Review of Bluebeard's Bride

Bluebeard's Bride from Magpie Games, written and designed by Whitney "Strix" Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson, is a short and very tightly scripted game that grew out of "the 2014 Gen Con Hacking as Women workshop." Its Kickstarter campaign succeeded in raising a hair under $130,000 - against a starting target of just $5,000 - so clearly there is an appetite for such seductively sinister fare.

The game bills itself as Powered by the Apocalypse, and most of the mechanics will be familiar to PbtA gamesters. That's no surprise considering the short-takeoff credentials of the system, as Bluebeard's Bride straddles an interesting space between RPGs and more casual board and tabletop games. "The game is designed to be played in a single session, but it has replay value," states the introduction, citing "a couple of hours" as a good playing time. Hence, PbtA's preset playbooks and Moves dovetail well with the creators' intent. It's no wonder that Bluebeard's Bride's Mediography cites Arkham Horror and Mansions of Madness among its inspirations - the latter especially recalls the flavour of the game.

Bluebeard's Bride may be quick to pick up, but it's by no means a superficial experience. It's definitely an adult game, though not in the gore-drenched sense of Kult: Divinity Lost, for example. "Bluebeard's Bride is designed to push the limits of your intellectual dark side and exercise everyone's twisted imaginations," the rules state, but those imaginations are definitely guided more towards subtle psychological horror and dark fantasy than to slasher porn. The rulebook also takes time to tackle the issue of handling sensitive themes carefully, employing carefully mapped approaches and props like John Stavropolous's X-Card. If you're genuinely disturbed by an outcome like "What about the way Bluebeard displays the Bride's dead body makes her happy?" then this is definitely not the game for you, and the creators give plenty of warning to that effect.

Gameplay and player-character archetypes are structured through playbooks that deliver "the role of an aspect of the Bride's psyche - a Sister - who guides the Bride through Bluebeard's house, armed with little more than a set of keys." This allows different players, and different character types from Animus to Fatale, to collaborate in manoeuvring a single Bride. The GM, or Groundskeeper, serves up a series of Rooms, with different characteristics, perils and revelations. Pro-active gameplay is structured in familiar PbtA fashion with Moves - for the Sisters, the Groundskeeper, and each of the Rooms. The various traumas that the Groundskeeper can deliver along the way, and the eventual resolutions, are more than unsettling enough to live up to the billing of investigative horror. All this exquisite horror is served up in immaculate production design, all florid curlicues and grisaille illustrations, like some survival of the Golden Age of Illustration seen through a very dark lens. If you don't want to pay the full price for the hardcover, the core book is also available as PDF only, but you'd be missing out on some stunning artwork. There's already an equally opulent collection of supplements to the original game.

I'm not sure yet how broad the audience for Bluebeard's Bride will be, but what it does, it does supremely well, and it certainly succeeds in creating a mood. That distinctive structure demonstrates that diversity in game design can break out in all kinds of interesting new directions. Players who warm to the theme, and who don't expect an involved long-term campaign, will be richly and darkly rewarded.

Style: The tremendous success of the Kickstarter is reflected in gorgeously dark design work that fully lives up to the setting. It's a very, and sometimes creepily, beautiful game.

Substance: This is a short and very tightly focused game. Those are two of the very few criticisms that could be made of a superbly elegant and effective piece of game design, that makes the best of its underlying system.