Cozy Town, a game where nothing bad happens

After getting into Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I went looking for an RPG that had a similar feel for community building. What I really wanted was something like The Quiet Year until someone told me that Cozy Town was verbatim what I was looking for.

So, I found it and checked it out.

In Cosy Town, you are creating a safe and cozy community together. The core concept is communally creating a map of the place. Along the way, you will develop the folks who live there, the resources the town has and the holidays they celebrate. While there will be individual characters, they don’t belong to anyone. Everything belongs to all the players.

The game plays out a year in the life of the community. You divide up a deck of cards by suit, with each one being a different seasons. Each turn, the active player draws a card and consults the guide. Each card describes an event that takes place and asks a question about how the resolution affects the town.

After that, the active player can choose one of the three actions: add a feature to the map, have a friend of the town visit or prepare for an event.

I have to say that, while it would be super easy to create an Animal Crossing-style town, a lot of the fluff options that are suggested are actually even more whimsical and saccharine than Animal Crossing, to the point that Animal Crossing would end up on the gritty, realistic side of Cozy Town. 

It’s beyond obvious that Cozy Town is heavily influenced by The Quiet Year to the point that it’s practically a reskin. Mechanically, they are border on being identical. And, yet, they are almost on the opposite ends of sensibility. The Quiet Year runs on scarcity and the innate conflict that comes out of scarcity while Cozy Town explicitly bans scarcity and conflict.

I am fascinated by The Quiet Year. It’s a very unique gaming experience. Cozy Town is also fascinating for me. It is what I was looking for in a game that emulates Animal Crossing. At the same time, I have a feeling if I played it more than once, particularly with the same group of people, we’d end up bending the rules on scarcity and conflict. I mean, you need some level of conflict to create drama.

How would you make a table top Animal Crossing?

Since I have discovered Animal Crossing (only eighteen years late to the party), I decided to see if anyone has made a tabletop RPG about Animal Crossing because of course I did.

The closest thing I’ve found is a one-page Lasers & Feeling hack. 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/samekindofnerdyasme.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/animal-crossing-rpg/amp/

I swear that Lasers & Feelings is the most hacked system in existence. It doesn’t hurt that it is a one-page, super light system. The original game, inspired by a Doubleclick song, is themed around the original Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off and built around the dichotomy of logic and emotion. I think it’s work well because that’s a conflict that lends itself to Star Trek and, while there is no actual setting, you can just use Star Trek wholesale.

In the Animal Crossing hack, the two ends of the spectrum are Fashion (social) and Animal (physical) The biggest difference mechanical difference is that if you hit the target number exactly, you get a bennie. In the original Lasers & Feelings, the GM gives you more information and you can change your action.

I am glad that David White created this hack and it’s clearly a work of love. But, for me, it doesn’t feel like Animal Crossing. It’s designed around mission-based stories. Which works great for Star Trek but doesn’t jibe with my concept of Animal Crossing, which is infrastructure development. The Lasers & Feelings system is built around conflict and I feel like Animal Crossing would work better as collaborative.

The game that I think would really lend itself to an Animal Crossing hack is the Quiet Year. That’s a game where you collaborate to create the map of a community over the course of a year. No one has their own characters. You jointly own everything. Obviously, an Animal Crossing hack would be more upbeat than the story of a post-apocalyptic community in the year before things get really bad.

Animal Crossing tells a different kind of story than a lot of RPGs (but not board games) It’s interesting to consider how to translate it to the tabletop.

Lexicon - an RPG about creating your own wiki

Lexicon is a game that was just recommended to me by Russ Williams, all around brilliant member of BGG. Between my interest in GM free systems and my interest in RPG's that can be played online, he made a good call in knowing that I'd be interested in it.

Lexicon falls into that category of role-playing games that are really about developing worlds and settings. My beloved Microscope is another, as is the Quiet Year. It is an unusual design space in the world of role-playing games but I still believe that it falls under the larger umbrella of role-playing.

In Lexicon, each player is a scholar who is helping write an encyclopedia. At the end of the game, the encyclopedia will be made up of 26 entries, one for every letter in the alphabet. 

Here is the twist, that makes the game of Lexicon one that is interconnected between all of the players. At the end of your entry, you have to cite to other entries. Indeed, at the beginning of the game they will be entries that haven't been written yet. And, you cannot write or have written an entry that you have cited.

The designer recommends that you set up a wiki to play the game, hyperlinking the citations. So, when the 26th entry has been written, the one that starts with a Z, you will have a tightly linked, self referencing document.

Honestly, this sounds so cool to me. I have really gotten a lot out of my email games of Microscope and Lexicon would take a lot of those ideas is an even more online friendly place.

And I like how, unlike in Microscope or the Quiet Year, a player can actually take on the role of a specific person. Namely a scholar or researcher who may have their own agenda and who may not think much of the other goobers who are trying to hone in on their area of specialty. You know, the other players.

BUT I have also found that keeping people involved and active in an email game can be a struggle. The commitment might be smaller, in some ways, than getting together for one four-to-six hour game but it will be a commitment that will span weeks or months.

AND Microscope has a fail safe valve in be form of periods and, in particular, events. Only a sentence or two long, they let folks make quick moves when they are strapped for time or thought. In Lexicon, every turn is a full entry and one that has to involve two other entries. That's a lot more to ask for.

For all that, I am still hoping that I manage to play a game of Lexicon in 2016. I'm certainly not going to try while I have a game of Microscope already going and some of those folks are the first ones that I would try and involve.

http://lexiconcubine.wikidot.com/lexicon-definition