had pre-randomized the players to establish play order, putting their names on the edges of the tabletop as a place to scribble notes. I also added a couple of areas for lore about The Queen and The Realm.

I made extensive use of those note areas, and, in fact, wrote the notes for most of the characters myself — because that’s me, and because I can type quickly and could do it while people were talking.

Though there was a lot of lore casting aspersions on the Queen (indeed, one of the players started off with a card that she’d planned an assassination attempt on her), only two of the characters ended up not really defending her. The exchequer whose dog the Queen had killed took advantage of the final attack to try and kill her, and the tax collector moved off to protect the treasure they were carrying. Two of the defenders were half-hearted, still wanting something from the Queen but not willing to lay down their lives if it came to it.

It having been established that the Queen knew black magic (which was how she had held off that first assassination attempt), it was only when the knight of the realm (me) assured her he’d give his life for her that she said, “Yep, that’s what I need for my spell, thanks, O Knight,” and drained said life. He willingly, if a bit disappointedly, fell back into the darkness of death, and as I was the last player around the table, we left it with a freeze frame of character reaction shots as her big spell to “smite her enemies” went off, Butch & Sundance-style.

Fun times!

I loved how the players, from the get-go, were willing to both lean into tweaking the story in unexpected ways (the Queen used magic to thwart the first attack! The Queen killed my dog! The Queen imprisoned Character J’s father because Character J is more beautiful than her own daughter. Oh, the Queen is blind — was that a cost of losing magic? Or was the cost her occasionally homicidal rages?) that everyone else could riff on for their own next card. Sometimes that was due to a suggestion, sometimes it came organically.

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Here’s the tabletop we ended with.

For the Queen 2022-11-11 — Click to embiggen.

The Verdict

This is a great pickup game that requires minimal prep (I did some, not for the campaign, but to smooth out the rules and make sure the tabletop was how I wanted it — again, that’s my kink). It could also be a targeted destination for an evening, scalable from a half to two hours (suggestion: take a break after an hour or so).

The game is designed for 2-6, and I suspect that the number of players will vary things a lot. More players create more hooks, but also make it take longer before things come back around to you, so each character is, in a sense, more shallow the more players there are around the table, unless you make the game longer. (Going over five also creates some group dynamic changes, letting some players fade more into the background.) Our five-for-an-hour worked well.

I can’t say how having someone who is not into RP (“I like to roll dice and hit things with my sword”) would affect the gameplay. It’s not necessary improv theater RP, but storytelling about a character, and since any prompt question can be answered centered around a dagger or fireball as easily as around any emotion, it should work out okay, especially with other players offering suggestions or questions to flesh things out.

The game is definitely replayable, as players define everything through the prompt questions. For example, you can really choose any setting. Our defaulting to vague Medieval fantasy is common, and a lot of the queen images support that — but this really could be set in a modern era (political, business), in space opera, among anthropomorphic woodland creatures, in the Old West, etc. For example, the queen might be the CEO, the journey a critical business trip to meet with execs from a third corporation, the players the business team she chose to bring along because she knows they are all fiercely loyal to her.

Indeed, Evil Hat, the company that produces the game, has put out an SRD that lets people come up with their own overarching story setting and prompt questions in distinctly different settings — because the setting is just a backdrop., the game being about exploring a relationship, a character, and a final decision.

In retrospect, this game sort of hit the sweet spot between the most recent games we’ve done on non-D&D nights: Fiasco (which seems much more demanding of the imagination and of live-RPing skills) and Killer Ratings (where the GM has to do more heavy lifting of the setting). For the Queen instead uses some occasionally gobsmacking questions to draw out that creativity, avoiding the heavy worldbuilding because the game is not about that, but about the characters building themselves through their relationship to the Queen. Very neatly done.

For the Queen deserves its very positive reputation.

Game Review: “Killer Ratings”

A fun one-shot, high-improv, collaborational “ghost hunters” reality show simulation

So here’s a combo review, description, and run-through of Killer Ratings, a game by Ken Lowery.

