A review of pretty much every ttrpg I've ever played, before midnight.
I've had the full month of September to review one (1) game. Any game, really. Naturally, this means I'll be finishing a review of pretty much every ttrpg I've ever played in the remaining three hours before midnight.
This gives me less than six (6) minutes per review.
Let's fucking go.
Pretend
Sapiens, Homo et al. At least 300,000 years ago. Probably earlier.
It's pretty good!
Player's Handbook: Core Rulebook I
Dungeons & Dragons, 3.5th Edition. Cook, Monte et al. Wizards of the Coast, 2003.
This is where I learned what a Dungeons and Dragons was. Picture it: playground structure, I'm like seven, and one of the other kids in the homeschool group has got this book. It's pretending to be an older, leather-bound book with gems and studs on the cover. It's kind of cheesy but in a way that is so simultaneously self-conscious and unembarassed as to be intoxicating.
More importantly, this book has got charts of weapons and the height of all the different kinds of people you can be in it. It has numbers to be able to find out just how good you are at crawling through a strange underground space filled with monsters.
I have never played D&D 3.5e, but this impression of it, as something that would challenge not only a fictional character, but the player on the other side of it, with an unfamiliar and dangerous world, remains core to what fascinates and excites me about tabletop roleplaying games.
I do not think I would like playing D&D 3.5e.
Challenger RPG
Dostaler, David L. Superior Games Books, 2011.
My first "real" ttrpg. A clumsy, amateurish, and extremely welcoming volume, purchased for the Amazon Kindle in 2012 or so. It was free. I read it voraciously while traveling.
Pretty solid GM section, which assumes chaotic players and very little prep going to plan. A good place to start. The middle overflows with classes of extremely variable concept, scope, and quality, which is exactly what any twelve-year-old prospective GM needs to hook a couple players.
Simple, if not especially elegant mechanics. D20+mod, big ol' pile of skills. Hit the target number. Interestingly, though — it's all player facing, which keeps things fast and simple. Class powers come in to provide interest, but I'll be honest, we never played much with those.
I remain so grateful that this was my entry to the hobby, even if it isn't very good by many measures.
Interlude: Homemade Games
I've run a bunch of homemade games that I won't be reviewing because I wrote them and that just seems unethical or something but MORE importantly I don't have time I'll get to it later moving right along to...
Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition
Crawford, Jeremy et al. Wizards of the Coast, 2014.
I've run and played a few sessions of 5e. Because it's past 9pm, and I've got a lot of reviews to write; here's my real thoughts:
Fuck this game.
It's fine. It's alright. It's solidly, decidedly pretty good. And it is also some of the absolute worst role-playing, and if not for some of the Wizards' other output — gaming in general — I've ever encountered.
The mechanics are messy, incremental, tentative, frustrating. Abilities seem frightened to effect the fiction in any substantial, meaningful way, while combat spits out injury and death on a fairly arbitrary basis.
The writing is unmemorable, meaning I've have to reference it regularly at the table, where it unfurls limp and joyless.
I respect the hell out of anyone who can pry a good time out of this game, because it sure doesn't help you do it.
MÖRK BORG
Nilsson, Pelle and Johan Nohr. Free League Publishing, 2020.
One of the first indie ttrpgs I picked up, actually. Bright yellow cover was pretty fucking obvious on DriveThruRPG in a sea of Regulation-Compliant Fantasy Beige.
The design is great, though variable. The character creation requires a bit more flipping back and forth than is ideal, but it also spits out some gross little freaks, and I can't complain about that.
Haven't actually played it yet, but it did make me a graphic designer, and I like graphic design a lot, so it gets a quick review.
Thanks, MÖRK BORG!
Magic: The Gathering, Strip.
Garfield, Richard. Wizards of the Coast, 1993.
Not as good as making out with my girlfriend, sorry, Wizards.
Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies
Seyalioglu, Hakan and Kathryn Hymes. Thorny Games, 2019.
Less than the sum of too many parts, Dialect includes some absolutely gorgeous artwork, a tantalizing premise, and a compelling selection of roles and cards, and then proceeds to funnel that through a cranky, overcomplicated structure.
