An asynchronous trick-taking game for four players (one Spirit and three Hunters).
<aside>
Designer’s Note: The goal I had here was to create a “boss fight” where you don’t quite want to destroy the boss, and the boss doesn’t quite want to destroy you, and you both maybe hope for a secret third thing. I’m not sure how much of that comes through, but I’m confident that a more refined version of this game could get there.
</aside>
“It cannot be denied that such beings exist. We at the association don’t claim to know what awaits us after this life, but we can certainly recognize the dangers of those caught between. What must it be like, to have your very being torn away from its body and caught upon the corners of our world? To have not limbs and nerve endings, but the very threads of the world itself—gravity, wind, heat, and other unseen things—as their only remaining tools to wield. They thrash, speaking to us the only ways they can, but one can hardly imagine how it would change a person to become something like that. How could it not make them a monster?”
”We hunt monsters such as these out of a sense of mercy. Poor creatures, lost amidst tides between life and death, too incoherent to communicate. Rabid beasts to be put down, I’m afraid; it’s the only release we can truly grant them.”
“The hunters do necessary work, I’m sure. Trapped spirits, possessor ghosts, and so forth are known to cause real harm in our world, and it’s evident that problems such as these cannot go unaddressed.”
”On this matter, I wish to say only this: our evidence suggests that spirits understand a difference between oblivion (accomplished by our hunter friends’ tactics) and release into the next world. Accomplishing the latter appears to be difficult, but it is a subject of great interest for further study.”
Divide a standard deck of cards into four suit decks, each with all 13 cards of a single suit. Shuffle each suit deck.
Determine who will be playing the Spirit and who will be playing the Hunters, then choose and distribute decks accordingly. The Spirit takes the Hearts deck and Hunter will choose one of the three remaining to determine their role on the ghost hunting team:
The spirit is tethered to this place for a reason. Each of the three Hunters, after shuffling their deck, hands one card at random—face down—to the Spirit. Without looking at them, the Spirit should arrange them in a line nearby.
These three cards are the Spirit’s Earthly Ties. They represent the reason that the Spirit is trapped in this location and unable to pass on to the next life.
Earthly ties will be revealed (flipped over) when the Spirit wins a round during the Confrontation.
They can then be broken (turned sideways) whenever any round resolves with a tie.
The focal part of the game is the Confrontation. During the Confrontation, the Hunters’ goal is to survive and eliminate the Spirit. The Spirit’s goal is to survive at all costs and communicate its dying message as its Earthly Ties dictate.