The Outline

Players (and, to a degree, the GM) are members of a third-rate ghost hunting “reality” show, desperate for ratings salvation before they get canceled, which they figure they can get through finding the holy grail of such shows: solid proof of life after death. Luck for them, they’re going to get that proof. Unlucky for them, they might get first-hand experience in the “death” part of it …

Here’s the official IndieGoGo description:

KILLER RATINGS is a one-shot, zero-prep, rules-light tabletop roleplaying game for 3 to 5 players and a Director. The players are the cast and crew of a terrible paranormal investigation show on the verge of cancellation. The good news is you’ve secured the rights to film the season finale in “the most haunted location in America.” The bad news is the place is actually really haunted, and you may well be completely boned.

As loud, campy reality TV stars, your gift for melodrama will be all you need to wake the dead – and may well be your key to survival once the haunting goes sideways. If it doesn’t get you killed first.

In short, you play some of the worst people on earth as they blithely walk into one of the worst places on earth, and most of you won’t survive. But however it shakes out, it should make for great TV.

Killer Ratings is highly narrative and RP-driven. There are die rolls, but those mechanics are way in the background — important, but infrequent until the very end.

Instead, the group as a whole “builds” a haunted setting, inventing clues and set pieces (“Features”) that slowly, collaboratively begin to tell a story about What Happened Here and How To Summon the Ghost. At the end, of course, they realize the horrible mistake they’ve made, and flee for their lives, as the Ghost tries to take them.

The Gameplay

I started an X-Card style safety talk at the beginning of the game, which I’ve never done with any other game I’ve run — largely because some of the play-throughs I’ve watched/listened to have leaned into the horror. We never got near that point, I think.

The game rules call for figuring out the characters, first, but I decided to start with the show and the haunt/setting first, as that would provide some context for the players to be built in.

The rules have nice guidelines for coming up with a fun show title, and then I drew from the players further details (Where do viewers go to see this show? Why have ratings been so bad?). We ended up with Fiend Highway, a show on its third, faltering season on History Channel … but it’s History Channel 3, which most cable packages don’t cover.

The rules also have suggestions to collaboratively develop the setting and triggering event of the haunt — in our case, a College, the site of a Forbidden Ritual. With further discussion, the players decided that rumors on the internet told a sorority house on the campus of Holy Ghost College (originally a Lutheran-sponsored school in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest), where the sisters had tried to summon the ghost of their Founding President, in order to find where a treasure had been hidden in the place. No big deal, except one of the sorority sisters had vanished, and the survivors — who had been cleared of the place as a possible crime scene — had told conflicting tales about what happened to her, all of which seemed to be innocent …

Then I had the (four) players come up with characters within one of the five preset roles in the game — the Face (the star of the reality show), the Camera Person, the Face’s Buddy (co-star / rival / enabler), the Academic, or the Charlatan.

That netted us a Face who was an enthusiastic True Believer in a car salesman sort of manner; a gruff veteran Camera Person quietly bemused by the things they ran across; an Academic who was kicked out of the academy for pursuing fringe science about the afterlife; and a Charlatan Elvira-esque psychic, complete with deep cleavage.

(Some of this didn’t precisely align with the roll descriptions, but as it’s all just guidelines for RP, who cares?)

All characters have two attributes: Provoke (ability/willingness to stir things up, including the Haunt) and Survive (hit points, essentially). You get a total of 5, and need a minimum of 1 in each, so that means 4/1 or 3/2 in one combo or another.

The GM was Bob, the Director, out in the van keeping the recording gear running and chatting over the remote communications gear. My role there was to prompt people to find or describe information they were coming up with, provoke some conversations or reactions, and make occasional references to fiascos during earlier episodes.

After an initial arrival, description of the outside of the ΓΟΣΤ sorority house, some RP-establishing discussion with the Assistant Deputy Dean of Students who was, unapproving, there to meet them, the team went in …

Going Room to Room

Each room (and the game comes with suggestions as to what rooms one might find in a given setting) is named and initially described by the GM, complete with creepy vibe and unusual features (the game also has suggestions for these, broken apart between Act 1, the unsettling stuff, and Act 2, the actively freaky but not quite yet unbelievable bits).

That then gives the players the opportunity to interact with the room, the show, and each other: seeking camera time, establishing Features themselves, wondering aloud about what they are seeing, theorizing for the viewers, acting out any drama they feel inclined to, etc.

