Last night I ran a game of Dread: the Game. (If you haven't played this neat game, in short, it is this: it's a roleplaying game where, instead of rolling dice, you take a turn at a Jenga tower. If it falls, you die.) I have some good and not so good things to report on it.
Well, let's get the bad out of the way first. It takes 30 or so pulls for any given Jenga tower to even start to be precarious. We had over 40 pulls in the game, and the tower did not fall until the very end. People had died, sure, but in inescapable situations, and even at each other's hands, not from the main mechanic of the game which is supposed to kill people. Given that the game I ran was a) meant to be a one shot adventure, and b) had a larger than usual number of players, I would expect the deaths to come often enough with the number of pulls they were making. We were even drinking beer, and the Jenga tower was sitting on and end table in the middle of the room which was on carpet. The tower swayed, but never fell until it got purposefully knocked over (in the game, this means the character dies but succeeds in his or her action heroically). Near the end of the evening, I was simply killing people off by GM's fiat - they were getting tired of the game, and so was I.
The problem with Dread - the number of pulls it takes to knock over the tower - could be fixed. Each person makes two or even three pulls per attempted action. Still, it was an unexpected problem that put a damper on the fun, in my opinion. The official rules say one pull on the pile per action; I don't know if the game creators realized that, by the time you make 30 pulls, everyone is tired of the tower not falling. Players kept commenting about how the tower needed to fall, and people needed to die. Players were rationalizing reasons for them to off other players, or just go ahead and put themselves into inescapable situations in a sort of player-driven suicide. We'll know better what to do next time, if we play it again, but the main mechanic of the game is a heck of an important thing to get wrong.
What was good about the game? The mechanic was novel. The rules were simple. The "making characters" section made sense, but wasn't necessarily anything we could have thought up out of the blue. Playing Jenga is fun and nerve wracking, and that lends drama to keeping your character alive.
Some of the good things about the game that people really enjoyed - the intriguing assigned characters, the story, the backstabbing - that was all me. Well, maybe not the backstabbing; we're all a vindictive, competitive bunch who enjoyed locking other characters outside the front door to be eaten by the Big Bad. So we made the fun for ourselves using the game as a framework.
I added a house rule that every person had exactly one thing that didn't require a pull, and one thing that required two. (What you were good at, and what you suck at.) Maybe next time I'll only put in what you suck at - anything to keep the number of turns at the Jenga tower high!
If you like the numbers game of roleplaying games, this game is not for you. It's a short game, there's no leveling up, there's no loot. Everyone enjoyed a good horror romp though. For better or worse, the Dread the Game system worked for us. Though really, we will all probably go back to playing Are You A Werewolf? next week.
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