I backed this game on Kickstarter, as it's a genre I really like (but rarely play), yet was clearly being approached very much tongue in cheek. And I love it.

I've seen it described as “Bridgerton, only extremely violent” but I found it a bit more nuanced than that. There’s a great deal of Three Musketers and Romeo & Juliet, with the romance and sword play and divided loyalties, but there's a touch of Baron Maunchausen, with the silliness of the setting, and the bravado of characters bragging. A touch of cowardly Flashman perhaps. A pinch of Blackadder. Maybe even some Hamilton, if you want to sing along with your duels to the death. And it's actually been reminding me of some reality TV shows, with a cast of entitled posh folk constantly falling into and out of relationships, and having arguments with each other. All set in the fictional olde city of Vindamere (“a jewel of vice upon a harlot’s powdered throat,” “the shiniest blemish on the nation’s face” and “a sty of unrepentant civic vice and bottomless financial corruption”) set in an undisclosed country, but possibly as accurate as any city depicted by Shakespeare.

It looks the perfect game for a 'messy' one-shot of comedy and faux-tragedy.

Each player controls their main character, the tutor of a fencing school, who is hard to kill and remove from the game (though it's not impossible), and the various 'Beloved' characters that orbit them, students, friends, even family, who are much easier to have killed off and die dramatically. The Beloved characters can be stolen by other players once they become more devoted to their duelling fop, at which point they move over to your school. There are only four stats to keep on top of (or, technically, two sliding scales, with Foppish poised against Serious, and Duelling poised against Aristocratic, that you'll want to ensure don't max out in any direction - the main way your main character can be removed from the game), plus keeping note of all the minor characters who are connected to your school.

It's GM-less, so the game has a vague script you follow, and then choices that are a little like the decisions in solo gamebooks (or the choices you get in computer games for branching narratives), except that once the player has rolled to determine whether they succeeded or failed they should narrate exactly how events unfold, elaborating on the details given by the script (so rather like Moves in PbtA games). There are a few scenes that must occur in the narrative, such as the opening ball, where your main character falls in love with another tutor's Beloved, and the climactic final act where duellists compete to win a fencing contest, but then a whole bunch of optional scenes that can be dropped in: secret meetings, rowdy pub brawls, murder mysteries, people running away to get married, duels to the death to demand satisfaction, revolutions, even a Faustian pact or two. I especially like how the results of certain actions allow you to add an additional amusing title to your name, or on rare occasions force you to adopt an alternative identity altogether and switch your whole name to some specific silly name, after commiting a terrible crime and re-entering society with a fake moustache, adopting a ridiculous accent for the rest of the game.

I've got it to the table just once, and we had a blast, though there were a few points where the rules weren't exactly clear (as if it hadn't been thoroughly playtested). However, it's easy enough to house rule, and this is a game that immediately struck me as fun to hack so that the same idea of charming but competing protagonists with a random grab bag of followers or allies can be applied to various genres: pirates, cultists, international spies, etc.

Well worth checking out, though the price might feel a little on the high side.