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Here’s a weird confluence of story and game for you: I’m working on a screenplay that’s about—among other things—people who play a particular game.

This has been done before, of course. Take Jumanji, Zathura, and perhaps most obviously, The Game. In these cases and others that are similar, the game that’s the basis of the story frequently doesn’t make a lot of sense as a game qua game. Sometimes, it makes no fucking sense at all: Shade is a film about poker, except that you’re allowed to bet more than you have on the table, and an opponent who can’t call a given bet has to fold. Uh… yeah.

As I wrote and re-wrote drafts of the script, it became clear that the game really ought to be designed as well—I’m a game designer, after all—so I finished a complete draft of the rules a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t played it yet; I haven’t bothered to mock it up, for that matter.

Designing a game whose primary purpose isn’t to be played, but rather, to provide an interesting structure for storytelling, was an unusual challenge. I needed a tone for play that fit the dramatic needs of the story. I developed and wrote down the customs of gameplay alongside the rules themselves. I decided to include specific ways an apparent loser could gain a tremendous advantage by making an apparently crazy play in just the right circumstances. These are things you’d never do when writing a game to be released into the world as a game.

I’ve been thinking of the game design as a mountain range, and the story as a sea that covers parts of it. The game itself is only exposed to the reader in places where the water level is low enough. But with the whole mountain range more or less defined, as I get to parts of the story where I need to give the reader more or fewer specifics, I can just lower or raise the water level. That’s much easier than lowering the water level to discover—as I did when I was first working on the script—that there’s nothing down there, and certain swaths of story have stopped making sense.

All that said, for your amusement—and feedback, if you like—please feel free to download Rules and Customs for Playing the Game, version 1.0, as a PDF. As intimated above, the document itself is bare explanatory text. That said, you could mock it up and play it from just this. Naturally, I hope someone does; if you do, please report back! If you create a prototype, it would be swell if you’d post a link to any documents you create so others who are interested can check them out.

Without talking too much about the story that’s in the foreground of this game (Keep it secret! Keep it safe!), you wouldn’t be too far wrong to imagine a setting similar to that of Unknown Armies.

Enjoy!