Games like Four Lovers

The year is 1599 You are all judges on the Court of the Queen’s Bench in London.  As with actual judges in the year 1599, no legal experience is necessary. You will hear five cases. In each case you will have three options for dispensing justice. You will have three minutes to adjudicate each case. When you hear music, it is time to announce your verdict.  This experience is fun when you view eac…

Someone has stolen a pig. As a sophisticated traveler you may find this crisis laughable, but for these poor farmers a full-grown pig will fetch the same coin as two months of hard work, and it will keep a family from starving over a hard winter. It isn’t funny to the people who lost the pig—it is a disaster. They want their pig back and they want you to find it, alive or in pieces. And they want …

Sure, call it a ghost, that works. A ghost killed your dad. The truth is that there are ultradimensional monsters that can move back and forth across dimensions to fuck with our shit.  Why they do this we do not know, but they have done it throughout recorded history. They are angels and devils and UFOs and bigfoot.  From our point of view it is just senseless, mendacious evil. Now we have machine…

Bermuda, 1934. You’ve come to this paradise to drop a two-and-a-half ton iron ball off the side of a ship and lower it almost a kilometer into the abyss.  You’ve come to crawl inside that iron ball and go down with it, to see what there is to see down there.  You’ve come with three other brilliant adventurers, friends, and lovers, and you’ll all get a chance to descend and risk your lives in excha…

Ten years after an experiment, a group of clones return to the lab for their last moments, all believing they are the original, and the only one that will not die. Denatured is a live-action roleplaying game by Rachel Rudy Logistics: Participants: Four to six people, with six being the ideal, one of whom facilitates.Time: Roughly two hours plus additional time for an introduction and a debrief.Th…

As you probably know, here at the Time Institute we’ve built enormously expensive machines that generate ultradimensional wormholes and then create Einstein-Rosen bridges that allow us to exchange consciousnesses across time. We manage the destructive positive feedback loop of virtual particles circulating through a wormhole generator by sending returning particles not to their universe of origin …

In a fantasy village, witches exist on the margins of society and are treated very badly.  That is why they become witches in the first place. In The Black Drink, they must choose what indignities are worth enduring. Past that limit, they must go to desperate extremes to summon agreeable demons, gain their help, and learn the secret rituals necessary to repay them. These rituals are capricious and…

Space is a huge inconvenience.  It’s big, it’s dangerous, and it is between you and anywhere interesting.  Once upon a time it was so outrageously hazardous that people traveling through it were killed now and then just for being there. Of course today spaceships are safe and sensible and no one dies in old-fashioned ways like “hull depressurization” or “reactor explosion”. Today spaceships are sm…

Magic Circle is the name of a leafy suburban cul-de-sac where a bunch of monsters live The monsters keep a low profile but there’s always something complicating the simple life. This game is about them meeting to address neighborhood problems, both mundane and fantastic. Magic Circle is a tabletop roleplaying game designed by Jason Morningstar. Logistics: Participants: 4-8 players, one of whom lig…

When adventurers come to town, there is a simple and time-honored checklist. 1. Hide the children. 2. Get out our valuables and put them in a pile. That’s it. That’s the checklist. Then hope they take our things and don’t go looking for our children.  The alternative, of course, is to utter a word of protest, or to stupidly conceal our valuables, or to issue the slightest whiff of resistance. Th…