kicking my feet & cuddling a pillow sorrowfully

"I wrote a eulogy for my best friend last week. Then I read it to him. At the pub. On a Tuesday."

He was alive, holding a pint, looking at me like I'd lost my mind. Maybe I have.

I'm Mick. I'm 70. The man across the table was Barry. Seventy-two. Best mate for 46 years. Met on a building site in 1979. He dropped a plank on my foot. I called him something unrepeatable. He bought me a pint after the shift. Haven't gone a week without talking since.

Three months ago we went to a funeral. Bloke we'd worked with. Cancer. The eulogies were beautiful - people saying what he meant to them, things they'd clearly never said to his face. And all I could think was, he can't hear any of this.

Every beautiful sentence. Every "he changed my life." Said to a room of crying people and a box of wood.

I turned to Barry. Whispered, "What a waste."

Drove home. Couldn't sleep. Because I realised, if Barry died tomorrow, I'd stand up and say extraordinary things about this man. Things I've never said in 46 years. And he'd be in the box, missing all of it.

So I wrote them down. Took a week. Harder than expected - not finding the words, but admitting I had them.

Rang him. "Tuesday. The Crown. Need to read you something."

"Have you joined a book club?"

"Just come."

Same corner table. Pint of bitter. Crisps. I pulled out the paper. He saw my hands shake.

"Mick. What's this?"

"Your eulogy. I'm reading it now because I'm not wasting it on a day you can't hear it."

"Have you gone mad?"

"Probably. Shut up and listen."

I read it. In a pub. To a man very much alive and very much uncomfortable.

I told him about the plank and how it was the best injury of my life. About the night he drove forty minutes in rain to help change a tyre. About how he rang every day for three months after my divorce and never once asked "Are you alright?" - just talked about football and weather, because he knew I didn't need a question. I needed a voice.

I told him he was the funniest man I'd ever known and his jokes were terrible and both things were true. That he'd been a better father than he thinks. That his wife's a saint and he knows it. That I'd have been a worse man without him.

He didn't look at me. Stared at his pint. Jaw tight. Doing that thing men do when the feelings arrive and they'd rather swallow glass than show it.

When I finished, long silence. Then he picked up his pint, took a sip, and said,

"You're paying for the next round. And the one after."

That was his answer. Perfect. Because Barry doesn't say "I love you too." He says "you're buying."

But in the car park, he hugged me. Not the quick back-pat. A real one. Thirty seconds. Neither let go first.

And he said quietly into my shoulder, "Don't read that again at the real one. I want new material."

Who would you write a eulogy for - while they're still here?

Don't wait. The flowers can't hear. The box doesn't laugh. Say it now. At the pub. Over a bad cup of tea. You'll feel ridiculous.

They'll look uncomfortable. It'll be the most important thing you've ever done.

Read them the speech while they can still hug you in the car park.”

love as recognition

these are the preview images for the game (excluding the one that is just art). and i don't think they are very helpful. they don't really... imply anything?

this paragraph in the blurb is telling me that the mechanics aspire towards finding a balance between crunch, arbitrary fluff, and resource management... but i don't see a single substantial mechanic displayed here other than some pbta-looking skill checks. to me, merging crunch and rules-light fluff sounds like it would risk creating a system that tries to do everything while doing nothing (resource management doesn't really sound like a third thing here - it just sounds like you wanted to write a third thing). i would love to see how that marriage could play out but i'm seeing a lot of fluff and not a lot of crunch; nothing is dispelling my misgivings and i have no idea how your game manifests other than "it has no fixed setting" and "we had no mechanics we felt proud enough to throw front-and-center in the previews".

these images are a lot of... nothing? telling me to imagine piloting a mech and having a rival with fancy art next to it.

i feel no desire to give this game a chance because it hasn't told me what i'm giving a chance to begin with. by contrast, a lot of my favourite recent games always have at least one page that explains an incredible amount about the kind of game it wants to be.

triangle agency has, among overviews of the game goals and offering entire role pages as examples, this lovely little page showing off its novel dice system. from it, you receive the following information:

in triangle agency, three is the only number that matters. so much so that receiving three 3s is better than receiving as many as possible.

resultingly, the game defines itself as willing to follow through on its motifs to an absolutely inhuman degree. throw away you intuitive sense of success and failure. playing this will demand learning to speak in triangle agency's language.

this is a game where a result of "infinite" can be obtained from rolling three 3s. it is prepared for you to say "all hands, infinite".

despair dilemma, like triangle agency, provides a role page as an example... but more importantly, it offers up a "death game sheet" (as shown above). from it, you receive the following information:

like dragon reactor, despair dilemma aspires to have players create its world. it, however, appears to not (and in fact doesn't!) involve a gm figure. each player participates rather evenly in this based upon the death game sheet in question as well as the plot sheets that player has (which permits creating a number of characters).

it tempers the freedom to create the world that it offers you with a very firm structure (through a mandatory location as well as a branching path for players who are succeeding to choose between). it deals in broad archetypes, but you know that you will be building upon a well-defined core.

games played in despair dilemma are, by default, meant to take place within a limited and pre-established timeframe as enforced by the mechanics.

each death book (and each play through a single death book!) can have radically different mechanics, as shown through the "special" box and the various effects of choosing different narrative paths. adhering to this well-defined core will be rewarded with gameplay which ACTUALLY molds itself towards the story it wants to tell rather than functioning purely off of gm fiat.

it's definitely difficult to pick just one part of eureka's itch page to describe how it manages this. it doesn't even use preview images. the whole thing is just one well-made introduction to how the game plays. composure is a personal favourite, though! so let's use this image. from it, you receive the following information:

eureka runs off of a resource system that naturally hinders what your investigator is capable of the lower it gets. that is, instead of focusing on it as a cost or treating it as a flat negative modifier it will flatten your effectiveness... which means you are constantly struggling against it not to prevent failure at those things you are already bad at, but to maintain your character concept. to remain a storied figure rather than somebody left at the hands of chance.

doctor: tch... i guess theres no choice...!!

*doctor pulls in nurse for a tender embrace and a beat passes before they kiss passionately*

*pulse starts again*

nurse: i cant believe it...! doctor youve saved yet another patient through your unorthodox methods!

doctor, looking out the window to avoid the nurse's adoring gaze: suppose i have...

doctor, thinking: sigh... will i ever get to approach her not out of obligation but out of ...love...;!

nurse, thinking: i hope she doesnt realize ive been manufacturing the yuri shortage to engineer these kinds of scenarios