Parts of it work beautifully. The game makes extensive, clever use of index cards placed on the table and folded into stands, which helps keep the play space, clear, tangible, and workable. The role cards for each player provide helpful anchors for later interaction.
But the fact is that it's not a game about how language dies. It's a game about a language that dies. Because the outcome is fixed, completely. The scenes may vary, the words you make may change, but the fate of the language you are called to create together and the isolated community which created it have been decided, and in fact scripted from the point you selected a framework. And that just feels cheap.
More importantly, the structural guardrails that keep the game rolling towards its intended conclusion also keep it from coming fully alive. It produced a couple excellent scenes and memorable characters in the time I spent with it, made more meaningful by using words we had created with the game's assistance — largely leaning on a syllable inventory and deck of cards.
But also, as the facilitator, I kept having to check and re-check the book for the subtle alterations that occur between the game's many, nesting phases. Awkward structural design, and overly-prescriptive storytelling hold it back from the vitality its premise implies.
Mothership 0.5e
McCoy, Sean et al. Tuesday Knight Games, 2021.
MÖRK BORG was the game that let me know indie ttrpgs existed. Mothership 0.5e got me hooked.
Setting the scene: I'm in college. It's 2022 or so. I've picked up a digital copy of the original "0e" zine, itself an exciting, raw piece of design filled with haunted, impressionistic sharpie-and-paint illustrations of faceless body armor, astronauts dying horribly, malformed weapons and industrial equipment.
A weapon spread. It's like being back on the playground, looking at a copy of 3.5e, but this time the book is cool. It's not pretending to be a leather book with gems and stuff on the front. It knows it's a zine. It's scrappy.
I didn't play much of 0.5e — mostly solo sessions in my dorm room, marking up handwritten character sheets to send crews into Screaming on the Alexis for Dead Planet or some cobbled-together scenario. I hung around the Mothership discord a lot during this time, caught up in the excitement and creativity surrounding the game's ongoing development and upcoming release.
It was pretty good. It wasn't finished, obviously. And yet, it ran. It was playable. It worked. It was good enough. One of the big things that allows for the creative scene Tuesday Knight Games has fostered around Mothership is actually the durability of it's visual and mechanical design. It's hard to break. It expects you to throw the game around a little, push the edges, ignore pieces.
And I loved that. I still do.
Spire: The City Must Fall
Howitt, Grant and Christopher Taylor. Rowan, Rook, and Decard, 2018.
Alright sentimentality over. 40 minutes left. It's like 2023, I'm still in college. A friend and theatre classmate offers to run Spire for me and another classmate. They adore Spire.
This is because Spire fucking rules. So much so it'll be getting two reviews in here if I make it that far.
We played a one-shot. I played a Bound. The Bound, if you don't know is what Grant Howitt describes as a "sort of shibari batman," and one of the abilities I took is when you encounter a locked door or window you can simply tell the GM it isn't.
And I did. This felt fucking amazing.
And Spire is just ... like that. It hands you a fantastic premise clandestine dark elf revolutionaries fighting for survival and freedom against a high elf regime in a mile high city, and then sets you loose with gleeful character abilities just begging to be used.
Our GM was an incredibly generous and enthusiastic tour guide for the City Above. I remember the sense of the city of Spire feeling much, much larger than just the scope of the session, spreading out around our characters, lively and wild.
Blades in the Dark
Harper, John. Evil Hat Productions, 2017
Same evening, same friend ran Blades in the Dark, also. Real quick session so here's a real quick review also half an hour left. Duskvol is pulpy and satisfying. The equipment is great. Crime is great. Trains are great (there was a train in the one shot I don't know how much trains will factor into any given game of Blades in the Dark but there can potentially be trains which is not true of many other games.) The mechanics are fine? Hard to see the full extent within a one-shot. The system pushes back. Characters gain Stress. Etcetera. Blah blah blah.
We stole a fucking train in an hour of play. That's cool.
Heart: The City Beneath
Howitt, Grant and Christopher Taylor. Rowan, Rook, and Decard, 2020.
