New Games In June and July 2024

Thomas Manuel

I. Dear Reader,

Welcome to another itch.io round up. If this is the first post like this that you’re seeing: every two months I highlight around ten new games. Most of these games are small in scope and I usually have not played or even read them. I’m often just picking them based on whats caught my idiosyncratic eye. I hear about most of these games through this form.

  1. False Kingdom: Survive a succession crisis in 12th century England playing delightful named characters with hilarious special abilities. From Jim R and Marsh D, the designers of TEETH. (PWYW)
  2. Freak Folio: The artist known as Chaoclypse releases a book where you mix and match monsters to create abominations for your fantasy game.
  3. The Girls of the Genziana Hotel: Chambermaids investigating the disappearance of one of their own in a spooky 19th century German hotel. (Hendrik ten Napel, PWYW)
  4. Against Time and Death: Two-player game of war, self-discovery, and connection across all of time and space. Inspired by This Is How You Lose the Time War. (Nick Bate)
  5. Tarnation: Solo journalling in a weird west setting with multiple pre-made adventures. (Symbolic City)
  6. For Small Creatures Such As We: Solo or GM-less game about a human captain and a crew of aliens where you explore the galaxy and your relationships. (Anna Blackwell)
  7. ’till it kills us: A game about queer activism, mental health and the delicate balance between the two. Uses a system that requires you to work together to use your cool powers. (Damsels & Dice)
  8. Paranormal Wellington: A comedy roleplaying game about bumbling TV investigators and supernatural shenanigans. (Morgan Davie)
  9. Fight or Fright: A Halloween Trick-or-treating game about magical costumes, possessed decorations, and scoring lots of candy. (Alex Marinkovich-Josey)
  10. Fording the Derbal Yerrigan: A game about removing an invasive species that uses an Uno deck. (Pidj Sorensen)

That’s all for this week!

Yours still-busy-as-hell,

Thomas

II. Media of the Week

  • At the Generation Analog conference, keynote speaker Emily Friedman gives a fantastic talk about actual play and takes head-on lots of the usual talking points about the form.
  • I’m sure you’ve seen this already but Quinns did a great video on Mothership. It brings out the excellent quality of adventures, both first and third party, as well as I think the fair criticism that the game is actually uninterested in whether you actually care about the characters. I believe this comes from Sean McCoy’s preference for thinking of these games as “escape rooms”.

III. Links of the Week

  • Jay Dragon wrote a really interesting piece on the Possum Creek Games patreon about how there are two ways that queerness emerges from a game: endogenous and exogenous.
    • “The first is what I’m gonna call Endogenic Queerness, in which the game text or the game mechanics queer the gamespace the players have created. For example, Monsterhearts is designed to produce queerness by eroding the players’ confidence in a character’s sexuality. (I have more to say on that, hopefully in the form of an article at some point.) If a group of straight people sit down to play a normal game of Monsterhearts and follow the rules as written in the book, playing straight characters, their characters will inevitably arc towards homosocial desire.”
  • Rascal News has had a fun week. Here’s a post about a new fictional true crime podcast set in a D&D world starring Jon Hamm, Will Wheaton, Felicia Day and more.
  • Also, from them, Lin Codega wrote this amusing lament about the Neopets RPG crowdfunding campaign: “The Kickstarter page promises to recreate everything, and I literally mean everything, that was available online at Neopets in the early aughts. Puzzles, minigames, the Battledome, petpets, guilds, eggs, faeries, and paintbrushes—all of the weird little digital geegaws and obnoxious side-quests that were meant to sidetrack a child online for hours …But missing from the declarative of the Kickstarter is any definitive explanation of the game itself”
  • Playing at the World, Jon Petersen’s history of the D&D, has received a much expanded 2nd edition.

From the archive:

  • Ema Acosta, designer of Crescent Moon, wrote this great introduction to using Miro to play online. Miro is a whiteboard app so it makes for a pretty good pseudo-table. (Issue 41, May 2021)

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

  • A Show of Hands: Play disembodied sentient hands, scurrying around a creepy circus, solving crime! Can be played with nothing more than your hands and a pen! Back on Kickstarter now
  • Explore the galaxy with your robot best friend in ION Heart 🚀 A lo-fi solo mech TTRPG where you’ll have stellar adventures with your giant mechanical companion 🪐 Get your copy on Backerkit here.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

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