In so doing they are not only fleshing out their characters and the show, but beginning to build a more detailed story around the haunt — what actually happened, and why.

At the end of each room (whenever it feels like a proper amount of discovery and activity has taken place, the GM calls for a Provoke roll, to see how much each character may have provoked the Haunt into manifesting. Rolling 1d6 below or at the character’s Provoke level means a Provocation has happened. As GM, I kept track of those, comparing them to a value suggested by the rules …

And then it’s on to the next room, as described by the GM. The same sorts of activities occur, with the GM leaning into spookiness that seems to tie into the theories of the players (or the GM, if need be) as to what is going on. Once the total of end-of-room Provocations reaches the “secret” number, then the Act is over. Have the Face give us a sing-out to commercial …

After Act 1, the GM coordinates a brief discussion about (a) how the character interplay is working, (b) what the characters think is going on, and then (c) what would punch up the drama.

Act 2 works just like Act 1, only the suggested Features and Vibes are ramped up and creepier — going from weird stains on the ceiling to blood dripping off the walls. Not a bingo sufficient to make it a day, but enough to further guide the tale (i.e., inspire the players to do so), build a mood, and, once enough Provokes have again been scored, have an unmistakable supernatural occurrence. Sing out to commercials, leading to Act 3.

Between acts this time, the players finalize their theory as to what is actually going on, and where and how they are going to act to cause the Ghost/Haunt to fully manifest. That is, of course, their goal, even if we, the GM and Players, know that is a terrible idea.

In our case, the understanding of the Haunt had morphed over many rooms. There was still a focus on the spirit of the founder of the sorority, Agatha Spenser-Reede. The Face kept commenting on how poorly the place was being kept up, the strange smells, the unwashed dishes, narratively trying to provoke the Haunt. But between me and the players, we also started building a tale of a sorority gone wrong, of bad behavior and debauchery and worse. In the end, the players “realized” that the effort by the sorority girls that fateful night was to lay the spirit an angry Agatha to rest, not to summon her up. So clearly they need to find the orgy room / sex gym as the site where Agatha would be most likely to be summoned up.

Bear in mind that it’s the players who eventually put that jigsaw puzzle together. I amplified their ideas as they came up, sometimes tried to give a little extra spin in a sympathetic direction (e.g., some mysteriously marked DVDs hidden in the TV room), etc. But I was quite happy what they found, even if it veered off from my original idea.

(So Agatha was a big freak about being physically and morally clean. The idea that the current generation of sisters maybe were not, and that the haunting was all about features of filth and sin and blood, all fit together quite neatly.)

My original thought was that they were going to go to the President’s Room (so marked with a plaque), which doors they’d seen Agatha slamming shut, to find that as the place where the sorority “forbidden ritual” ceremony had been held. Instead, they found the “Workout Room,” which looked just like you’d expect, except with various supernatural trappings, indications of strange brackets and hooks and places where things could be mounted, and a shattered mirror by the dance bar behind which was a broken video camera (where the girls had been photographing either their own pornos or creating blackmail videos for fun and profit).

Blood flowing down the mirror, corner of the eye figures humping on the floor, weird distortions in the room — yup, that was the place.

The Face tried to be the center of the final provocation but suddenly started missing his rolls. The Academic was the one who tried/said something that triggered …

… well, the giant, spectral, decayed-and-filth-ridden remains of Agatha Spenser-Reede, rising up out of the floor and chastising them as NAUGHTY GIRLS WHO MUST BE PUNISHED! And the characters suddenly realize how pear-shaped this has gotten.

Act 4 is the flight from the Haunt, retracing their steps. This time they are rolling 1d6 plus their Provoke, the high score being the one who gets attacked by the Ghost. There are mechanisms to simply take it (lose Survive), or redirect it to someone else (by sacrificing a Provoke), or just (once a game) negating it. On analysis, it’s not a particularly onerous setup, but it is designed for backbiting or selfish characters to screw with each other while fleeing for their lives.

This act goes fast — run back to the previous room, only to find out that the spooky effects from the way in are now cranked up to 12. The running washing machines that seemed to be filled with soap and blood before? They’re now vomiting soap and blood all over the room, as the Hair Drying seats that were clearly non-operational are now bellowing flame and howling like the damned.