Another banger from the minds at Rowan, Rook, and Decard. Heart is beneath Spire. It's a dungeon made of meat. This is a dungeon game that cuts out the dungeon crawling by giving distance hit points (called Resistance), that you roll against to Delve farther and farther into the Heart, which the GM does by describing horrible meaty, rocky corridors and the creatures that sometimes live there. Works great. The classes are great. I haven't played it much and we've got twenty on the clock so we've gotta move on but this really deserves a better review.
Also: the physical book has a delicious linen texture on the outside cover and I think that's important to mention. The folks at RRD really go off on production.
Between Clouds
Licht, Andi. Andi Makes Games, 2023.
A longtime friend of mine picked this game up and ran a session. The players are symbiotes, biomodified humans in a symbiotic relationship with a kirin, a big flying animal that is your moving base, and humans live in the clouds now because the earth below is toxic and horrible. The art is extensive, colorful, effusive. It is clearly a work of passion and enthusiasm.
And it was built using the Year Zero Engine (YZE) — the mechanical system underlying Free League Publishing games like Mutant: Year Zero, Twilight: 2000, and Tales from the Loop — which ends up being a rough fit in play. The base math for YZE is harsh, and felt widely out of step with the lively tone and tempo the art and writing seemed to be aiming for.
In practice, while some of the joy in the setting struggled through, play was awkward, halting, and somewhat disorienting. Some of this may have been the result of the particular circumstances of that session, but a large part felt like the game was weighing down the experience.
Mothership 1e
McCoy, Sean et al. Tuesday Knight Games, 2024.
The laser cutter does d100 damage. The wound table is great. The graphic design is also great, and I'm super picky, so this matters to me, personally. You might not be broken like I am.
Maybe most importantly, this game is tough. It asks you to change it. And you can, and it's fine. The mechanics are fine. They work. They're harsh where it counts, but forgiving enough that characters can scrape by. It's the other stuff — the way it draws from a variety of science fiction and horror, the ways it implies a grounded, human future, the trinket table, the friendliness of the writing, putting death checks under a cup, and so many other little things I wish I had more time to talk about — that make this such a remarkable work of play and design.
TEETH: Blood Cotillion
Davis, Marsh and Jim Rossingol, 2021.
The itch.io page for TEETH: Blood Cotillion describes it's contents thus: "It's a fair bit."
No kidding. There is so much stuff in this scenario. There's some really good stuff here, too. The players are assassins disguised as debutantes infiltrating a cotillion.
It's a blast. Some of the best pre-generated characters out there, riotously playful abilities and equipment lists, a meaty, uproarious scenario. The mechanics are pretty good, if a little clunky for running fast and short. It draws on a pretty orthodox implementation of Blades in the Dark, and adjusting all the possible modifiers and outcomes of a roll every time someone does something risky takes more time than I'd love for a one-shot. But the adjustments do feel meaningful enough to not be dead weight.
Probably best in 2-3 sessions. There's so much stuff here that fitting it all into 3-4 hours felt like an absolute sprint.
Though perhaps not as much as reviewing every ttrpg I've played before midnight. Four minutes left, by the way. We'll be running overtime on this one.
Slugblaster Turbo X
Hamm, Mikey. Wilkies Candy Lab.
Hands-down the best one-shot design I've ever seen or run. Plays great. Slugblaster has a terrific premise (teenage hoverboarders break into other dimensions to do tricks), that's an easy sell. I've run this for a table of seven, including some folks who were entirely new to ttrpgs, and made it through a full session in an hour-and-a-half. The character sheets include the rules, require the players to make very few choices but still create a character, and the example scenario is an absolute masterclass in well-scoped, manageable one-shot design.
Oh, yeah, it's free. Go get it.
Spire: The City Must Fall
Howitt, Grant and Christopher Taylor. Fifth Anniversary Edition, Rowan, Rook, and Decard, 2023.
Spire's on here twice. It's that good.
