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’m sitting alone on my lunch break, so instead of socialising with the colleagues I’m reading The Adventures of Gonan: The Season 1 Adventure Game (TAG for short). TAG is a strange and remarkable beast of a game by Ricardo Peraça Cavassane: It takes the conceit of Yazeba’s B&B — you’re playing out the story of an imaginary 80’s cartoon — but applies it to a fantasy child’s series, and does it seemingly without having ever glanced at Yazeba’s at all. It’s 20 pages of two-column layout, with evocative black and white line art that knocks it out of the park by Felipe da Silva Faria. Apparently Ricardo is a prolific creator, but I’d never heard of them until now.

While tackling the same conceit, this comes at it from a completely different direction: A slim booklet, it’s relying heavily on the collaboration of the three players, who all share different aspects of the referee role, as well as one of the main characters. It’s clearly designed for 3 players, although theoretically adaptable up to 4, and more easily adaptable to 2 I think. The referee roles are Fan, Casual and Newbie, each responsible for the integrity of a different aspect: Continuity, Character and Logic. There are 3 stats with a mixed success model. Episodes have 3 acts, and the bulk of the game is a bunch of episode synopses that set you up for 14 sessions of play.

And I love these synopses. There’s a summary of the plot, a unique initiative order, a side character and a screenshot to give you one banger moment to build to. They’re brief, but with the weight of previous story and 3 players collaborating on the story, it’s so much to work with and potentially a lot of momentum. My main worry is that we don’t have that momentum for the pilot: I wish we got a little more scaffolding for episode 1, because we don’t know anyone yet, and we don’t have that weight of previous story to help us improvise the gaps. But, I suspect it’s presumed that when you get stuck, you’ll come back to the random tables at the end of the book, of which there are 2 pages, and which covers unique twists for each act, scene features, encounters and dangers. This is definitely enough to get me through a momentary lull, but maybe not enough for episode 1 I suspect.

Nitpicking: For me, while there are a lot of characters here, they’re defined mainly through their powers rather than anything else. For a kids show I don’t mind this: Often their power reflects their personalities, but I’m not seeing that here. I’d be happy with caricature, but even a one word personality trait or a guiding principle for each character would bring playing them (either collaborative or your personal main character) a whole lot of weight that they don’t have here.

There’s only 20 pages, so there’s not a whole lot else to talk about here, except: I love this, love this, love this. The Adventures of Gonan: The Season 1 Adventure Game is not a perfect game, but this structure is *chef’s kiss* and I want to see a proliferation of TAG clones that iterate and leverage this remarkable tech to more powerful and interesting ends. I haven’t been this excited for a basic game structure before, since No Dice No Masters, and it combines it with the best elements of the OSR in a way I adore. It’s PWYW with a recommended price of $3. At that price it’s a no brainer, and this is something you can play with adults or kids, and is fruitful space for design if that’s your angle. And if this does nothing but put Ricardo Peraça Cavassane on your radar, it’s worth it.

Idle Cartulary