In our case, Paul, the Face and True Believer, actually sacrificed himself (took a hit from the Ghost with only 1 Survival to his name) in order to make sure that the video taken would get to the public. Everyone else managed to make it out, in time for a final wrap session for the episode, where memorials for Paul and descriptions of What We Learned Today were had, including a final pre-videoed sign-off for the episode by the late, great, Paul Peterson was run, with cheesy “IN MEMORIAM, 1990-2022” text video-overlaid atop it.

Curtain, and applause.

Good game. The mechanics worked well. There is more than enough call for the GM to improvise a constantly shifting set of next steps and story elements, while letting the players drive the plot. And it clearly would play differently with different characters and settings. Fun times.

Playing with Roll20

Killer Rating is not sold as a Roll20/VTT game, and, if necessary, it needn’t be. Everything can be Theater of the Mind, the GM can scribble notes to one side, rolling can be trust-based, and everyone could be just talking by telephone, if need be. Indeed, the trial game I found there was no sort of VTT use involved.

That said, it occured to me that in a real game, you’d have public notes. You’d have a way of easily seeing people’s Provoke and Score, identities, and, of course, clues and rooms.

So even though it is a “zero prep” game, I spent a bunch of time to prep a (reusable) Roll20 tabletop, essentially to be used as a whiteboard. I had Provoke and Survive tokens. I had room outlines — not for maps, but for notes.

Killer Ratings 2022-10-14 — Screen cap of the Roll20 board I made, with notes.

I also moved a bunch of tables and rules outlines from the rulebook to Roll20 journal entries. That made it a lot easier to juggle things and present them to players. And as people rolled for the initial setup or for various Provokes, having the die rolls up in the chat was handy (not for trust, but just for being able to reference them). I also pulled in some graphics for “And now a word from our sponsor” and “We are having technical difficulties, please stand by.”

(And I spent a few hours posting lots of “Ghost Hunter” memes to the game Discussion Board in Roll20, to set the tone and/or amuse.)

I don’t know if the players thought it was necessary, but it worked pretty well for me. Anyone could add notes to the tabletop, though only one player did (as color commentary on the way out).

What would I do differently?

I thought the game went pretty well, and I had players both telling me they were getting the wiggins at times, and that they had a good time, so I take them at their word.

There are only a couple of things I might frame or nudge a bit differently on the next go-around (which I think will happen).

First, the game really leans, for fun, on the rivalry and backstabbing of the party. “Terrible people,” the rules say. My son noted that this wasn’t necessarily the best group for that — we are all pretty consciously nice to each other (and are, in fact, nice people). There was minimal elbowing for camera time, verbal sniping, or rerouting ghost attacks in the finale (and the one that there was was (1) for a Higher Cause, and (2) blocked by the Face, who had previously sacrificed himself during an attack and so was allowed to do so).

So I would probably try to instruct the players to be a bit more aggressive — all in the name of hilarity (and to make soft provocation by the GM easier).

Second, I probably didn’t rein in Features (clues) found by the players quite enough. They were introducing supernatural elements too early. That weakened the reveal at the end of Act 1, and even a bit for Act 2. Not a huge problem, but I’d likely lay out, as I suggest people spotlight things, appropriate levels of weird. (That may be my CDO working, though.)

Oh, and I (and they) also forgot about poor Carolyne Merrill, the sorority sister whose disappearance made this a cause célèbre. She may have been killed by the first manifestation of Agatha (probably for spilling blood all over the originally-expensive rug in the President’s suite), or she might have been possessed by Agatha and used as her anchor here in the world. In either case, RIP.

And that’s a wrap

A fun one-off, “zero prep” game. I strongly suspect it would be a very different beast, even with the same players. I really loved that the players drove a lot of the narrative elements of the game, including “Aha! That’s what’s going on here!” It’s not a matter of the GM trying to get them to guess the pre-written story, but adapting to the story as it evolves. We came out with something better than I would have thought of.

We ran about 3.5 hours, with a bio break during one of the commercials. We could have moved faster than that, if I’d pushed the accelerator — one of the big purposes of the GM here is to keep the pace going forward at a reasonable clip — but I think it was pretty okay except for the player who was two timezones later.