In addition to a one-shot described above, I got to join a multi-GM play-by-post campaign for a few sessions. Here, the game's mechanics really got to breathe. Spire runs off a dice pool. Add dice based on what your character is good at (Skills) and the areas they're familiar with (Domains), plus some other factors. Highest result turns into the result and — here's the kicker — probably gives you Stress. Then, you roll against your Stress and see if something horrible happens (Fallout).
Here's kicker #2: if something horrible does NOT happen, Stress does not go down, and in fact if something horrible happens later instead, it may actually be MUCH WORSE. So when you're rolling to find out if something horrible happens, sometimes you hope it actually DOES happen now instead of later.
There is a kind of fatalism and desperation to this dynamic that works really well alongside being desperate, fatalistic cultist-operatives in an endless secret war against the oppressive high elf overclass. Oh, yeah, forgot to mention the clandestine resistance organization for which you will give your life is a cult earlier. It is. Sorry about the delay.
On top of this mechanical masochism lies joyous, bombastic fiction. Fungus takes over factory workers. A train carries experimental lightning weapons. Your character's skin conceals a flickering, unruly True Form — a symptom of infection by the roiling unreality engine beneath the City Above.
And in the middle of this, your cell goes for noodles, because that's where they're meeting for the briefing, and so you sit and chat in the restaurant-safehouse, not knowing the absolute mayhem you are about to unleash or the sometimes-final price your characters will pay in the process.
It's that good.
Dragonbane
Härenstam, Tomas et al. Free League Publishing, 2023.
Free League does a good box set. Dragonbane comes along with a ton of punchboard pawns for all the pre-generated characters and monsters in the core rules, a collection of adventures threaded into a sandbox, and a beautiful map of the whole area. The larger plot for the included sandbox is not especially new or compelling, but it feels direct and intentional enough to be charming. You're here to play a classic fantasy game, and it's got one. Find magic artifact, stop ancient evil, go!
The rules here are alright. Characters are made of a whole lot of stats. Roll under them to do stuff. Blah blah. Characters can be ducks, which is cool, and you're not locked to a class when you create a character — you get a profession at the beginning, and your character is allowed to shift and change from there.
What I've played of Dragonbane remains minimal, a single introductory session which quickly threw my two players into a grid-based combat with wargs. It's effective enough. The action system is simple. You can either attack OR defend, not both, which ends up offering some meaningful choice since a hit or two will drop a character. The outcome was genuinely uncertain at times, and the characters just barely scraped by alive to venture down into the broad valley where the campaign is set.
And yet, it's a little tough to recommend, not so much on its own merits as the variety of excellent fantasy ttrpgs currently available. My admittedly limited impression is that it does a lot of things pretty well. The primary stand-out factor is coming along with a complete set of adventures, a really nice map, and a full set of pawns. It sits somewhere between starter set and standalone game, and it's asking for so much less elbow grease than many of its relatives.
I like elbow grease, though?
Realistically, I'm not sure if Dragonbane is a game for anyone who's deep enough in the ttrpg scene to be reading this review, but I appreciate that it exists.
Eat the Reich
Howitt, Grant. Rowan, Rook, and Decard, 2023.
Undead commandos eat Nazis. Dice pool. Luscious, textural, color-strewn art and page design. I've played a condensed, single-session run and I think it would probably benefit from the breathing room of 3 sessions to have a chance to connect with the cast of characters.
I had a great time with this game, and it also felt somewhat thinner than its consummately exuberant art and writing.
Kingdoms
Tinney, Sofia.
Kingdoms spat out some of the absolute worst characters. A gobbet of nasty, awful, squabbling princelings. We tore into them with joy. They died without honor.
The graphic design and artwork inside is unrestrained. For the most part, this is spectacular and energetic. At times, it would have benefitted from restraint.
Mystic Bastionland
McDowall, Chris.
The game practically runs itself. Making a Realm on a hex map feels great. One of the Knights you can randomly roll comes along with a "boneless steed."
