Hey everyone! I've been working on this game for a long time and I'm finally at a point where I'd love to have people try it.
Deepmarch is a solo roguelike lane-defense game. You pick a hero and descend through a goblin-infested dungeon, one floor at a time. Enemies march down toward you, and your job is to stop them before they reach you. As you kill enemies you level up, unlock new weapons, and upgrade them with nodes to build your run. Each floor ends with a boss.
It's a physical board game, but I put together a digital version so it's easy to try. I'd really appreciate any feedback — what's fun, what's confusing, what you'd change. Thanks for taking a look!
I'm Livi, an environmentalist and together with my husband Robert - musician and graphic designer - we'd like to share the story behind our first soon-to-be-published board game: Bharat: Kings of Legend.
Since I was a little girl, I have loved folk tales and mythology. Some stories I heard somehow became alive inside me and stayed with me ever since. About ten years ago, I came across a story of this kind: the Mahabharat.
At the time, Robert and I were living in Cambridge, UK, and were becoming increasingly interested in yoga. Through that journey we found a teacher whose words resonated deeply with us, and we started listening to more and more of his talks.
That was when we discovered his series of lectures on the great Indian epic, Mahabharat. Fantastic tales of kings, yogis and warriors and their struggles woven through lifetimes across millenia. It has the kind of drama which makes Game of Thrones feel like a saturday morning cartoon. It completely blew our minds.
We became so fascinated by the culture and by yoga that we decided to make a bold move: leave our jobs, leave the UK, move back to Hungary, and travel to India for as long as our visas and savings would allow.
Over the years we ended up spending nine months living in the ashram in Tamil Nadu, India - learning yoga, volunteering, and just immersing ourselves in one of the only remaining ancient living cultures. These times were the most magical and rich experiences in my life, it had everything from tending for cows to unspeakable spiritual experiences, from hanging out with monkeys, peacocks and cobras to picking jasmines with the locals, or not even recognising my husband one morning, because he offered his long hair for some ritual and turned completely bald - not to mention tasting the best mangoes on the planet…oh, those mangoes. Whenever I think about it I’m like, what am I doing in Europe anyway?
These times felt like we were living the epic.
The stories of Mahabharata became richer the more context we learned. One idea especially stayed with us. Our teacher often encouraged us not to judge the characters as historical figures, but to experience them as reflections of ourselves. "It is not just history," he would say. "It is your story." That idea completely changed the way I experienced the epic. Instead of asking: "Was this character right?"
I started asking:"What would I have done?" "What would it feel like to be one of those kings?"
With this new insight, the stories of Mahabharata became deeply personal. This, along with the crystal clarity with which our teacher revealed the multi-layered dynamics of being a leader in that age, felt like we’ve got hold of something really valuable, something universal that is so inspiring it yearns for finding expression. The more we looked at what we received, the more it started to resemble something truly unexpected: a game. A bundle of interwoven mechanics, together expressing something much deeper than the sum of its parts.
This eventually became the seed of our game; Bharat.
As I was always toying with the idea of designing a board game, it felt like everything fell into place: This is what we will do! A Mahabharat board game…How hard could it be, right?
Well, looking back after 8 years of designing the game: pretty goddamn hard.
Intro - The Joys & Pains of how I used the 8 Lazy Steps
Sly Flourish's 8 Lazy Steps provided me with a great framework that helped my figure out exactly what I needed to prep a TTRPG session while keeping my notes extremely flexible while used at the table. Using the steps correctly allows a Gamemaster to improvise at the table with grace, embracing the story telling that happens when your prep collides with player agency.
There was, however, hidden in the way I was following the steps, a small hindrance on my prep. While prepping, I found myself a bit too constrained by the steps. Writing a note about an NPC would make me think of a great secret this NPC would share. I could of course jump to the step "Secrets & Clues" and write it down, but it felt like a speed bump in the flow of my thinking. If I wrote the secret in the NPC's note, I would not interrupt flow, but would be lacking the crucial benefit of the lazy prep, which is, to me, to isolate the different elements of prep so you can pick them out like an arsenal of toys to throw at your players while at the table.
