GAME FLIGHT | RIVERHOUSE GAMES
(This content is sponsored)
Hello everyone!
This is the first ever game flights where I take a few of a designers or brands Tabletop RPG products and give you a sampling, a tasting if you will, of their finest offerings. And lastly, as a fun bonus I will pair each game with a wine. And there is no better way to kick this thing off with our friend Taylor LaBresh and Riverhouse game
Riverhouse games prides itself in providing a weird and queer experience inside of their designs and translate the feeling of just going out to cabin with your best mates and going fishing. Weird meaning pushing the concept of play and games into spaces that you wouldn’t commonly think about and queer in instilling a sense of joy self love and self confidence. Taylor wants to capture the experience of just hanging with you r friend at the cabin and enjoying your relationships while you build the mechanics that help you foster those intimate moments between each other.
If you want to learn more about Riverhouse games you can check their website or you can listen to Taylor over on the Riverhouse Games podcast called Game Closet.
Now let’s start tasting some games!
First, if you are unfamiliar with how this series works, I will be doing what in the sommelier world we would call a deductive tasting and review. We examine something with our 5 senses to determine a wines place of origin and quality however I am not looking to lick or sniff my screen or my books so instead our five sense here will mostly involve our brains and soul.
We will look at a games Complexity, both to learn and to execute, how it vibes with its Flavor and setting, we will try to grab a sense of the Emotions and Experiences we garner from the text and gameplay, and lastly what wine would I Pair with the whole package.
Let’s get into the first game with…
Full of Memory and Anger
A game about the forest from Riverhouse Games .
The cover is a beautiful horizon of pines and evergreens that disappear into a background of heavy morning mist. As if to go on forever.
When you go beyond the cover you are greeted by a fable of sorts, this will be a running theme in the games we examine today. The passage explains to you that you are the forest you are ancient and old and have grown beyond the need for rain but crave the blood of those that would be hateful or destructive to you. Adventures or industry that dare walk your trunks with steel and flame, take no notice of the devastation to the wood and stone of your make. You are the summoned guardians of this wode.
In the game you play as fae creatures living in this forest and defending it from adventures, industry, and pollution all the same.
This is a game for 1–5 friends, the game would love for you to play in the nearest old forest, but a quiet area will do, dirt and sticks to draw ephemera into it, though paper and pencil work as well, and time to breathe deeply. Have to love a game that wants you to take care of yourself.
Also the game has a brief passage that explains that even if you are enacting violent and wrathful scenes in the narrative that you should always be able to zoom out and check in with the friends you are playing with who love you and remind yourselves that you are indeed playing a game, asking you to use any safety tools you see fit to communicate with each other and enjoy the fiction.
The game plays over 3 phases with a prologue and an epilogue
The prologue has each player go find a unique tree, fictional or real, that you call yours. Hug it, remember it, know its leaves, and feel its bark.
Then, together, you will draw the forest and build the setting using prompts from the book.
After that, you will take on a brief meditation under your chosen tree and then awaken to the forest being invaded.
The book then goes into instructing you how the different scenes will operate. Every scene has two encounter with a passage of time and unique invaders for each event. You will add to the history of the forest, and you will always win. You are the forest’s retribution.
The three phases, or better labeled, sections of the forest are: the Forest’s Edge the Tangled Growth, and the Heart Wood.
Each phase provides you with invader prompts and time passage prompts where you commit to exercises and engage in role-play.
Additionally, as you complete each prompt, you will be asked to mark off selections from four lists known as: Overgrowth, Entropy, Haunting, and Stillness.
These selections will help connect you with the world of the forest and as you dance through the phases you will then begin to form your existence and eventually your epilogue as you, the fae spirits, fall back into a deep slumber until you are next called upon.
Complexity:
Picking up the game is as easy as the movement you are able to conduct with your body. It is a welcome form of free expression through physical movement and mental clearing, giving you a structure to mediate and breathe, to be present.
