Winterhorn is an incredible game that does for LARPs what Papers Please did for videogames, making the banality of evil in authoritarian regimes real.

You are an interagency working group in an unnamed country loosely based on East Germany (but even western democracies have secret police, the FBI ran COINTELPRO for decades, and in 2003 a British undercover agent had a child with an activist before disappearing.) Your target is Winterhorn, an activist group composed of seven core members with ideals, desires, and weaknesses laid out in the briefing material. Additionally, you have a role as a secret police agent, with a past and an agenda of your own.

Over three rounds of thirty minutes each, your secret police squad will select seven options from deck of twelve secret police tactics, ranging in violence from hands-off wiretapping to sending 'patriotic' thugs (off-duty cops) to assault members of Winterhorn. You can also be tricky, setting up front groups to siphon away recruits and using "bad jacketing" to destroy the cohesion of the group by planting rumors suggesting some members are informers for the secret police. At the end of the game, the seven tactics that you chose in the last round are used to create a final report drawn from paragraphs in the rules, which describes how well the group succeeded in its mission. Then you debrief and discuss the ethics of the secret police.

Winterhorn is a shining example of rules-light design. Key game information like character roleplaying notes, OOC roles, and the results of operations, are contained on playing cards. The system of choosing seven of twelve options forces the group to evaluate and select tactics, but it is possible to over-commit and blow the operation. It's a brilliant piece of game design which creates an emergent narrative without getting tied down in complex rules or props. Twelve alternate operation cards provide a smidgen of replayability, but Winterhorn is mostly a one-and-done experience. The graphic design is top-notch, with bureaucratic memos describing Winterhorn, and a samizdat zine describing the secret police. You can choose to print-and-play the cards or buy them (mine are in the mail, and I full expect them to be excellent). A brief essay on the history of subverting political enemies rounds out the materials.

With the caveats that this is a read-through review rather than a playtest review, though I can't imagine the rules breaking, and that I didn't comprehensively crosscheck the cards to see if nonsense outcomes could arise, I love this game. Education and LARPing are two flavors that should go together like chocolate and peanut butter, but making a good EduLARP is surprisingly hard. As a tabletop gamer and professor, I've been only moderately impressed with the games put out by the Reacting to the Past (RttP) consortium. RttP may beat the standard rigmarole of lectures and essays, but the game design is not particularly sophisticated, and my time in the RttP facebook group suggests that most professors have similar problems about students not reading background material, not getting involved, and the game system giving nonsensical answers about how the siege of Athens proceeds. My own efforts in this area were a near-total failure of design goals saved only by brilliant improvisation on the part of my co-instructors. So believe me when I say A) this stuff is hard and B) Jason Morningstar has cracked the code.

Ran as a convention game. Chilling, bleak, one of the best games of the year.

This is a really fun game that was really great and easy to play. The mechanics were light enough to not be a pain but existent enough that I didn't feel abandoned by the writers or anything. Great replayability potential, and it led us in some storytelling directions I don't think we would have gone on our own.

Easily worth the price for the PDF, and I can imagine buying a hard copy to make it easier to play IRL. This might be a good game to play with (older) kids to introduce them to the idea of tabletop gaming; I can definitely see my younger cousins, nieces, and nephews, having fun with this.

This was a great one-shot to play on a day my regular campaign was missing players.

Really very cool, a fun experience to share with friends who care about mysterious

The game is fun. Its a system thats easy to learn and dosent take much setup. It has an improv feel, and i enjoy that. Twas Good.

This is basically genius. It's one of the weirder niche settings I've encountered, but somehow all the more powerful for it.

A very well-written game. The rules are brief and concise, containing everything you need to play. The only thing that prevents you from running this game in ten minutes from printing is that it takes a while to cut the cards. I've now run the game five times, and the stories that emerged varied wildly, from love stories to murder mysteries to the cthulhuoid. The mask has been used as described in the rules, but also forced unto players to send them to Hell, used as self-sacrifice and everything in between. It's an awesome tool! If the game lacks anything, it would be a list of pitfalls to avoid. Last run I had, the players played themselves into a corner where they needed a non-existing NPC to be physically present to conclude the game, but luckily they managed to kidnap a bystander (I was filming the session, normally I'd have participated).

I got this earlier in the year, and have play/run it about 3-4 times. The first time it was with just 2 of us, the next times it was a short play-test with 3, and the last time I ran it as a pseudo-GM/facilitator with 5 players.

This game does some really clever things. You start with a character sheet that is almost entirely blank. You have no memory of your past life. You get to draw over the skeleton on the sheet, so there is a little art period, where you add a sword, or helmet, or whatever. I.e. what you might look like.

The great thing is that the questionairre on the character sheet gets filled out during the game, as you play... you start to fill in your path and remember things.

And then there are quite periods during the long dark between scenes, where you sit, quiet, in the dark, for a few minutes. It really catures some great essence.