Overall, a good time, and I’m ready to go back for more.

Killer Ratings is by Ken Lowery at Bannerless Games, and is available at $10 for PDFs, or $20 with a hardcopy thrown in. It comes with a lighter-tone (and lighter-weight) variation called TargMarg, about people sneaking drinks into an open-all-night Super Target and having drunken shenanigans.

Game Review: “Dwindle”

Caro Asercion, 1-5+ players, 2-3 hours, $7.77

⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ — Ease of Play
⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ – Replayability
⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ – Fun

Dwindle is a self-contained indie RPG designed to let you run an “occult cyberpunk” scenario in the dying tech metropolis of Vector City.

VECTOR CITY used to gleam, its wireframe skylines shimmering against a perpetual pixel sunset. But the Vector’s heyday is long gone, and you — the ECHOES of this former metroscape — are left tending to the wreckage.

You’re no more special than any of the other stragglers stubborn enough to stick around; people here live hardscrabble lives full of risk and danger, and the difference between success and obliteration is as fickle as static in the wind. But without somebody to keep things running smoothly, it’s only a matter of time before the ghosts and the glitches and the corporate bastards eat away at every last bit of data and render this husk of a city entirely unrecognizable.

You won’t let it disappear without a fight.

Written by Caro Asercion, the game does a quite decent job of letting you generate characters (it can be played GMless if you like) and develop a scenario. Characters and the city are seeded (randomly, if you wish) by tables with interesting people, gadgets, goals, and problems to guide game play. There’s enough there I suspect for a number of replays before things might to seem repetitive.

One of the tables to help you build your character. Using an item from your pocket adds a die to your roll.

Dwindle’s most unique mechanic is its use of a grid to place seven dice into. The sum of dice for each row and column give you dice to roll for different actions/attributes (with bonus dice for reputation or use of a trinket in your pocket) — the highest die rolled provides a range of success or failure for the group to interpret.

The digital grid. I can see that one row means I have a Hack (modify tech) of 1 die, and the other column means I have a Heed (awareness) of 2 dice.

The trick is, those dice you rolled get removed from your grid, meaning, as the game name implies, your abilities and options dwindle over time, until you reach a situation where the highest die you roll (or, if you are at 0 dice available, the lower of two dice) scores a 1, at which point you can replenish the grid in whatever way you like.

It sounds a little complex, but it’s mechanically simple, esp. if you use the digital interface by Tim Busuttil. The main thing is figuring out when best to shoot big dice, realizing you’ll be seriously weakened until you can figure out how to replenish.

The Good

Intriguing setting, neatly set up for a variety of adventures.
Clean and pretty rule set, plus a text-only version if that’s how you roll.
Interesting attribute / rolling grid (with digital tool).
Great for a one-off / fill-in session.
Can be run without a GM.
Can be played tabletop or virtually (if you trust your players’ rolling).

The Not-As-Good

Limited replays without brainstorming some new elements for the tables.
Characters may feel a little generic, as dice can replenished in whatever arrangement you wish.
Most die results are mixtures of success and failure, making it difficult to feel an unalloyed success.
Attribute tags sometimes drive, rather than guide, the action (“I have dice left in this, so that’s what I should do”).
In the session we played, we dwindled pretty quickly, and didn’t have a lot of luck replenishing.

It’s a fine one-night stand-in when a key player or the GM can’t make it for the regular session. I’m glad we played it, and I’d enjoy playing (or even GMing) it again.

Do you want to know more?

Game Review: “One Last Fight”

Superrobotbear, 2-6 players, 2 hours, $10
I ran this as a one-night fill-in when my normal D&D campaign couldn’t run because of absent players. We’ve been playing in Roll20 as a Virtual Tabletop, so I wanted something that would use that. I also wanted something I was pretty sure would fit into one evening; picking a “short” D&D crawl was a recipe for it spilling into multiple weeks.

I ended up with One Last Fight, by Ethan Hudgins, released back in late 2019. Ethan describes the game as “A GM-less Card-Prompt RPG for 2 to 6 players,” and that’s pretty accurate. I purchased and ran this through Roll20, which seems like a much superior choice to buying PDFs and printing up your own copy of the game.

