A Partnership Built to Last

Here at the Boredom Breakers we don’t often get to flex our creative writing chops; The most creativity we get to do is finding the precise words to describe how much we hated a certain game mechanic or trying to convince you that a game that just has flat tokens in two different colours and a deck of measly 30 cards is an epic showdown between rival mages in ritualistic combat and why you should care about it.

Steve Dee decided to come along and shake this up quite spectacularly. For the uninitiated, Steve Dee is an award-winning games designer that has a penchant for designing RPG systems, something that our brains could not even begin to comprehend the complexity of.

The task before us? Read a 145 page rulebook for a brand new RPG system that is coming to Kickstarted in a matter of days, design the characters, have a playthrough and hopefully have energy left over to share our experience!

Well it was quite a journey but we have finally managed to recover from our whirlwind of activity enough to put pen to paper. So let us take you through our journey with Partners, a brand new Table Top RPG / Storytelling game for Two Players!

This review will be structured slightly differently to our usual Board Game material as the Components and Rulebook categories are one and the same for a Tabletop RPG. Furthermore, as experiences will vary between players, we will be taking you through our specific playthrough of our TV Show: A Bike, a Bluff and a Barrister.

Provisional Cover Art

The Rulebook: 8/10

The premise for the game is that two players will form a detective duo; A Straight Shooter and a Wild Card. The rulebook goes into great detail as to why these roles are chosen, the origins of the trope and even goes as far as give viewing recommendations of films and tv shows for you to draw inspiration from. It is very clear that the author of the book is really passionate and knowledgeable about the topic. Once the main characters are assigned players take turns filling out the remaining cast of recurring characters: The Subordinate, the Superior, the Oddball and the Touchstone. The role of each supporting character is also explained in great detail, along with examples in popular TV shows and how they will be involved in the story. All of this fluff is used to ease the players into the meat of the procedural generation that powers the game.

As opposed to the usual Tabletop RPGs (at least in our experience), Partners uses a procedural approach to the storytelling. What this means is that there is no Game Master role that knows the solution to the mystery and steers the Player Characters around the story. Instead, in Partners the players are just that, partners in a cooperative storytelling experience. All of the clues, scenes, victims and perpetrators of the game are resolved by using a standard deck of playing cards that is cross-referenced through various tables along with a random word generator to add a dash of unpredictability to the gameplay. The players then have to collaborate and form these random prompts into a coherent narrative.

Example Table

Overall the rulebook is very well structured and the reading is easy-going due to the frequent illustrations of famous pop-culture duos, from Mulder and Scully all the way to Rick and Morty. As per usual, the rulebook contains character sheets and other paperwork that players have to fill out prior to commencing the game.

Some of our favorite illustrations

To go one step further the Author even included several pre-generated characters and settings for players that wish to simply jump into a game, as well as a list of 100 shows that you can review for character inspiration. Now that is dedication.

If we were to offer some criticism it would be that we felt like there should be a single sheet where play structure is outlined in the form of a flowchart (To generate a suspect do the following, To generate a scene do the following). There was also one page of the text that was a bit difficult to read due to the illustration being position in the middle of the text (Page 95).

Gameplay: 7/10

The best way to describe this section would be with an example of play:

In our story we started with generating a victim, crime scene and apparent cause of death. From our random draws we established that the victim was a female unsuccessful/ unpopular politician that died at a retail location with the apparent cause of death being a mystery. The random words that had been generated were “Play” and “Snow”. And so we got to work; After about 10 minutes of deliberation we arrived at a story of a local mayor that is unpopular due to her association with known criminals (one of the suspects), running for re-election. The time of the setting was around Christmas and she was attending a ribbon cutting ceremony and simply collapsed as the ribbon was cut, as “Let it Snow” played in the background.

And so, the game was afoot. We had four suspects to investigate: A well-known criminal, the victim’s brother, a rival politician, and a famous celebrity. The plot quickly escalated, with everyone having a potential motive;

• The criminal was funding the re-election campaign but the Mayor was starting to get cold feet.

• The Brother was a contractor on the verge of bankruptcy that suddenly came into a lot of money (and was the one that built the new supermarket that served as the crime scene).

• The rival politician was polling better than the current mayor but had relationships they didn’t want disclosed.

• The celebrity who had a history of ex partners ending up dead who had recently taken up a new mistress.

We were absolutely gobsmacked by how well the story unfolded over the course of our three-hour playtime. To re-iterate, neither of us have much experience with creative writing or detective series as such, and yet we were able to generate a (fairly) competent story that is likely full of holes and inconsistencies but was fun to develop regardless, and while we will not be nominated for any Emmys this year we were discussing and furthering the story even after we had concluded the episode. The full session is available as a Video on Demand on our YouTube channel.

Franchesca and Archie preparing for our first playthrough

As with any good TV show you can clearly see a character arc in us, the players; Initially we were all stutters and giggles due to being a bit our of our comfort zone but this was quickly replaced with a genuine look of interest as to where this story was going. We were genuinely intrigued and curious as to who did the deed, and while one suspect stood out quite consistently throughout, there was a point where we thought that this might turn out to not be the case at all as another suspect came out with a very compelling motive. To summarise, the story evolved into a tale of money laundering, nepotism and a web of secret romantic relationships that we were utterly engrossed in for well over two hours.

The only criticism that arose during our gameplay was the fact that the system isn’t very conducive to roleplaying as such: The problem is that scenes involve both the characters and often a third character, be it an obstacle, suspect or one of the support cast. If you’re intent on roleplaying these scenes someone is forced to take on two roles at a time which is added stress for the player and takes them out of the characters they were trying to get engaged with. This could, perhaps, be fixed with a third player that would take on the role of “Everyone else”, but this would require some extra thinking from minds greater than ours.

Verdict:

This is an easy recommendation from us. If you’re at all interested in the theme, creative writing or just want to run an RPG-like game with one other player then this is right up your alley. We would also recommend this book to Game Masters using any other RPG system that want prompts for writing a solid detective plot in their respective systems.

While this game is not really conducive to roleplaying (in our experience) we can definitely see this being a great project to run over the internet (perhaps via a shared word document). With some light improvisation and rule bending, this can be a great product for groups of three that wish to run an improvised murder-mystery night too.

A lot of love has been put into this and it clearly shows. From the hand-drawn art, the curated quotes from pop-culture and numerous viewing recommendations it is clear that the creators are very passionate and knowledgeable about the subject matter and all of this makes this a must-purchase if any of the above sounds appealing. The Kickstarter has successfully funded within 24 hours of launch as a confirmation of our words. We strongly recommend you get involved while you still have the opportunity.

Final Score: 8/10