B-Sides: Experimental Games, 2005–2010

RPG Anthology by Hyperfictive

Fifteen experimental games from the first years of indie design.

B-Sides is the other stuff. The experiments, the one-offs, the competition entries, the games that lived on a blog post and nowhere else. Arranged chronologically from 2007 to 2017, this collection follows one designer from playful formalism to something more personal.

Volume 1 includes:

• A Trip to the Moon: a gentle bedtime RPG where childlike characters visit the moon and return home to sleep
• Zombie Porn: undead porn stars in the afterlife, hunting each other for body parts and searching for true love
• Catherine: a two-player game about a single father raising a daughter with Down’s Syndrome
• The Orc in the Well: a role-playing poem about an orc trapped in a well who cannot get out
• Snow: play yourselves as 80-year-olds meeting by chance in falling snow
• Good Night, Darlings: a larp about a creator who must kill her darlings, one by one, as they plead for their lives
• Journey to the Center of the Mom: four infants explore a planet called The Mother, completing secret achievements to reach her interior
• …and eight more

Each game includes the author’s notes on what he was thinking at the time. About design, about life, and about why they’ve always been the same thing.

About the author: Matthijs Holter is a Norwegian game designer known for Archipelago, Society of Dreamers, and A Thousand Years Under the Sun. B-Sides collects his experimental work from the Norwegian Style scene: freeform play, role-playing poems, and games stripped down to the smallest possible thing that still works.

B-Sides: Experimental Games, 2005–2010 is available through DriveThruRPG in PDF.

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