Overview of the 200 Word RPGs

Wow, there's some really interesting stuff in the entries that I've had a look at so far.

There's also a few of the standard trends that I tend to see in contests like this...

If we work off the assumption that a complete game provides...

  1. a premise for play
  2. some kind of rules
  3. a way for players to define their characters
  4. an agenda for the players to work towards through their characters

...then virtually all of the games fall flat somewhere.

That's probably a function of the 200 word limitation. It's pretty hard to get all of those elements into an amount of text that many mainstream other games would cram into half a page.


I'm really tempted to do a series of reviews for every game in the contest. Maybe giving every game a score out of 20, with each of those categories above providing somewhere between 0-4 points, then a final 0-4 points based on how well I think the game has pulled the concepts together into a coherent package. If I were to do this, I'd limit myself to 50 words of critique regarding the game, because in some cases I could get really wordy and probably write more about my feelings on the game, than the actual length of the game itself. I'd probably block it into chunks of 10 games per post, because I wouldn't want to fill up people's feed with numerous review posts.

If anyone is interested in this, let me know.


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