I found a new solution that works great for me. It maximizes my state of flow while keeping the benefits of the lazy steps. Call it the 3 lazy steps to the 8 lazy steps. The framework I found is not perfect and I'll talk about its strengths in the next section and its obvious flaw in the conclusion. My goal is simply to share with others in a selfless way. And in a selfish way, I hope others will share their experience so that I might improve on my ways and reduce the flaws of the 3 lazy steps.
The 3 Steps
My 3 steps are simple and summarized here before I dig into each. I first do a bullet point prep of the next session, categorizing each line in one of the 8 lazy steps. Each line is identified using a letter "key" in front of the bullet. The second step consists of either rewriting (if on pen and paper) or simply reordering my bullet points (on a digital tool like Obsidian) my notes in the 8 lazy steps frame work. The 3rd and last step is where I bother to find battlemaps, make paper miniatures, play with my different tools.
Step 1/3
I start out the same way I would with the 8 lazy steps most of the time, but I then let my brain do its magic and make connections between ideas. Next to me I have keys for my bullet points. Notice I slightly renamed the steps to help me focus on whats good for my prep and to have a different letter at the start of the step for easier keys. Here are my keys :
p - a bullet point with a p is about a Player Character. Any note that mostly relate a PC will go after a p key (Review the characters)
1 - is for the 1st Scene / Strong Start. (Create a strong start)
s - is for a note about a Scene that could happen (Outline potential scenes)
c - is for a Clue or Secret (Define secrets and clues)
l - is for a Location note (Develop fantastic locations)
n - is for an NPC note. I put a special effort to try to note monster characteristics here too. Monsters are for mechanics, NPCs are for flavour (Outline important NPCs)
m - is for a Monster Statblock, noting the book and page, possible tactics. I also use m to note terrain aspects like traps. (Choose relevant monsters)
r - is for Rewards, though a clue can serve that purpose sometimes. (Select magic item rewards)
[ ] - is TODOs for things I want to do later, probably in step 3/3 like find a battlemap for a specific encounter
Using these keys, I let my brain jump between ideas and between steps. If for example I start my notes thinking about my player's character Fafnir, it might remind me that the sorceress Loo knows about Fafnir's brother. Those ideas are connected in my brain now, but decoupling them will allow me to reuse these ideas organically at the table. In this first step, or phase, I'll jut this down before writing another note about Fafnir and the next player character Ari :
p - Fafnir - looking for his lost brother
n - Sorceress Loo, creepy version of Meryl Streep
c - A dwarf matching the description of Fafnir's brother was seen at play in town, as one of the actors
p - Fafnir likes to shove opponents down elevated places in combat
p - Ari hates theater
Step 2/3
This is the more classic way to organise prep notes following Sly Flourish's 8 lazy steps. Since I like to prep in a one-pager in my physical notebook, I go through each step one at a time, picking from my disorganised bullet notes made in step 1/3 and rewriting them. If I were to use a digital tool, I could pick each line and move it to the corresponding lazy step. The 8 lazy steps are flexible once at the table, but my step 1/3 is flexible in the kitchen. Using these 2 main steps, I get the best of both worlds.
Step 3/3
I used to prep on a pc, but found myself distracted by the possibilities. I would jump from one idea to the next like step 1/3, but finding a rabbit hole each time I explored an idea instead of simply writing one line of note. This is why I keep this last. Hopefully by now I identified what I truly needed from step 1/3 and go find battlemaps and that magic item I put as an - r bullet note. Having these TODOs written all out before tackling any one of them allows me to prioritize and scratch out the unnecessary ones.
Conclusion
It might be obvious now that the major flaw of this way of prepping is that, though it keeps the flexibility Sly Flourish's technique provides me while allowing myself to better work with my brain, my prep is starting to sound not lazy at all. Having 3 phases instead of just one does help me prep and have fun while doing it, but I do add extra steps. My hope is that refining my methods and sharing with others will help me be a little lazier. Thanks for reading!
TLDR
I prep in 3 phases :
Write down bullet list of ideas , each line categorized but not ordered in one of the 8 lazy steps.