I say “I ran this,” but that’s not quite right. OLF is technically GM-less (I was GM as far as Roll20 was concerned, which was helpful with some card mechanics, and I knew the rules better than the players, but I tried to keep a distance regarding creatively guiding the game).

OLF’s premise is that a party of 2-6 is ending a long campaign/quest against their nemesis: slowly approaching where the nemesis is located, fighting their way in, then engaging in final battle. All of this is guided by a structured card deck built from separate decks for each phase of the approach. Twenty-five cards are dealt, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but the games generally seem to take a couple of hours.

There are really two games in OLF. One is a structure for conflict resolution. Character cards have simple combat attributes, bolstered by items/treasure acquired. Those attributes represent the number of dice to be rolled vs the challenges on the Adventure Cards. The Adventure Cards are flipped from the deck, and may force a solo challenge (which can be passed on to another player) or a group challenge (faced by each individually). These could be a bad guy, a group of opponents, a trap, a challenging situation, etc.

One Last Fight - character card — Character card with questions, special powers, and conflict attributes. This character has one each of the Key, Crown, and (through a treasure item) Magic attributes.

So if the conflict has Swords and Magic as vulnerabilities, and I have two Swords and one Magic, that gives me three dice, plus the free one I get, so I am rolling 4d6. If the conflict shows “4 4” as the difficulty, then on the individual dice I’m rolling (sums make no difference), I have to have two dice that have 4, 5, or 6 on them.

While many conflicts have the stake of losing life vs gaining treasure, quite a number have a different win/lose effect, sometimes being a matter of “this helps the party a lot” vs “this helps the party a little.”

Conflicts get hairier as the adventure progresses, until you finally get to the nemesis, the titular Last Battle, where it is kill or be killed.

Additional variation in play — beyond the randomizing of the built deck — come from the characters chosen: a variety of archetypes with both different strengths (conflict attributes) and various ways they can break the rules, from changing die rolls to providing assistance to other players.

But that brings us to the second system present in OLF, because, beyond a solid conflict mechanic, OLF is first and foremost about storytelling.

A game can be set (as a collaborative decision) in any setting — high or low fantasy, science fiction, the Old West, spies, comic books, named franchises or generic pastiches. The cards and actions are set as archetypes, without any particular setting in mind — a character’s description as being able to tell the future could be magic, it could be psionics, it could be the Force, or it could be a powerful computer. This gets determined by the group defining the setting, and by every card — nemesis, characters, gear, and adventure cards — having a series of questions that describe the present or fill in the past.

One Last Fight - nemesis cards — Some of the Nemesis cards. Collaboratively answering the questions help create the game setting.

Those questions may be answered by individuals drawing the cards, or by group efforts. And while the story built by those questions and answers don’t actually affect the mechanics, they can influence how the individuals play, and, when all is said and done, the create the story that players will remember long after they recall a given die roll.

It’s those questions and answers in the end that make OLF special, from “What does this statue ask of you” to “For whom in the group would you take an arrow? Why?” to “How did you allow this enemy to escape before?” to “What does the nemesis mutter as they cling to life?” You could play without that storytelling, but ultimately they are what, to me, makes the game what it is.

And even when you reach the end, and the Nemesis is defeated (one hopes), there are final questions — the inevitable (and often most dramatic) where does you character go from here? (Or, if your character died — quite possible — how are they remembered?)

The Good

Well done storytelling prompts.
Good conflict resolution mechanic.
Pretty easy rules.

The Bad

Storytelling and conflict resolution don’t really link together.
Roll20’s card deck mechanics can be irksome.
No physical printed version available; printing PDFs would be painful.
Very indie, so not a lot of info out there about it (by no means the game’s fault).

Overall, One Last Fight is a flexible and entertaining and imagination-stretching game, perfect for fill-in sessions or killing a couple of hours. The rules setup (at least in Roll20) was a bit sketchy and disorganized, but the gaps are easily filled in; the game’s rules are picked up pretty quickly in play. It’s available on Roll20 for $10, or on the author page for the PDF version (same price).

Vigorously recommended.

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