If interested, I write about my sessions in pictures / more details / writeup: http://www.supernovembergames.com/tomes-of-tomes/2016/9/6/strategicon-gateway-2016-saturday-and-god-and-praxis (about half-way down) http://www.supernovembergames.com/tomes-of-tomes/2016/7/12/the-skeletons-in-space-a-very-short-playtest http://www.supernovembergames.com/tomes-of-tomes/2016/6/3/astg-the-skeletons

After funding the KickStarter, but not getting to play or run it yet, I finally got to play this at Big Bad Con 2016 at a convention game. The game does such a brilliant job of allowing you to play prey. The world is a rough and dangerous place, and you feel it at every turn. At the convention game they had the accompanying deck of cards, which is a nice touch, but by no means necessary.

If you are familiar with PbtA (Apocalypse World-based) games, then you will already be familiar with the success / success with complications / fail forward mechanics. One thing that differentiates this game from many other RPGs, is that there is really not much in the way of "combat". Being prey does have its disadvantages. That said, one brilliant mechanic in this game is the Innovate move, which allows you to cleverly come up with new moves that your bunnies discover or create. In our game we created "Speak for the first bunny" (i.e. Proselytize... i.e. Religion). A nearby table innovated a move to start fires, in helping fighting off the humans... but which resulted in a complete forest fire.

All in all, I can see this working equally well with younger audiences, but also can be brutal and dark with those that want it so. It also allows for easy progression of new characters in the continued tale-telling of the same rabbit warren, which means that even though characters can die easily, that doesn't have to stop the game.

Great game. My writeup of the con game is somewhere in here: http://www.supernovembergames.com/tomes-of-tomes/2016/10/19/big-bad-con-2016-saturday

So glad I went out on a limb and bought this game. I'm used to playing more traditional dice and minature games but when I heard the description of Fiasco I had to pick up a copy. It has changed my gaming life. Highly recommend.

I haven't had the chance to play it yet, but it's a very intriguing game. The rules "proper" are just one page (plus a second page of optional rules and things to try), and the rest are tables, somewhat akin to Fiasco's Playsets. You get to sets of tables: the standard one, and Sara Williamson's variant.

This game is certainly not for everyone, and will probably vary wildly depending on which players you play with. I'm looking forward to trying this out. If you like "artsy" or indie games, or if the description sounded appealing, I think it's totally worth the eight bucks. If you or your players are into min-maxing and rules... stay away.

Excellent system for people who want an RP experience that requires minimal setup time in a GM-less environment. I picked this up after finding out my usual GM couldn't show up for our FATE campaign. We set up the game vanilla, and chose relationships before we built our characters. Then we picked the needs, objects, and locations to make things super insane. The result was a total blast, full of awesome stories, ridiculous twists, and more than a few missing limbs. I would recommend this game to anyone who is looking for a new collaborative game to play with friends or anyone who needs a break from their usual RP session.

One thing I noticed was that the players who traditionally take RPing less seriously (making decisions that are unimaginative, responding n dialogue with jokes for cheap laughs instead of advancing the story, etc) found themselves in positions in the late game where their characters didn't have anything interesting going on, while everyone else was caught up in glorious chaos that they had collectively created It didn't hinder our experience too much, but I can see that this could hinder some players who are shy, having a bad day, etc. and leave them disappointed. If you are in this position, try to keep them engaged by having your character bring the trouble to them whenever possible (which is delightfully easy in Fiasco!).

A great game to pick up and play, and can be set up and finished in one session. Get it. You will not be disappointed.

Played this game tonight with my regular group instead of our regular game. I hadn't done my prep this week so it seemed like a good exuse to pull this one off the shelf. I was skeptical if this game was going to work as intended, but was pleasantly surprised at how quickly my players picked it up. We made a great story about honor, loss, and what meaning a human life can have after it is long forgotten. I would reccomend this game to GMs needing a one shot to fill a week when you don't have time to prep or to any story gamer types to be part of your regular rotation of games.

I played The Skeletons at a local story games meetup. We played it with 6 players. This was the first time any of us had played this game. 5/6 of us could be considered veteran story gamers, and our 6th was new to the story game side of gaming, but an experienced gamer.

Playing this in a public space with 6 people certainly had its challenges, but the game itself appeared to be at its core very fun (not to mention just a GREAT idea for a game), but its execution has a few traps in it.

What I mean by traps is that all play occurs in these small bursts of combat, but its important to note how little the combats actually matter.

It's also important to not fall into some freeform RPG traps such as asking for permission. This is just something to be aware of when playing a light game like this. This can slow one's game down and dilute the fun experience!

My full play experience can be found here on my blog.

Thank you for reading!

My son (10) says:

This is the best role playing game I have played in my life. The whole family can play it. It is easy to understand. It makes you think differently about the world. It can be terrifying, and the more you think about it, the sadder you feel for rabbits in real life. I am not a vegetarian, but this game makes me feel sad about eating meat.

I say:

This can play like a slasher film or a fairy tale. Or both. I love it. The world is easy to create and engage in for players new to role playing or veterans alike.