The Newest Flesh

A leaflet comdey game about trying to pass yourself off as sailors on a ship journey when you in fact know very little about sailing and ships. The main threats are discovery and exposure as being a sham or a fraud so the tone is very light-hearted.

Mechancially I find it interesting, there is a common pool of dice and over the course of four problems or rounds each player narrates their character's approach to the problem and adds a stat which is rated from 0 to 2 to a number of dice they take from the pool. Each dice thrown that is 5 or higher (adding in the stat number) is a success and returns to the pool but each dice that doesn't meet this threshold is placed in front of the player to indicate suspicion that they may not be all they say they are.

If all the dice are removed from the pool there is a collective negative outcome where the characters are exposed and consequences are based on how suspicious you are deemed.

If all four problems are overcome the remaining pool dice are shared between the players and rolled with successes indicating how well the character has done out of the whole misadventure.

I think the mechanics could work for something less comic, anything that involves subterfuge in a social setting.

The main problem with the game is that there isn't enough space to do some proper hand-holding on setting up a successful game. The GM is meant to come up with four interesting problems that require teamwork to overcome. The group needs to decide the setting and how the situation has come about and also set the stakes on what a successful voyage might be. It's one of those “create interesting and engaging scenes until you find a satisfying resolution” situations.

I'm very tempted to give this a go and I'm also interested in skinning it different but I would have preferred a bit more structure for something that feels clearly pitched as a pick-up game.