While you can play at home, I think the games true form is in the act of being one with the forest for a time. All this means is that it’s a perfect excuse to go out camping with your closest friends and just enjoy the land, yourself, and each other.
The Flavor:
This game tickles my sense of deepening and understanding of a single place, of an ancient place. The implied setting and how it connects envoke this forest for any future games I run.
The Emotion and The Experience:
While it is unknown to me if these emotions were by design or not, this is what I felt. The game has me explore thoughts of shared intention with my playmates. A unified purpose. I also get introspection, or self-reflection, allowing me to search how I feel when someone outside hurts or has no regard for what I care about. There is a to be mindful as I take time to be in the here and now.
The Pairing:
My recommendation for wine would be a Burgundian Pinot Noir. These wines are typically known for hints of old world flavors of leather with rich underripe red fruits like red currant or deep pomegranate. The can have a ton of tannin, which culminates into an overall soft experience on the pallet. I personally love mine a little spicer so I look for something that has a decent of cask aging to it, Maybe three or more years. You can find American equivalents in Oregon, namely the Willamette Valley
Next up…
Break Up On Re-Entry
A competitive role-play game about betrayal.
The cover of the game is a smoldering piece of paper on the right side with an excerpt to the left setting you up with the setting once again. Humanity has reached beyond the stars and killed their gods, in their place, mechs capable of grievous harm and inciting war. We will investigate the dramatic, intense, and secret lives of the pilots you play.
Beyond the cover we establish the game and your role in engaging with it. You will create the next generation of mech pilots, for the ones before you were murdered by the opposing faction. This game is designed for two players playing as pilots who do not know that their arch-nemesis sleeps beside them every night.
The game has war plot energy and, as the previous game, briefs you on the importance of checking in at all times and applying safety tools for your game.
It also requires two index cards each detailing your respective pilots, and a deck of playing cards, the latter of which you will divide into piles of their respective suits and set the king of hearts aside by itself. You can adjust the length of your experience of play by removing a number of cards from these piles as determined by the instructions. You will then shuffle any or all remaining cards back together and then slip the king of hearts in somewhere near the bottom.
Then you will each draw seven cards and begin your final confrontation with each other, unknowing that you are facing the one who means the most to you, as both rival and lover. You recognize the lover side by their name and the rival through their callsign, the insignia of the faction that you face with malcontent
You play the game in Clashes and Themes. Themes of the scene are based on the suit of the cards, meaning all clash plays must stay on suit. Each card will have a question that needs answered segmented by its respective value and suit as you play it from your hand. Players will continue to play higher and higher valued card of the theme until one runs out of that suit or cannot play a higher value. The last to play takes the pile and sets it aside for later.
Clubs wills ask you to fill in the history of the war with flashbacks
Diamonds will ask you about your civilian life
Hearts will ask you of your relationship with your lover
Spades may ask you to suffer harm.
After every card you will ask if the other player wants to keep playing or end this seeming stalemate.
The winner will describe the major blow they inflict and the other player will describe the damage they take in that clash.
Then both will draw back to seven and the loser will begin the clash again.
Once the players run out of cards to play, they will tally the cards they collected during the clashes. The player with the most cards collected will then have to decide what do you do about their rival, whom you must stop at any cost though killing is not the only option.
Should you run a draw, the command ships of both factions notice your stalemate and open fire in your directions, causing the moon to explode, killing you both in a beautiful symphony of lasers and glimmering lunar rock.
Complexity:
Set up is involved depending on the length of game you intend to play in terms of setting up the deck but truly not difficult at all.
Essentially you are playing the kids game War. Bigger number wins with a modified rule of continuous war on suit. You loved it as a kid, you will love it here!
The Flavor:
I love Mecha! Gundam animes have been a staple for me for a long time, especially gundam wing, which contains ALL the Drama you could ask for. Also that Quatra Rababba Winner. That aside, I think this is the closet I get to liking sci fi genres and to fight amongst the stars is awesome.
