my favourite game
JASON MORNINGSTAR After causing a Fiasco and busting through Ghost Court, the indie roleplaying designer admires the ‘less is more’ brilliance of streamlined storytelling RPG Archipelago
M
y favourite game is Archipelago by Matthijs Holter. If you know me you know this, because I can’t shut up about it, and I play the living hell out of it, and I’ve co-designed a bunch of stuff related to it. Have I mentioned that I love Archipelago? If you sent me to Mars and I could only take one roleplaying game, I would not take Archipelago, because I have internalised and memorised the game from top to bottom. (I would take Alex Roberts’ game Tension.) I love Archipelago for a lot of reasons. It’s a clean, elegant game: spare in word count, precise in execution. I appreciate the difficulty of paring a design back to what is essential, and know how much harder that often is than churning out a 300-page A4 tome. At its core, Archipelago is a handful of cards you occasionally draw from to resolve uncertainty and a half-dozen maxims you fall back on to guide you toward good – or, often, great – play. The game is structured loosely as a picaresque, modelled after Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea books in tenor and pacing. Basically it assumes you are playing a group of people on the move. My most recent games were about castaways in Dinotopia and a travelling carnival in post-WWII America.
February 2018
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Those cards, then. They come in two sorts. One pile consists of the outputs to any uncertainty you input. These largely overlap similar cards in another great game, Itras By, because the designers of that deeply weird game (Martin Bull Gudmundsen and Ole Peder Giæver) are pals of Matthijs Holter and were designing in parallel. Why reinvent the wheel, right? Very Norwegian of them. These cards give you a broad result – “Yes, but...” or “No, and…” – and inform play through their specifics. “Yes, but... something unrelated goes wrong,” for example. One card simply says: “Help is needed.” In play they do the boring job of telling you whether your character can escape the thugs who are chasing her, while resolutely throwing the creative bits back to the table to parse. Archipelago trusts you and your friends to be smarter than the designer, or you alone. These cards are functional and get the job done, but they aren’t the really interesting cards. The rest of the deck consists of fate cards. These are the beating heart of Archipelago. When you build up a setting, you figure out what the most important elements are. (In my carnival game they included “suckers and marks”, “money”, and “the carnival family”.) Every session, each of these elements is “owned” by a player, and this rotates from session to session. You are the final say on whatever you own. During play, once per session, you can ask someone else to draw a fate card if you aren’t sure what to do. It might read, “Somebody important to this character faces trouble because of the element you own – severe illness, bankruptcy, doubt in their faith or something similar,” and instantly you have forward momentum again. It is pretty brilliant in play. Imagine if the person who owned “suckers and marks” drew that for you. Or “the carnival family” – the next moves write themselves. This simple, extremely lightweight framework perfectly accommodates my freeform tendencies and desire to enjoy a system that solidly supports play, but fades into the background when it isn’t needed. Combine this with a series of phrases that allow you to calibrate play (including the wonderful and terrifying “Try a Different Way,” a hightrust tool that can amp up your game to new heights if you all love each other), and you have a really beautiful and near-universal game system. I love it! Maybe you will, too! I hope you give Archipelago a try.
It’s a clean, elegant game: spare in word count, precise in execution.
tabletopgaming.co.uk
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15/01/2018 13:45