The Princess Game is a really charming storytelling game about a magical little girl exploring a wondrous world of her own creation. Each player takes on a part of the girls personality, and works together to create a story about how the girl solved a problem, meet some strange characters and discovered wonderful places. The game is written to be cute and accessible, and it's very easy to imagine that even a novice gamer could easily pick up and play this game in just a few minutes. In fact, one of the things i really like about The Princess Game is that it requires little or no prior RPG experience to play. The Princess Game does not refer to itself as a roleplaying game, and you won't find any of the confusing terms or jargon common in most games (even really good ones). Instead, Colin presents the text in a simple and plain manner that is both easy to understand and fun to read.
The rules of the game are as fun and easy to understand as the text. The game requires 4 primary players who will each take on an aspect of the girl's personality. Each player is responsible for certain actions during the game, dividing the traditional player/gm roles in interesting ways. The Imagination makes the world and describes the people and places that inhabit it. Imagination sets the scenes and introduces characters. Love drives the girl to help people. The games objectives come from Love's desire to help. Curiosity makes the girl want to look around and discover stuff. Curiosity gets to introduce new elements into the game. Fear introduces doubt and indecision into the game. Fear makes the girl choose a different path and look for different options. As Imagination introduces a new character and describes a scene each player can take turns contributing to the scene by spending pennies from their limited pool. The player who spends the most pennies during a scene gets to determine the outcome of the scene and where the girl goes next. The text provides guidelines for determining the outcome of each scene depending on who spent the most pennies.
If you have more then four players your other friends can take on the roles of the Toy, the Companion and Responsibility. Each one of these players can influence the game in different and interesting ways.
Play proceeds as a simple series of scenes starting with an initial problem that the girl must solve. In each scene the girl will visit a fantastic new location and meet another strange and interesting character. Each character will present the girl with a new dilemma, and how she decides to proceed to the next scene will depend on which aspect of her personality "wins" the scene.
There are a few things that I really love about this game. First off, the games non-confrontational nature gives the girl's adventure a fun and innocent aspect absent in most other games. The girl will never strike out in anger or try to hurt anyone. At worst, she might accidentally hurt someone’s feelings. This gives the game a feeling of warmth and fun similar to Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service or Azuma's Yotsuba that I find both charming and irresistible.
Secondly, the game is very mechanically light, relying on scene framing, description and resource spending to help players tell their story. At the same time the game provides a very clean and simple structure to guide players through each scene and to the end of the girl's adventure. This makes the game both easy and immediately accessible. As I said before, I have trouble imagining a group of friends who couldn't be playing this game in just a few minutes.
Thirdly, and I know I said this before; the game is just charming to read. I felt like I wanted to hug it. Yes, really.
The Princess Game is a perfectly cute story game in a tiny little package. I highly recommend it.
-Jake Richmond
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