The Crater Village Game

The Crater Village Game is a cooperative storytelling game about the local history of a small, isolated community. Because passage in and out of the community is difficult and rare, many of the most significant events are arrivals and exits, literal or otherwise, and because the community is so small, each individual person, place or group has a chance to make a major difference to its history. The specific nature of the community, and the wider world it exists in, is up to the players, and can be determined over time as they play.

This is not a strategy or resource management game. The successes and failures of the community do not represent the successes and failures of the players. The story will be partially determined by random chance, and it will (hopefully) go in directions the players do not expect.

The Crater Village Game can be played with one or more players, at whatever pace the players desire, including in person or over a live call, or through messages.

The Crater Village Game has very few material requirements, and can be played almost entirely with just the digital files included here:

•  Plaintext file containing a guide to playing
• Plaintext file with a numbered list of Event Cards
• Plaintext file with a list of the Event Cards corresponding to playing cards

The following other materials will also be needed:

• A standard deck of 52 playing cards, or other random number generator to pick cards
• A coin, die or other method of randomly answering yes-or-no questions

This version of The Crater Village Game was created for the Ludum Dare 54 game jam, with the theme "limited space" but I have plans to expand and refine it in the future.

The following are my top priority goals:

• Put together a nicer-looking PDF guide
• Create actual cards, for printing or use in Tabletop Simulator
• Get more feedback from players, and more actual testing

You can help with that last goal! If you find this game interesting, please give it a try, and let me know how it went, and what you think. If you didn't like it, or even couldn't get through a game, your feedback will still help me improve it in the future.