Feral Fun and Games

Wilding Tales

+Giulianna tipped me off to a free story game created by Joli St. Patrick, called Wilding Tales. St. Patrick describes the game as “a small, intimate story of post-collapse community. It’s an experiment in distilling story-gaming to its barest essence.”

Wilding Tales consists of a handful of print-and-play pamphlets that you use in conjunction with a deck of ordinary playing cards to tell a brief (an hour or so) story. As St. Patrick describes it:

It’s not post-apocalyptic in the usual, Mad Max-y sense, it just asks “what if the Establishment finally had to pull the plug next week, and all those counterculture types just became… culture?” Play is very human-scale and ephemeral; we’re here for a glimpse and a few funny or beautiful moments.

Download the game for free, and get the instructions for how to fold and cut the printouts.

The Quiet Year

Giulianna also pointed me to another post-apocalyptic game by Joe Mcdaldno called The Quiet Year. Where you could describe Wilding Tales as a collective story-telling game, you could describe The Quite Year as a collective map-building game.

Although Mcdaldno doesn’t publish The Quiet Year for free per se, a simple print-and-play PDF edition only costs $8. However, the author does offer this and other games of his in exchange for good deeds (find out more about buying Mcdaldno’s games with good deeds).

The Fifth World

And, finally, it looks like the long awaited game The Fifth World will soon pass from alpha testing to a public beta! +The Fifth World reports from a playtest yesterday: “the last big question before we start getting the public beta ready: are the individual needs enough to drive the game without any other structuring mechanic? I’m happy to report that yes, they are!”