THE YAWHG
Damian Sommer, Emily Carroll
2013
PC

A great, impending doom is coming – when the season ends, The Yawhg will come, bringing untold death and destruction. The players each choose a character and, by choosing where to spend their time when, they tell a story of the last season before the great change comes. Each turn involves reading a short story prompt, making a choice, and then seeing the consequences. After everyone’s taken enough turns, the game ends, and you see how your characters lived.

This story is told with a sense of humor. There are vampires, drinking contests, streetwise burglars and vigilantes, potions gone wrong. While there is occasionally peril, your character is not going to die before The Yawhg arrives. The game luxuriates in strange, non sequitur experiences, like meeting an old man who asks you to stand against the sun and provide him some shade for a nap. Moments like these keep the game light and award all kinds of play. Tell your story – and tell it again differently next time.

The Yawhg released into a climate experiencing an independent multiplayer boom scattered across tabletop RPGs, board games, and video games, and it combines elements of all three. The branching narratives of The Yawhg invoke the Twine interactive fiction boom and matches games like Johann Sebastian Joust or Spaceteam. Its beautifully drawn art by Emily Carroll and its short playtime (a four person game of The Yawhg takes about 30-45 minutes) remind me of games like Tokaido and Agricola.

But the game The Yawhg reminds me most of is the tabletop RPG The Quiet Year, a map-drawing game where players take turns in a fantastic settlement drawing random events from a deck and, ultimately, facing down impending doom, the arrival of The Frost Giants at the end of the year. The two games are similar in their concept of offering more life in the settlement than just preparation for the End of Days. The taking of turns, drawing of cards as random events, and building of a collaborative story are kismet – the two games released at roughly the same time and appealed to many of the same people.

But what differentiates The Yawhg and The Quiet Year, apart from The Yawhg automating the process and taking about a quarter of the play time, is that The Yawhg centers on its characters whereas The Quiet Year is built around the community. The Quiet Year actually makes specific rules around not picking particular characters for each player – while you’re allowed to return to pet themes and storylines, The Quiet Year positions the players as responsible for both introducing the characters and creating the friction in their lives. The Yawhg uses its perspective within the characters’ shoes to automate that narrative friction and let the players imagine personalities without feeling responsible for eventually tearing them down.

The two games make beautiful companions for one another. Between them, I see a powerful understanding of the possibilities in the medium. Understanding the two next to one another creates dialogue about intention in design and tone management. I understand this reason for loving these games sounds so niche and dorky. I really appreciate having two variations on this idea, one aimed at the highest level of RPG players ready to create a story world together and take seriously its politics, economy, and characters, and one aimed at all levels of roleplay designed to laugh, look at some beautiful art, and relish in someone else’s great work.