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This game by Atarashi Games (http://atarashigames.com/) takes the world made popular by Battle Royale and runs wild with it into a setting so full of opportunities to kill and maim your friends that I can’t help but chuckle as I read it. 50 students are held captive by the Japanese Government and told to kill each other or else the bombs in the stomachs will explode and kill all of them! Now get to work.
The mechanics are inventive with one player (other than yourself) describing the successes of your character while a different person gets to chose what happens to you when you fail. The dice basically just get to say who gets to talk. The rest of the resolution system is so freeform that if I were to explain it too much you wouldn’t need to buy the book. There’s no weapon damage, no hit points, and no rules for being set on fire, bleeding from various wounds, being imploded, strangled, stabbed or even hit with a pocket calculator. All of these things can potentially kill you and probably will at least once or twice a session. Now that isn’t to say it is too simple to be fun, far from it. Rather, it just frees you from the usual “Okay, how much damage I take?” sort of combats and focus more on the “So it takes my WHOLE arm off, or is there still enough of it to re-cock my crossbow?” types.
In Classroom Deathmatch, you will die. I can assure you it will happen, but I can also tell you that it is a relatively painless experience. The character you play is randomly selected from a possible fifty students of varying skills, friend circles, and talents. When you die horribly you merely pluck out another unfortunate student at random to be added to the growing pile of student bodies. Last one standing takes home the prize and can probably get away with raising the roof for a few seconds in front of the other players.
If no one is really interested in murdering their friends all night, the rules provide other things to keep everyone entertained. Want to rebel against the government? Sure. Care to escape? Give it a shot! There’s even an optional rule set to turn Battle Royale into Dragon Ball Z if you’re so inclined. Although this really is a standalone product, I would have at least a good glance at the free preview of Panty Explosion (Available here: http://atarashigames.wordpress.com/try-for-free/) for an explanation of Junishi and blood types and how they can influence your game. They are mentioned in the rules for Classroom Deathmatch, but they tell you to check out the Panty explosion book instead. Would’ve been handy to have the whole section in the book, but you can just download it so it’s not a big deal.
In this game it pays to be popular. Secret votes are counted at the end of each in game day and the character with the most votes gets to roll a higher die type than the rest of the students. It helps keep people roleplaying and tends to make the failures less mortal and more dramatic which I like.
Some neat things that I like about this system is that even if you’re dealing with one character who is secluded from all the other classmates, the players still have things to do as they will be dictating the failures and successes of the player in question so no one is ever bored. Also, the fact that there isn’t actual damage for any of the weapons, it sort of means that there is no such thing as a useless weapon. There are only imaginative weapons and un-imaginative weapons. I imagine even the Sanitary napkins that get placed in all the girls equipment have killed at least one person.
There are some things missing from this game however. For instance, initiative, something that in most games has nearly a good three pages to figure it out is merely dropped to Rock Paper Scissors. Isn’t there a better mechanic? I mean, you’ve got all this stuff loaded into popularity and you couldn’t link initiative in there too? Do the unpopular kids freeze with self-doubt? Do they act rashly out of hate and move faster? Rock paper scissors feels like a cop-out. Also, I was missing a good chunk of text from Page.60 of my PDF, but I’m not sure if that’s a usual thing or it just happened to me. Another absent thing is a list of all the students’ names. The book even asks you to keep track of who is dead and who is alive via a list, so why doesn’t it provide a little checklist instead of forcing you to write one out on your own?
The game has great touches like the ability to throw in a flashback sequence to regain precious spent dice back and fill in backstory. You get to play out a mini-conflict with someone in the past that relates to the scene at hand whether it’s hiding in a box from a group of bone-breaking government goons, or fighting someone with power tools. You can recover dice as you resolve the action in the flashback, but the book isn’t specific if you regain the dice you spend in the flashback back or not. I assume you do as it’s the only way it makes sense, but that’s only my interpretation and when lives hang on the line, people might get bitchy at inconsistent rules. Also, it can be a little lame to have an amazing flashback scene only to hand the turn over to someone else and get a drill through the eye.
If I have any real complaints about Classroom Deathmatch, it’s that there isn’t enough of it. The game definitely has everything you’ll ever need to play whatever sort of high school free-for-all you want, but about a quarter of the book is all the student character sheets. I want this book to be two hundred pages with tons of extra options that I can’t really think of because the book encompasses all I wanted from it anyway. I just would like more of it. I also can’t see this being run with less than four people. Everyone needs a rival and a best friend and it just doesn’t work with one person being both of those things to one person.
To wrap it all up, Classroom Deathmatch succeeds everything it sets out to do and more. If you’re looking for something fun to spring on your imaginative friends who have a good sense of humour, look no further! I personally can’t wait to get everyone I know trapped on a deserted island and tell them to kill each other without mercy. There are so many things this game does while saying so little. The strikes it has against it doesn’t even compare to how much fun this game is. If this review stands between you buying this game or not, I can tell you right now that you won’t regret the purchase. Classroom Deathmatch is pure fun for those who like fast-paced, rules-lite games, and if you don’t like those sorts of games, buy it anyway.
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