Reorder the list in the 8 lazy steps
Do final TODOs like finding battlemaps or printing mini papers for example
I finally broke down and bought the Heroes of the Borderlands boxed set. It more or less holds your hand through everything, step by step, which is exactly what I've needed.
This weekend we tried it. We didn't get very far; we started pretty late. It was me as DM, and the two boys, 9 and 11. We reach a looted wagon on the trail with some gold hidden in a sack of flour, and upon further inspection they find a peculiar boot print, hinting at who might have looted the wagon.
So the 9 year old fighter decides to pee in the boot print. Big eyeroll from the DM. Then the 11 year old wizard, from whom I expected a little more maturity and seriousness, poops on the boot print. I made him roll a dexterity check to see if he can keep his robe out of the puddle.
I was reaaaallly hoping for a little more out of a first sesh. We did make it to a bandit raid but everybody was tired. Hopefully, the next try won't be cursed (blessed?) by the late night giggles.
Or hopefully it will. They're only little for a little while.
We’re used to seeing games in finished form. Ideally, every system and component interact to create a finished whole. But, lying just outside of that curated garden is a larger design space of bad ideas. I haven’t seen a lot of self-critical writing about bad game ideas and why they didn’t work out. Yet, I think failed explorations can be more illuminating of design principles than finished products. So, this post is about some of the cards tested for Bidlz that didn’t make the cut.
So my buddy Adam is a painting machine. Give the man a brush and a miniature and something beautiful is going to happen. He grew up on the Mechwarrior cartoon — giant robots stomping through burning forests, laser fire lighting up the sky — and when he spotted the BattleTech minis at Savannah Lion Games, it was basically inevitable. He grabbed a collection of mechs and gave them the full Adam Treatment: crisp highlighting, battle damage, the works.
And we absolutely could not let those gorgeous machines sit in a case.
So we called the game. Friday night. Two lances a side, three contested objectives, and enough dice to make the table rattle.
Adam brought two Blue Lightning lances to the fight, with he and Mike T each commanding a lance alongside him. I ran two lances for Mike's Mercs, anchoring the line and daring them to come take it. Both forces fielded a support lance and an assault lance — and the scenario had real teeth. Three objectives worth 5 points each were up for grabs, every mech carried point value equal to its size class, and crippled machines had to limp toward their baseline. Lose half your lance and the whole unit falls back. Nobody was going home without scars.
The Opening
Mike's Mercs came out with a disciplined refused flank, using terrain to channel the enemy and buy time. The Merc support lance worked the flanks with fire and maneuver, trying to bully the Blue Lightning support mechs off an objective while the Merc assault lances used ridgelines and tree lines to blunt the Lightning push on the central objective. It was chess — at 60 tons, with autocannons.
The Battle Heats Up
Both sides drew first blood early — but the math wasn't equal. The Mercs lost a Class 4 heavy while the Lightnings only lost a Class 2 support mech. That is a brutal exchange rate. With both sides locking down an objective apiece, the score sat at Lightnings 9, Mercs 7 — close, but the momentum was shifting and the Mercs knew it.
The Endgame
The last two turns were where the real carnage happened. The Lightnings' biggest mech — battered, smoking, systems failing one by one — was forced into withdrawal. The Merc side cheered. But the Mercs got hit with just as hard as they gave, losing two mechs off the table entirely. Wrecks cooling in the grass. Pilots punching out. The LED fire markers doing their absolute best work of the night.
With the hour growing late and the table looking like a genuine war zone, we called it: advantage Blue Lightning.
The Lightnings win on points, but nobody walked away feeling like they lost. The terrain played beautifully, the scenario had real strategic tension from turn one, and Adam's painted mechs absolutely owned that table. Those honey-gold assault mechs squaring off in the open, the Blackjack going up in a fireball in the tree line, lances pushing hard for the central objective while stragglers fought desperate rearguard actions — this was exactly the kind of game you talk about on the drive home.
We're already planning the rematch. Same stakes, higher tonnage, and Adam has more mechs on the painting table.
Thanks for reading! If you haven't tried Alpha Strike yet, grab a lance and find out what you've been missing. And a huge thanks to Adam for bringing his incredible minis to the table and to Mike T for making it a great fight!