The Emotions and The Experience:
The experience of doing battle with your loved one can be a vehicle for understanding a relationship better, and also examines how external events can weigh on you depending on how intimately it effects you, blinding you to those closest to you. This may reveal new versions of the person you thought you knew…
The Pairing:
As Napoleon said at some point in history, “In victory champagne, and in defeat even more so.” While you may not be able to get champagne you can find a great effervescence in wines from the Loire valley in France, especially so with Viogner wines. These wines can have a light and crisp tartness like the edge of a blade that can slice away and quench your thirst like a sprite on a hot summer day. You can find an American alternative in some Washington and Spanish wines of the same varietal
Lastly in out game flight we have…
This Is A Game About Fishing
Queer ecopunk using belonging outside belonging
The cover is bold lettering in front of a pyramid architecture made of modern materials like metal and glass with a large golden bass embellished on the front.
Going past the cover we get another warm up into the setting. You get a paragraph of a day long past, as your grandmother regals you with thick pike and pictures of chromatic coral reefs.
Different to today’s cinder block and barnacle ridden water barriers. The littering of empty shells of broken police mechs that house the eels and squid of the once boiled ocean. A high tech age of solar panels and wind turbines. The fish aren’t gone though, merely coveted and you will play those that will take them from greedy hands.
You play a story of those Robin Hood-esque individuals attempting to steal back the last of the fish to do with as you see fit. Repopulate the oceans, eat them, sell them. The choice is yours and you’ve assembled a crack team chief.
You play as some queer fisherfolk in a world that has faced its ecological apocalypse and some people have it much, much better than you. You also happen to know the names and addresses of those people.
This game is about shitposting, stretching the limits of credulity and how the absurd can offer shelter to those in need.
This game has you select from a wide roster of playbooks like the muscle of the Knuckle to the precision of the Pinbone
In addition, each playbook has a set of fictionally triggered shared moves across all playbooks and a set moves unique to that playbook, the cool twist is that you get to pick how they resolve as you play. The playbook decided the first half of the move and you can pick from a list of resolutions to attach to the move.
You’ll take a number of situations on the jobs you undertake and the positions you get yourself into. At the end of the day the experience is truly in your hands. And this has been true of this games siblings as well.
Be silly, be weird, be gay, and this game in particular has you do crime as well.
Complexity:
this game is amazingly easy to set up and easy to play. The playbook has built in creation prompts to aid in conception of character and the ability to create your own moves allows you to double down on those concepts.
The Flavor:
I also love ecopunk/hopepunk/solarpunk settings or themes. I want as much that enables you to construct and invent a better future or to imagine what we would do if we had a second chance, if we truly fuck things up.
The Emotion and The Experience:
It’s one of those shared goal games where we are on the same page about how we want to protect what we have and disrupt those who endanger the place we live. Lots of camaraderie, displayed in rolling up our sleeves, putting on our waders, and doing things the ol’ dang fashioned way. Its a beautiful thought experiment in terms of getting past the misery that is reality and also a reminder that reality is what we make of it.
The Pairing:
This one is easy, a Spanish Albariño from the Galician region of Spain, known for their seafood. Clean and pure like the world we want with elements of bright lime in some styles. Old world wines, however, tend to not be very fruit driven, so there is a ton of minerality and structure to explore as well.
Overall Brand Impression:
Weird and Queer Tabletop Design. In every game, that has been the principle, expressing a sense of joy and self-love. Working towards a shared goal of protecting what you hold dear. Taylor gives you the permission to manipulate the rules every time, to exercise your right to play. Riverhouse Games is beautiful and Taylor LaBresh is kind.
Resources/Links:
- Twitter: @Leviathan Files
- Website: https://riverhousegames.com
- Itch.io https://riverhousegames.itch.io
- Game Closet Podcast: https://riverhousegamespodcast.wordpress.com
- Special Bundle: RiverhouseGames.com/DYDBundle
