I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

I was going to stick my new cargo bike in the car and drive it home, but it doesn’t fit and instead I have to ride it home, so I’m resting in a park half way through this interminable ride and reading Slugblaster while sipping a hot cross bun iced chai chocolate.

Slugblaster is a much-lauded purportedly Forged in the Dark game featuring teens on hoverboards sneaking into other dimensions to do delinquent teenager things. The vibe here is kind of Scott Pilgrim meets Ferris Bueller meets Paper Girls? It gives massive inspired-by-music I-don’t-listen-to-personally vibes, although while it calls out punk at one point it never provides a playlist or an inspiration list.

The art and layout here does a lot of heavy lifting regarding these vibes: Bright, cartoony, with a very strong colour palette. This colour palette could be better adhered to — it steps away for in-world advertisements and a few other things and I think suffers for it — but overall it’s a stellar effort. The layout is in square format, in two columns (although in a few variants), and is beautifully simple and clear, while keeping visually interesting and consistent. It’s a remarkable feat.

The introductory section largely follows the same structure as Blades in the Dark, complete with a pop-punk version of the blob diagram. It incorporates a very neat reframing of the player principles as player tips, which I like a lot — more games should do this. I love a good set of bespoke principles. There are no action ratings here, but you can boost, kick or hype for a bonus, and you can make a dare — a cute take on devil’s bargain but it doesn’t work like its namesake — in exchange for one as well. The GM’s moves are similarly reduced to simply snags and slams, and resistance is retained in the form of a more metatextual Nope! At this point, I start to feel quite overwhelmed by the endless list of quite flavourful but also very samey terminology. While it’s redeemed by the smart move to keep each section to one spread each, twenty new terms in six pages is just too much for me to retain.

Beats are a new addition without an analogue: Players can buy story beats for their characters. This is a neat mechanic, but complicated by the way it’s presented, which is into different lists according to the kind of story you want to tell, in addition to unique beats for your specific personality (these will be our playbooks, and will be discovered later). I thought initially, that the opportunities and challenges presented here were in fact a run generating tool because at 25 pages in I’m not sure what a run will look like, so would’ve been neat, but alas they’re not. Runs gets two spreads, one of them being the generator I was hoping for. It really leans into the GM not being the driver of the plot here — the players come up with what they do and the GM is to react. Weirdly, it then jumps to epilogues, which I had to search the text for as they’d been scarcely mentioned at this point. This is how you finish out the campaign. I know you have to fit it in somewhere, but a little repetition would’ve helped here to clarify the role of the epilogue. These work a little like the epilogues in Fiasco, leveraging the doom and legacy that characters have earnt over the campaign.

Our next section is a whole big example of play, which is, to be frank, fantastic. It shows exactly how the game is meant to be played: A combination between high-emotion low-stakes teen drama and wild pulpy hi-octane action. The problem, I think, is that it feels lower paced than I want a game with these vibes to feel. It doesn’t feel like this game wants to slow down for discussions with your parents. The vibes this game gives says to me this window into the teen experience wants to be only the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. I feel tension in how much the example and the rules want it to be a quieter exploration of adolescence.

Character creation is a fill in the form style, which I really don’t prefer to the picklist and checkbox style. I think more flavour and vibes that are trying to be communicated through flavour text in the book could be communicated with names and families built into more traditionally designed playbooks, and befit the teen experience of really experiencing the world through other people’s lenses. That said, the personalities are really mainly about their beats and arcs, and I expect you’ll be choosing from the heart or smarts arc more than anything else. But this is not the only thing the player designs: They also design their “signature device”. This is fun, cool and flavourful, but character creation is becoming a bit of a drag for what was previously presenting as a very rules light game. Again, this feels like it’d have been better as a playbook variation than a book section. This ain’t Kansas and I’m not optimising anything here. Crew creation is collaborative, and includes a little worldbuilding as well — factions and worlds start appearing here.

