15May/12Off
Review: Guestbook: The RPG
I'll come right out and say it: I love Guestbook.
The game was an impulse buy at last year's Gen Con after a friend demoed the system for me. Even after having a great time I felt a little cheated when I forked over twenty bucks for five tri-fold brochures of story scenarios, rules that looked like they were truncated for a thirty second elevator pitch, and a pretty picture on the front. It wasn't until later, when I handed one of my Storybook brochures to an avowed non-gamer, that the real magic of the RPG hit me.
See, Guestbook isn't a game; it's a smokescreen to get non-gamers to jump into roleplay. Getting somebody to play along feels almost subversive, like the brochure is an excuse to trick non-gamers into having fun.
Instead of offering large, all-inclusive rulebooks this game is organized into tri-fold character brochures. Each brochure contains a single protagonist, a set of ten story-seeds, and all the rules required to play the game -- which, beyond placing limits on how many sentences are allowed for a response, boils down to "tell a story with a friend."