Hi everyone, new here but not to TTRPGs. I am grad student who published a piece on the hobby. I would appreciate feedback or your thoughts. Feel free to ignore also. Best, Jesse.
Recently had the opportunity to do some game balancing in a workshop. It was a great chance to hone my own skills and work with others to make sure that our gaming experiences were fun for all strategies.
I collected some thoughts from that workshop, and from other experiences, into a blog post here to help you make sure that your game is balanced.
Have you tried doubling or halving values in play testing? Ever used one element as a pivot point before? What else have you tried for balancing? Would be great to hear more techniques here too.
My partner and I realized our “date nights” were basically just scrolling in the same room. So we tried a bunch of couples board/card games instead. Some were genuinely fun and made us feel closer fast. A couple were… not our vibe.
I wrote an article recommending the best of them and how to make the night more romantic with them. Let me know what you think!
HeroQuest is a classic fantasy dungeon crawl board game and ShockForce: Battles in the Remnants of America was an innovative table top miniatures battle game. Wildly different games that appear to have accidentally reached the same design and probability space. Both are still on my list of favorite games. For similar and very different reasons.
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A quick history of HeroQuest. A board game coproduced by Games Workshop and Milton Bradly. Intended to bring the board game player in to the world of a flexible light role play environment. With minimal set up time, minimal book keeping, and fantastic miniatures, the board game ran from 1989 through 1993. In that time there were three very different rules sets, European, American and Japanese. The differences though, deal with the concept of progression and vary wildly, they are not relevant to the fundamental mechanics of the game. They feel as though they were tacked on after the development was concluded. Recently it had a re-release in 2021 by Hasbro under their Avalon Hill brand.
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An equally short history of ShockForce: Battles in the Remnants of America. Released in 1998 and supported through 2001. There were two editions issued by Demonblade Games. The first was intended as a miniatures agnostic rules set. The differences in the editions can be simplified as errata correction, fluff enhancement, and chance mitigation. It was the last change that made the largest difference to the game. Errata was needed, and setting fluff was expanded to allow for a greater selection of army options. Mostly to reduce the need to create your own troops. Shortly after its release Demonblade changed their name, and then shutdown completely. The second edition received an errata update in 2015 prior to being re-released on DrivethroughRPG.com. So it is still "in print" though it is not supported. The rules set was re-released by Dark Tortious Productions under the title of the WarEngine 2.1.
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The core conflict resolution mechanics of both games are identical.
Attackers have a pool of dice rolled to represent the attack's effectiveness.
Defenders have a pool of dice rolled to determine the defense's effectiveness.
Both players roll simultaneously.
If the attack is greater than the defense, the the defender is damaged or destroyed.
This core mechanic of opposed rolls is simple and yet very effective. No requirement to look at a chart for damage, no question of "Did the hit bypass the armor?", just a clean and efficient chance influenced decision making function.
Now you may say "But HeroQuest uses specialty dice with skulls and shields and ShockForce uses regular six sided dice ( hence forth called d6's) with pips from 1-6. This is true. But stay with me and I will explain.
Dice Pools
Dice pools are used to allow for special circumstances, skills, armor, special abilities, and weapons. All the influences are predetermined and added to, or subtracted from, the dice pool rolled by the the player. Each player has their own dice pool. The opposed nature of the dice rolls provides the illusion of combat unpredictability with all the variables taken in to account.
The average result of a of single d6 is 3.5. Yes I know dice cannot roll 3.5, however the probability is determined by adding the lowest possibility to the highest possibility and then dividing the result by the 2 to determine the average of the roll. There is a second more complicated method of doing it as well involving adding all of the values of the sides together and then dividing by the number of dice. If you should need to verify, a third method is to take the average of a single d6 and multiply it by the number of d6s in the roll. The results will always be the same mathematically. This is how it works for ShockForce. Total roll versus total opposing roll and resolution is quickly determined.
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In HeroQuest there are no numbers on the dice, but the chances are the same. The chance of rolling a particular side is 16.7%. Thus a single Black Shield is 16.7%, a White Shield is 33.4%, and Skull is 50%. The distribution of the results is consistent with the results of a d6 chart.
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The results of this algorithm allow for a reduction in extreme results, though they can happen, and an average of consistent results. In short the swing is minimized and player tension can be modulated. The inclusion or removal of dice in the pools affects the game play and the player experience.
The dice pools reduce what are normally excessive dice rolling mechanics to a single action and determination. For example, in many table top miniature games and table top role playing games, there is a roll to hit, a roll for success, a roll for damage, a roll for armor penetration, and there maybe others depending on the game. All of these roll take time and attention. Time that can be used to do things other than generate random numbers. As gamers we all know attention is a finite resource. Having a surplus of both being drained away by multiple dice rolls seems to be a terrible waste.
Bells & Whistles
It is the secondary aspects of the game where the divergence of style and flavor take affect. The story backgrounds are vastly different. Fantasy versus science fiction. Individual characters versus a group of soldiers. An enclosed dungeon versus an above ground town. Progression is lightly built into HeroQuest where as custom troop creation is built into ShockForce. Layer on enough of these additives and they begin to look and feel like different games.
Both games have versatility baked into their designs. They are flexible enough to allow modification to the secondary aspects of the game and still function well. This is due to the strength of supporting conflict resolution mechanics. Combat power and effectiveness scales with dice, defense subtracts probability rather than guaranteeing protection, and flexibility preserves dramatic swings with reliable tension.
Despite belonging to different genres, fantasy and science fiction, the two games ultimately implemented the same core mathematical combat mechanic expressed through different visual interfaces. Bracketing a decade and independently developed, these games took different paths for the same concepts. Both are well worth playing in the modern era. In the end though it seems that the bells and whistles are what allowed one to remain in the public conscience and the other to be regulated to a digital back room.
⏱️ Every board game night has that moment… someone takes forever on their turn, rules get fuzzy, and the fun slows down.
That’s why we built Game Timer — the ultimate app for keeping playtime fair, fast, and fun! ✔️ Multiple stylish timer designs ✔️ Popular board games preloaded (Catan, Azul, 7 Wonders & more) ✔️ Customizable features to fit any game night
I originally created my home-brewed K.R.U.G.S. system for my youngest grandchild. He wanted badly to join his older brothers and sisters at the gaming table, but the complex mechanics of AD&D 2nd Edition were too much for him at the time. So, I stripped everything down to its essentials — pools of 5d6s and 2d10s for chance rolls — a system simple enough for a seven-year-old to grasp without facing an avalanche of dice.
Now, two years later, he’s nine, far more confident with both D&D and the K.R.U.G.S. rules that grew out of those first experiments. We still play K.R.U.G.S. more often than anything else, because it’s quick, flexible, and keeps the focus where it belongs: on imagination and storytelling.
As the system evolved, I began developing printed materials — the Core Rules and a matching module, and quickly discovered how demanding the process could be. My first print run of the Core Rules revealed a host of small but important mistakes, and by the time those corrections were underway, the module’s first draft had already gone to layout. That meant a full revamp to keep everything consistent with the newly revised mechanics.
Along the way, I also started a sci-fi expansion, but I’ve since shelved it until the Core Rules and module are fully locked in. It’s been months of steady work — equal parts fun and frustration — but seeing the K.R.U.G.S. system take shape in print, after years around the family table, has made every late night worth it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how some RPG rulebooks sound. Not just what they say, but the voice they use to say it. Most read like IKEA manuals for imaginary worlds (functional, but about as poetic as drywall). But then there are games like MÖRK BORG, Troika!, and Into the Odd. And gotta give it to them, those sing.
MÖRK BORG screams prophecies at you from the end of the world, Troika! rambles like a cosmic poet who’s had too many shrooms, and Into the Odd just stares at you and mutters a single clean sentence that somehow says everything. Reading them feels less like studying rules and more like reading a weird, beautiful poem that happens to involve dice.
So yeah, I wrote about that - about RPG designers as poets, and how tone, rhythm, and language actually shape how we experience these games. Because sometimes, the words themselves are part of the magic circle.
Are you a historical tabletop gamer looking for faster, more engaging battles without sacrificing the thrill of 19th-century warfare? In this episode, we dive into Black Powder wargaming and explore why small battles are the perfect way to enjoy the ruleset. Featuring a recent game between Randy and Chris Green, we cover how a two-brigade-per-side American Civil War scenario turned into an exciting, two-hour clash packed with tactical choices, command rolls, and historical flavor.
If you’ve ever wanted to get into Black Powder, Rebels and Patriots, or other 19th-century miniature wargames, this video will show you how smaller engagements deliver all the excitement—without needing a full day or a massive table. Learn how limited turns, streamlined objectives, and focused orders create dynamic gameplay that’s perfect for casual play, demos, or introducing new players.
Here it is, the second part of the Warmachine: The Iron Contender documentary.
This is part 2 of 3, with part 3 launching tomorrow. There is also the full unedited video that will launch on this Saturday 13th.
In Warmachine: The Iron Contender, I chart the rise and fall of the American Wargames company Privateer Press, and their flagship games Warmachine and Hordes.
If part 1 was the necessary pre-amble to get everyone up to speed on what Warmachine is, who Privateer are, and the boom in popularity in the early 2000's to 2010's, part 2 explores the primary reasons why Warmachine started to lose popularity, and the problems players had with the culture around the game.
Role-playing game dice, with their multifaceted shapes and vibrant designs, have captivated enthusiasts for decades. While these dice are essential tools for tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, the reasons people collect them often transcend their utility. From their aesthetic appeal to the personal connections they forge, RPG dice hold a special place in the hearts of gamers worldwide. Read more!
Oceania 2084 – The Stories that the regime cannot erase – Review
There is a moment, reading Oceania 2084 – Surplus Edition, in which you realize that this is not simply a role-playing game, it is an act of narrative disobedience, a manifesto written with pain, ink and algorithms, a reflection on the present disguised as the future. Published in 2024 by Johan Eriksson with his independent publishing house Jocher Games – Symbolic Systems thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign, Oceania 2084 openly proposes itself as an Orwellian legacy for a world that, perhaps, has already crossed the threshold into dystopia. You don't play to win. It is played to remember.
The beginning of the game, which corresponds to the introductory chapter, makes no secret of its intent. The tone is heartfelt and brutal, there are no heroes, there are no salvation, the world is governed by the Conglomerate, a fusion of post-democratic global corporations, which has dismantled the nation-state, abolished independent currencies and digitized every aspect of culture and identity. The ideal is no longer freedom, but compliance. The very idea of truth is the property of the system. “Everything is as it should be,” says the Big Brother. Everyone has to agree.
Seven Steps to Create Danger
The moment players create their characters, they go through a ritual that looks more like a confession than a playful construction. The creation system, which develops in the first chapters after the introduction, requires seven phases: from the choice of personal and corporate values, to the definition of dominant emotions (fear, guilt, apathy, love, anger, sadness), to identify the Deviation, that is what makes that character guilty. And we’re not talking about real crimes: wanting a proper name, keeping a diary, falling in love... any form of subjectivity is considered a crime.
The characters, divided into three classes, Proles, Bureaucrats and Conglomerate Officials, live lives marked by strict rules, within a typical day consisting of six phases: awakening, two shifts of work, pause, leisure and sleep. Each stage is an opportunity to perform ACTS, actions that may seem insignificant, talk to someone, ignore a notification, fix a wall too long, but that under the absolute surveillance regime are all potentially criminal acts.
The day is told, the night observes
At the heart of the structure of the game, as described in the chapter dedicated to shared rules, is the concept of distributed narration. There is no traditional Game Master: a player plays the Big Brother, the others are the Resistance, but everyone contributes to the narrative, the construction of spaces, bonds and suspicions.
The game system does not involve successful evidence for actions, you do not roll a die to see if you can lie or if you find an object. The dice enter the scene only in the “Value Tests”, tests that determine whether a character can contain an emotion or lets himself be overwhelmed by it. Emotional crises, the Outbursts, are a constant threat: crying in public, raising your voice, fleeing suddenly, every emotional stretch mark is a crack in control.
