Lost Cities as a reference point

I can't seem to escape Lost Cities :D I was recently talking with an old gaming buddy and we began discussing low key, easy to teach two-player games. And Lost Cities inevitably came up.

While we both agreed that Lost Cities has been superseded in our own experiences, it's place as the go-to couples game/girlfriend game/ room mate game/ etc seems to be still going strong.

Personally, I would rather reach for Morels or Jaipur or Battle Line, just to name a few. Lost Cities no longer interests me but boy did I play a ton of it in years past. I can't think of a lot of games that got as much play for me.

While it is now the poster child for the style of game, Lost Cities certainly didn't create the niche. I have absolutely no idea what game you could give credit for doing that. I can see arguments for games like checkers, which means that casual two-player games go back to the dawn of time.

The worlds of two player games is a different than multi-player ones.  The games that you play with only one other person are different than the ones you play with a group. 

And it is such a diverse world as well. Classic abstracts like Go or Chess, not to mention the vast majority of modern abstracts. Two player war games are the rule, not the exception. And that's not counting casual games like Lost Cities.

My own world of gaming has been increasingly focus on two player games. I may not be playing Lost Cities right now, but in many ways, it has become my guiding light.

A Courteous Night - Romance in two pages of RPG

A Courteous Night, from the Indie RPG Megamix Tape, is an eety, bitty little role playing game for two players. No prep, no GM, requires just a deck of playing cards and should play out in just an hour. 

 

In a Courteous Night, the players play two lovers and they play out three events in the development of their relationship. The game is couched in fantastical terms with one player being the Enchanted and the other the Sotted with both characters being under curses. However, the roles really just dictate play order and a curse can be something mundane like crippling shyness, overprotective parents or heroin addiction.

The game has a simple but very defined structure. An introduction, where you meet the characters, three scenes that define the relationship, and an epilogue.

The scenes are played out in a call and response fashion, with the active player describing things and the reactive player responding to them. The active player will be playing cards face up and the reactive player will be playing them face down.

The value of the cards sadly doesn't have a direct correlation to the story. Instead, the face up cards will determine who controls the third act and all the cards will determine who is the 'winner'.

I have to note that the third act is a consensual seduction. Unlike Emily Karen Boss's romance RPGs, there aren't any guidelines for respecting people's comfort levels (to be fair, A Courteous Night is only two pages so there is size constraints) but including the word consensual goes a long way to keep things from getting creepy.

The 'winner' gets to narrate the epilogue, which describes how they break the _other_ player's curse. So really, everyone gets to be a winner. Yay!

To my mind, A Courteous Night has a couple strikes against it. First of all, I'm not terribly interested in romance RPGs. Second of all, if I did want to play a two-player romance RPG, the first game I would reach for would be Emily Care Boss's very excellent Breaking the Ice.

I also wish the mechanics of the card play were a little more tightly tied to the narrative. They do serve as a place keeper and help determine who controls certain elements. However, you can play towards winning or losing without that reflecting on how you tell the story.

However, there are some things I do like about the game. First off, an hour running time. As I have grown older and life has grown busier and more complex, shorter playing times have became more valuable.

Second, it has a tight structure. I have found that with narrative games, particularly short form ones, having a tight structure helps keep the game focused, which can be very important with the free form mechanics of many narrative game systems.

Third, I like how the player with the higher point total breaks the _other_ player's curse. It creates a cooperative, collaborative atmosphere.

A Courteous Night is by no means a perfect game. But an hour playing time and a structure that should keep the game moving along  does help it have a definite place in a very specific niche.

Games about physical and emotional distance

One Missed Call is a short form role playing game for two people trust explores physical and emotional distance. Seriously, some of these short form games are one researcher short of a psychological experiment.

(My wife pointed out to me that there is a movie called One Missed Call, which is an adaptation of the Japanese horror movie, with the distinguished rating on Rotten Tomatoes of 0%. Which means  taping two people playing this game would probably garner better ratings.)

In One Missed Call, the players play two people are are far from each other and are either drifting apart or coming together. You sit back to back so you can't see each other and play out phone calls.

At the start of the game, you decide how physically apart you are and each person secretly decides if you are coming together or falling apart. 

You then will phone each other. Note I don't say take turns. Let's be painfully honest, life doesn't act so fairly either. The non-calling player has a choice of answering or not. If they don't, then the other player has a choice of leaving a voicemail or not.

Each player has a list of phrases. Comes with the game, you don't pick them out yourself. They include things like I love you and I'm sorry I couldn't make it. When you say them, you check them off your list. After you have checked all of them off, you can't make any more calls or answer any calls.

After you have three minutes of silence, probably awkward silence, the game ends.

One Missed Call strikes me as the kind of game that I don't really want to play but I think does a good job doing what it sets out to do. On paper, it is about physical distance and physical separation. Of course and obviously, it's about exploring emotional separation.

As with any game like this, the players are going to get as much as they put in the game. The rules freely admit that you might be very casual and flippant with your phrases. And that works too because that's another way of coping with emotional separation.

There are even rules for playing via email or real phones or even the post office. Frankly, I think that might be a good way to make the game real. Perhaps too real.

One Missed Call really reminds me of Slower Than Light from Twenty Four Game Poems by Marc Majcher, which is a collection of very short forms. In Slower Than Light, you were communicating with the other players by passing notes. However, with every turn, everyone grows farther apart. You have to wait more and more turns in order to read a note until, at the end of the game, you leave with one note unread.

While I am not a fan of every game in Twenty Four Game Poems, I do think that Slower Than Light is pretty brilliant. With a very simple mechanic, it does a wonderful job of demonstrating growing distances.

Physical distance and, more importantly, emotional distance are very powerful things. Both One Missed Call and Slower Than Light create a way for people to discuss them.

http://lessthanthreegames.com/onemissedcall/