One jarring inclusion here is tier, rebranded as fame. As in Blades in the Dark, this indicates how powerful you are, and feels oddly out of place in a game that tries really hard to avoid these kind of conceits — appropriately given the subjects are teens. I understand the urge to make worlds of increasing difficulty, it just feels at odds with the rest of the design to me.

Next up we have a bunch of universes and a bunch of monsters, and a bunch of factions, sponsors and rival crews. Altogether this section is absolutely fire, and it raises Slugblaster to the next level: Given these universes are simply sets for your latest run, and everything else is interdimensional too, despite the increased freedom it serves as a graffitied hypersaturated Doskvol. Reading through these — and the stretch goal additions that are also included in the correct sections rather than at the end of the book, an innovation I shouldn’t have to make note of — I feel like I could throw them down at the table and get this game running very quickly.

The GM section (now they call them Slugmaster, which it should’ve been already imho), is pretty good stuff. As always, there’s too much, but we have bespoke GM principles and moves, which I love to see, we have guidance for special scenes — which is also super valuable (although the chase rules aren’t super dynamic for me) — and most importantly we have clear guidance around saying no (and yes, but the no advice is just golden). Then we have the seemingly mandatory “how to hack my game section”, which I’ll say little on except: I don’t need help thank you.

That’s Slugblaster! How do I feel about it? It’s a more thematic simplification of the Forged in the Dark framework than other simplifications I’ve played, my favourite of which was Retropunk. Most of what it does is solidly in line with its themes, with a few jarring examples. I must say, though, the Forged in the Dark framework feels at odds with what it’s trying to achieve, and you can see this with its considerable overtures towards distributing narrative control mechanically in a very conscious way. You’re really choosing personalities by story you want to play out, and using your character sheet to facilitate those stories and their beats. And you can see the seams showing as this distributed, goal-oriented narrative design goal strains against the sandbox, systems driven heritage it’s developed from. This contrasts with less adventurous Forged in the Dark games such as Brinkwood or Retropunk (although Retropunk is more innovative than Brinkwood), but it doesn’t innovate on its predecessor as seamlessly and interestingly as Mountain Home for example. It feels a little like the three biological child of Monsterhearts who don’t understand why it doesn’t have the same systems as its adopted Forged in the Dark siblings.

It’s themes, although I think clear in the author’s mind, clash a little with its aesthetics, too, although looking through the personalities and the character archetypes listed in them, perhaps this is simply a bad sell at the front of the book. Most of these properties feature gonzo action and heartfelt quiet moments, they just don’t feature going home to the real world to have them. Reading Armour Astir, I noted I want those big feelings to resolve themselves through metaphorical action in these types of games, but Slugblaster wants you to resolve it through dinners, stargazing and first kisses under the bleachers, and it doesn’t communicate that particularly well. Not my jam, but if it’s yours, you’ll enjoy the downtime and beats here.

I really struggled with the onboarding here. The structure combined with the admirable insistence on brevity, combined to make a very front-heavy rules text that I struggled to wrap my head around despite most of the terms being analogous to a system I already understood. It may have been better drip-fed than presented in a smorgasbord; certainly for me at least. The vibes were impeccable, though, for the most part, in the rules structure.

Overall, then, despite the mess, and despite the poor onboarding, Slugblaster is a unique game with great artwork and clear layout. It’s held back by challenges in information design, and by mixed thematic messages that take a significant portion of the text to clarify and wash out. I don’t think Slugblaster is the best version of itself — what game is? — but if you want to play skateboarding interdimensional teens feeling their feelings without the darkness and biting queer truths that come with a game of Monsterhearts, this is probably the game for you. But for me, the biting angst of Monsterhearts is closer to my own experience, and so Slugblaster feels a little sanitised and cartoony for me to vibe with strongly. It was still worth a read, though, as for me it was an interesting but unsuccessful experiment in taking the chassis of Blades in the Dark and reimagining it as a very different kind of game, and it has helped me understand better where some of those limits on the chassis might lie, and why. As someone interested in games, a good read. Will I play Slugblaster? Nah, I didn’t grow up in Hillview.

Idle Cartulary