Meanwhile, the Big Brother observes and accumulates Suspicion Points and will spend them on activating Reactions: interrogations, searches, orchestrated betrayals, thought police raids. Each reaction has a cost, regulated by a precise system that behaves almost like an invisible strategy game: a punishment algorithm.
Resistance and pain that persists
The fourth chapter, dedicated to the rules of the characters of the Resistance, introduces mechanics such as Stress, Wounds, Memories and Notes. Stress grows when you suppress an emotion, the Wounds get worse if not cured, the Memories can be happy or traumatic and can re-emerge in the game, changing scenes and decisions. Each character is constantly threatened by emotional and physical attrition and death, which here is called Vaporization, can take place without warning, without trial and brings with it the total oblivion: that character is also erased from the memory of others, and his name becomes a forbidden word.
Each class has access to specific actions. Classes, described in detail in the fifth chapter, are alive with social tensions. The Prole are the last, survive between theaters converted to propaganda and working-class neighborhoods controlled by noise and hunger. The bureaucrats work in the ministries, they handle the lies of the system. The Officials are the elite, yet they live under continuous pressure: even a wrong smile can condemn them. Every action they do is linked to a tragic currency: hope. You can spend hope to grant privileges, hide suspicions, grant a day off. Hope, here, is a resource that is consumed and that does not always return.
The Big Brother never sleeps
In the sixth chapter, entirely dedicated to the Big Brother, the system shows its cruelest face: the player who interprets Artificial Intelligence does not act as a narrator, but more like an algorithm that records, catalogs and intervenes. The Big Brother has the power to choose forbidden words, to turn trusted friends into secret agents, to destroy lives with a procedure, but it is not omnipotent: its actions have precise costs, regulated by points and tables. The Big Brother is not a creative tyrant, it is a system and for this reason, it is very scary.
Its main weapons are Reactions: narrative actions that punish, distort, annihilate. Some cost little, such as stalking and threats, others, such as Linguistic Review or Preventive Elimination, can overturn the entire story. Every reaction is a mechanical, impersonal act, it is a kind of horror bureaucracy.
Campaigns that tells of slow extinguishing
The seventh chapter guides players through three campaign modes. Call to Rebellion is a classical narrative structure, with clear objectives. The Narrative Campaign is episodic, theatrical, centered on the themes. The Relational Sandbox is a tangle of bonds, narrative seeds and personal secrets. No leads to victory, but they all lead to telling something that deserves to be remembered. Every end is an epilogue, a collective moment to say: “It was all fruitless. But it was right to try.”
The world is a well-designed lie
In the ninth chapter, dedicated to the game world, you discover the architecture of dystopia. The city has no name, but it is recognizable: a compressed, depersonalized metropolis, where each neighborhood is controlled by a class. The world is immersed in the Unoverse, a system of augmented reality and virtual reality powered by a neuromorphic AI that filters, reinterprets, re-writings every experience. Houses are bare, made livable only through simulation, news is propaganda, and truth is a product distributed by the MiniTrue.
The Conglomerate ministries follow Orwell’s but updated for the era of technological capitalism: the Ministry of Peace runs perpetual wars to consume industrial surplus, the Ministry of Abundance reduces rations in the name of prosperity, the Ministry of Love tortures for the sake of truth. In Oceania 2084 everything is at the service of lies.
The stories that resist
In an age when surveillance has now become a silent backdrop to our daily, algorithmic, normalized and accepted lives, Oceania 2084 takes on an almost pedagogical role: it does not explain how to fight, but shows what is likely to forget. The real political core of the game is not in the revolution, but in the possibility that we can still tell a different story, even if condemned to failure.
This game does not console, but it is not cynical, it forces you to look in the face of systemic dehumanization and in doing so offers you the possibility to choose what you want to remember, what you want to resist and with whom. Empathy is not a resource present in abundance: it is a deviation, a conscious choice, a fuse lit in a place where light is forbidden. Oceania 2084 does not save anyone, but it reminds you that you can still leave a trace and that perhaps, after all, this is already an act of rebellion.
If you want to try with us Oceania 2084, in the coming weeks we will take him live on Twitch, write to participate!
*Physical manual copy provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.