Delta Green
Arc Dream Publishing,
thorough, specific
it lies it lies it lies
messy combat
critical rules buried
too many pages deep
great little interstitial fiction
sets a tone that is bleak and clear
held down by lovecraft baggage
well-placed abstractions
(gear, acquisition, prosecution)
downtime is real good
crossing off motivations
i like the skills list
Last Things Last
Arc Dream Publishing
fantastic one-shot
compact, effective scope
moody, slow start
and you are seeing
a preview — dead Agent
lonely and compromised
opens up as it goes
from an apartment to a cabin
until the end is flung wide
even when the choice
at the end feels obvious,
the details matter
and the execution is uncertain
Over/Under
Sorensen, Sam. Tuesday Knight Games, 2025.
where to even fucking start.
Impossible Landscapes
Arc Dream Publishing,
dreamlike
unreal architecture
a precipice
connections upon connections
the joy of missed information
fuck dorchester house
this is maybe more about hotels than plays
Break!!
not for me, too many rules, deserves to be played in its own setting, great presentation, some fantastic ways of consolidating rules, missing example scenarios to model prep, zone-based combat is great, lots of character options, rules summary needed to be frontloaded instead of buried in the back, way too much scrolling
Ultraviolet Grasslands
Rejec, Luka.
easier to grab than I thought.
Songbirds 3e
snow.
strange but tactile
unfurls characters
terribly organized
haunting
Urban Shadows 2E
Left me wanting something with more bite.
Magic: The Gathering, Commander
Wizards of the Coast, 2011.
Miserable. Agonizing.
Escape from Dino Island
Tung, Sam and Sam Roberts. Mythworks, 2019.
pretty good. love the casualty mechanic. good choice of archetypes. choices at the start were allowed to lead to a more out-there dinosaur story without straining the rules or archetypes, so it’s not bolted to playing jurassic park alone. NOT too much stuff, well-budgeted for one-shot play. romp
Deathmatch Island
Denee, Tim. Old Dog Games and Evil Hat Productions, 2024.
wears influences on its sleeve without being beholden to them
sharp, incisive writing
stark, playable locations
some of the best layout and stylistic design anywhere in the scene
chafed against the rules in a way that I don’t think is unintended or at least not unwanted
results in order of success works fantastic, as does having a moment to narrate — played these as confessionals
not a solved game
cries for a 3-5 session run
DIE
Gillen, Kieron. Rowan, Rook, and Decard, 2022.
deft, layered metafiction
the satisfaction of playing messy, contemporary people
well-laid hooks
compact, effective core mechanics
at all times handing opportunities to twist the knife
GM character!
ritual!!!
For the Queen
Second Edition, Darrington Press, 2024. Originally released by Evil Hat Productions in 2019.
not the most remarkable
but an extremely easy lift
very low pressure at a moment
where that was hugely appreciated
almost no set-up
Old School Essentials
Norman, Gavin. Necrotic Gnome, 2019.
I like it. lots of tools. streamlined layout and approachable text make the ways the game is clunky and unintuitive underneath feel charming rather than infuriating. extremely lethal. 3d6 down the line is an engine of discovery. the appeal of stronghold rules, boats, and more
Into the Odd Remastered
McDowall, Chris. Free League Publishing, 2022.
economical writing
guaranteed encounters
no to hit rolls is beautiful
extremely fast character creation
is an absolute relief
unconventional setting
essentially no bestiary;
pushes for unique monsters instead
uncoated paper, cloth spine feels great
wish the binding was looser
stripped-down layout, which
compliments the mechanical writing
Heaven in the Dust
Jordan, Luke. Plus One Exp, 2025.
based on direct material
so even as gods, real people
played through an explosive session in two hours
after about an hour or set up
maybe too many pieces
but maybe it just wants a couple sessions to breathe
sharply written
poetry is a fantastic choice
chills
A review of this review
It's 1am. Done is beautiful.
For transparency, reviews from Delta Green onward are basically my notes from earlier. So, technically, I'm over time and only reviewed 21 of 37 games this evening. Just so we're clear.
This was a good exercise, extremely reminiscent of knocking out last-minute writing assignments for college. Unlike those, I'll come back for a round of editing if I get the chance.
And until then, good night!
Works Cited
Tuttle, Russell Howard. "human evolution". Encyclopedia Britannica, 31 Aug. 2026, https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution.