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One central conceit is that Lacuna isn't complete: you can interpret the game different ways. There's some truth in this: you can play various ways and the setting is deliberately mysterious. The central ruleset, however, is complete and solid.
Rules summary
Central to Lacuna are two innovative rules: heart rates and Static.
Your Agent has three attributes: Force, Instinct and Access. You also have a heart rate.
To do something, roll a number of six-sided dice equal to the appropriate attribute (if you're using Force, and your Force is 3, you roll 3 dice). If you get 11 or more, you succeed. If not, you may try again: but, each time you try, you add your roll to your heart rate.
When your heart rate hits a Target range, you become more effective. When it exceeds a maximum, you're in trouble, and every failure damages your attributes.
Over the course of the adventure, your heart rate ramps up, so that, by the end, everything's dangerous.
The other central rule is Static: each time an Agent fails, the team gets a point of Static. Other things, such as insubordination and conflict between Agents, also create Static.
The GM uses Static to drive the adventure: every time Static hits preset levels, bad or weird things happen. As Static increases, Blue City becomes more surreal and the Agents’ employers become more duplicitous. By the end, you can’t trust anyone.
Text
Lacuna is elegantly written. Pieces of text - letters, transcripts, pages from books - hint at the setting, without specifying it in detail. The ideas are imaginative and intriguing: the Spidermen, who appear when things are nasty and make them nastier; the Girl, a harbinger of death; Control, who communicates with the Agents, becoming less reliable as the game progresses.
Note that Lacuna gives no guidance on running the game. This means you'll draw heavily on your experience from GMing other games: if you like indie games, you'll probably use techniques from indie games; if you like traditional games, you might take the Agents through a preprepared adventure. Either style will work, but Lacuna won't tell you which to use.
The rules are generally clear, although there are ambiguities. For example, the text states "While within their Target Heart Rate, Agents may roll any number of attribute dice when making a Force or Instinct roll". Does that mean any number of dice: ten or twenty, say? Or a number of your Attribute dice, to a maximum of the Attribute? It's unclear. The rule would work either way. I’ll discuss this further in “Is Lacuna complete?”, below.
Sometimes, too, the text is ill-organised. Consider the following rule (which I've paraphrased): when you exceed your maximum Heart Rate, you take damage to your attributes if you fail Force or Instinct rolls. It's a simple rule, which the text explains badly. The Maximum Heart Rate section refers forward to the Complications section, which tucks this important rule in the third paragraph down. In general, you'll need to flip back and forth to fully understand the game.
These are flaws in an otherwise clear and entertaining text.
Design
Daniel Solis has designed a slim, professional product with unusual, Soviet-esque cover art.
Inside, the text is laid out clearly. There are clever touches: a mass of text fills the margins and, as the book goes on, it encroaches further into the page. The last pages are completely obscured with an unreadable mass of words. (This, to be clear, is a good thing).
Some clever touches seem like gimmicks. Misplaced accents on some characters add nothing. Some sentences are blacked-out, in the style of government documents, but the text still makes sense, so there's no sense of mystery.
The character sheet is a weak point: designed, it seems, for appearance, not usability. I suspect it hasn't been tested in play. In particular, there's nowhere to write your current Heart Rate, an essential part of the game.
But these are irritations, not serious problems. It's a slick, well-designed game, one of the best-looking around.
Is Lacuna complete?
Lacuna makes great play of being incomplete: it's an "experimental" roleplaying game and "you're part of the experiment". It's been described as a Rorschach blot: different people see the game differently; and play it differently.
This is partly true. The setting material is ambiguous and deliberately incomplete. This works well, leaving questions to answer during play.
It's true, too, that different people will play different ways. It could be a Cold War spy story; a Paranoia variant; an action movie; a Lovecraftian investigation game; or many other things. The system is versatile enough to support these various styles.
However, two or three times, the rules themselves are ambiguous or badly explained. The Target Heart Rate ambiguity, given above, is one example.
It's important to distinguish rules ambiguities from the ambiguous setting. The ambiguous setting works well. The rules ambiguities are flaws, which could be improved by better phrasing and organisation of the text.
Lacuna in play
I ran Lacuna with five players. It was a superbly enjoyable, three hour game.
The plot was simple: Agents hunting down a Hostile in Blue City. Two players chose an investigative approach, interviewing contacts and following leads. The others wanted to shoot things, beginning the game by robbing a gun shop.
Lacuna supported both these styles (investigation and action movie). The Agents split into two teams: the Investigative Team and the Gun Team. We cut between their scenes.
Static worked well, ramping up, creating tension and driving the game: a perfect pacing mechanism. As the game went on, Control got less reliable and surreal things happened. By the end, there was intense danger, with Spidermen closing in on the Agents, just as they ejected from Blue City.
The heart rates played a part, but not a central one: only one player exceeded his maximum. I think this is because Static ramped up so quickly: if Static hadn't added pace to the game, the heart rates would have done.
The players enjoyed the game a lot. I'm keen to play again. If all sessions run as slickly as this one, it’ll become one of my go-to games.
There is more detail in an Actual Play report on The Forge.
If you're a traditional gamer
If you prefer traditional games, don't dismiss Lacuna. It'd work well, played traditionally: it's got a superb setting, a central GM role and slick mechanics. Hell, parts of our game were very traditional, just fighting monsters.
Although Lacuna is an indie game, in the sense it's self-published, it doesn't feel like many indie games. There's no deep issues, no soul searching, unless you want there to be. And it's not a game about a single issue.
One significant different from traditional games is the simplicity of the rules. You'll resolve most combats with a single die roll: there are no hit points, for example. If you can handle that simplicity, Lacuna is worth a look.
Overview
I haven't been this excited about a game for a long time. And, by the way, I'm a miserable bastard who doesn't easily get excited about games.
Lacuna is a gem of a game, a twisted piece of genius. It's also a beautiful book. You can play it different ways, you'll fill in bits of the mystery yourself, and that's part of the fun.
There are flaws in the text, which I hope will be fixed in future editions.
For fifteen dollars, I'd highly recommend Lacuna.
