#journalling ttrpg

A Fool's Errand by Mike Free is a solo game that follows a court jester as they try and fail to warn their king of a conspiracy against them. It was originally written for Long Tail Games' Tiny Tome Jam. 

This game is quite short at only two pages and thus the layout is more substance over style. The one piece of art included in the game is nice, but at times I found the bright red text tricky to read through (though I have certainly committed worse graphic design sins).

Moving onto play, this game is meant to be quite short, lasting 1-2 hours at most. Looking at my aftergame logs, I played it for about 50 minutes. Unfortunately, even with this relatively short playtime, I still found the game to drag on a bit. 

Before I elaborate on that, let me explain some of the mechanics. In A Fool Errand, you draw from a shuffled deck of cards as you journal each of the King's petitioners and your jesterish japes at them. Each card represents a petitioner with their suit and value respectively determining their relationship to the conspiracy and what kind of petitioner they are. Jokers play an important role as both are shuffled into the deck. The first joker drawn signals your first attempt to warn the King of the conspiracy, a warning which is not heeded. The second joker signals when the conspiracy's plan is put into motion.

One important thing to note is that every card of the same value is the same person. This means that, for example, every time you pull an 8, it's the same Lord wishing to settle a land dispute. This, for me, made it a bit repetitive, especially near the end as I kept running into the same petitioners over and over.  I really like the aforementioned joker mechanic, I actually used it as inspiration for a mechanic in another game I'm working on, but that comes with a caveat. The problem is, it's very possible for that second joker to get stuck near the back of the deck, leaving you almost spinning your wheels as the various petitioners bounce around in their allegiances. 

Despite this, I really liked this game! There's an air of tragedy in your jester's loyalty to their King despite said King's hubris. In my game, the jester was an unreliable narrator loyal to a cruel demi-god tyrant, which I had a lot of fun with! I also thought the prompt for each card was really well-written. It was a lot of fun fleshing out each petitioner and their ever-shifting allegiances. There's a lot of good stuff in this game, unfortunately it just risks getting stale when your Joker is in the final quarter of your deck.