Review of “Blackout on the Elevator”
By: Bryan Hansel

Game Summary:

Opens with the situation.  You’re trapped in an elevator.  This game doesn’t mess around.  It presents the players with the challenge they face right up front. 

The game begins with set characters to play:

“Roy Schmidt, mailroom clerk, in his mind a born leader.
Christina Ley, sales expert, in her mind a crazy cheerleader.
Natalie Casper, visiting customer, in her mind a mature mother.
Jamie Gaylord, Vice-President of Operations, in his or her mind a brave outdoors person.
Irving Talbot, well know author, in his mind a healer.”

Players then need to pick a vice for their character.  Vices come from a list that includes things like anger, cowardice, wrath, etc.  Character creation takes just a few minutes as players negotiate with each other on who will play what character and consider which vice they would like to explore.

The object of the game appears to be to get to a specific floor.  The “party” has two measures of its progress towards rescue: Calming Points and Breaking Points.  If you have too many breaking points, the characters flip out and presumably kill each other.  If you can maintain enough Calming Points, they get rescued.

Each floor puts the characters into situation where they need to react.  There are pre-generated challenges for them to face that can soak up their Calming Points and give them Breaking Points.  Carefully managing your resources is key to victory.

The resolution is brief.  The system works mostly by negotiation.  A player states what he is going to do and everyone either supports him (by doing the same thing) or undermines him (by doing something different).  The support and subversion are added or subtracted from the value assigned to each floor.  Then a d20 is rolled.  The result of that roll either add Calming Points or add Breaking Points.  The idea is to narrate progression towards rescue.

Reflection:

There is an interesting mechanic here.  There proto-mechanic of each character having their own agenda yet sharing a communal currency.  This good-of-self vs. good-of-group conflict could be exported to another game and really expanded upon.  I would encourage Bryan to export this mechanic to a game perhaps about spies-for-hire, soldiers of fortune, or gangsters of the 1920’s.  I could really see the self-intersect of characters causing intra-group conflict.  If you’d like some help developing this idea Brian, let me know :) 

Peace,

-Troy

Thanks for the review, Troy. I might take you up on the offer for developing the mechanic in the future. I've got to get PEQ finished first.