Colin, Jim, Joshua & I tried A Short History of Decay, my mini-game about the decline and fall of practically anything.

I wrote this game for a very informal challenge at i-would-knife-fight-a-man to create a game of less than 600 words. It’s like a hybrid of two of my earlier short games, with a decline theme similar to Satanic Mills and mechanics like Joy Division.

Players decide what will be declining. We went with Jim’s suggestion of ‘the Chinese environment.’ We then distributed points among three values: drive, flexibility, and resources (basically, resources is the number of dice rolled, drive lets players split a die on the table into two dice, and flexibility lets players raise a dice on the table). Our Chinese environment had a drive of 4 and flexibility and resources of 5. We each stated a ‘fact’ to help establish context: that desertification and agriculture were kicking up dust storms, that panda are protected, and that more and more cars were on the roads.

Play opens with an ‘apex’ scene to represent the strength from which the focus of the game would then decline. Rather than start off from a prehistoric, untouched ecosystem I initiated a contemporary apex scene at the opening of next year’s Olympics. The set up was the Chinese environment minister leading his international counterparts on a solar/electric powered bus tour of ‘green’ china. We each played the minister pointing out a strength: a restored stream swarming with fish, research on grain varieties that need less pesticides, low-water agriculture and xeriscaping on a dry plateau, and a wilderness preserve.

Then we took turns starting decay scenes- which are internal or external threats. The player starting the scene rolls dice to represent the threat, then the next player rolls dice to show how well the threat is being overcome. If that roll doesn’t equal or match all the threat dice, then players spend flexibility and/or drive to increase the dice until the threat is overcome or we run out of ways to improve our dice. Our decay scenes included a drought caused by global warming; a contaminated seafood outbreak during the Olympics (partially solved by the national swimming and diving team being recruited to block the leaks), overpopulation; and cheap imported Indian cars allowing the average Chinese citizen to afford an automobile. When we ran out of points on this last challenge- the horses and donkeys raised to replace cars for a burgeoning population devouring vegetation leading to an ecological collapse.

The final step was us each listing something about the now destroyed Chinese environment that would be remembered by future generations: zebra-bears, poison fish, too many people, and solar buses.

The game performed as designed- short, inevitable decline. There wasn’t much subtlety. The economy of dice was transparent so we could predict when we were going to lose. A few possible modifications:
• resources as number of dice rolled to counter threat was sort of lame. Josh had a good idea to always roll dice = number of players and then resources could allow players to add two dice together (a nice counterpart to drive, which splits dice).
• Maybe allow drive/flex/resources to go up at times rather than always deplete. For example, if the initial roll to counter the threat eliminates all or most of the threat dice, or maybe you get back one after each threat. The other players weren’t keen on this change.
• Growing threats? Maybe the first time around the table, the threat has dice = number of players minus one, then dice = # of players, then # players + 1.