The Newest Flesh

An amusing little story game about a group of actor-thieves who are performing a play and carrying out a heist simultaneously. Some obvious inspiration feels like the “Now you see me” films

Structurally the game breaks down into a world and character building phase, followed by the private creation of props. These are items that will be used in both the play and the heist (with the play providing the cover for the use of the item in the heist).

Then the play is ready to begin with Act I, the prop cards are used to build up a timeline of the play as they are drawn. Each player will be directing the action twice in each Act, when directing the player sets up two scenes. One within the play and one as part of the heist, the one onstage uses the player's character; the lead character for the heist can be anyone including a character created just for that scene (although how these characters are meant to be handled isn't clearer, I presume they go into a pool of characters that can be reused later by any player). There's some basic guidance on how the scene is meant to be structured (goal, obstacle, prop) and players are encouraged to lean on the other players to help frame and play out their scenes, which is sound advice as using a random prop to frame two scenes: one advancing a shared dramatic narrative and the other logically building on a heist plot, seems like quite a big ask of one player.

The first Act is followed by an interval where the outcomes of the previous scenes are reviewed and the players have the metagame conversation about how they feel about the game so far and what kind of conclusion they are going to drive towards. Think of the tilt section of Fiasco but a bit more considered and driven by player consensus. With the discussion complete, Act II plays out leading to a conclusion or epilogue section where the consequences of the heist are resolved. Act II has the same structure as the first Act.

I've said this is a storygame but it's actually more of a poem or a story framework as in Act I you can't do anything mechanically to affect the random outcome of your action which is simply based on coin-flipping at the end of your scene and it isn't until Act II that you actually get a bit of a gameplay and some decisions to be made in whether you use the reincorporation mechanism or not. At this stage the mechanics and the direction of the story are aligned but before this the resolution is really just random. Something like player voting on success or failure might have been more interesting.

The final stage is the Denouement where the drama and the heist are resolved. Satisfyingly the question about the play is not whether it goes well. The characters are assumed to be skilled performers who deliver an excellent performance. Instead the question is whether the final performance is a tragedy (more performance failures than successes) or a comedy (not a tragedy).

It feels like matching tones and using ideas like palettes is going to be important for this game. I feel like its natural tone is gonzo comedy but the play examples seem a little straighter.

The physical version of the zine comes a spiral-bound portrait booklet, this might be handy at the table but when going for the end to end read I actually found it a bit trickier than a normal booklet zine.

This is an interesting one, its imaginative, demanding, highly portable and well-structured for one shots. I wonder if it maybe just asks too much of the players and doesn't offer quite enough support to make the whole thing work.