from the gaming-like-it’s-1927 dept
Well, here we are at the last of our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927. So far we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, Best Adaptation winner To And Again, Best Deep Cut winner The Pigeon Wager, and Best Digital Game winner Escape from 1927. Today, we’re wrapping things up with a look at the winner of the Best Analog Game category: Tower Tree Stories by David Harris.
Those of you who have followed the game jams over the years will surely recognize that name, because this is David’s fourth straight win, and the third in this category. In the past his winning games have all shared a common purpose: guiding players in an exploration of one or more paintings that had just entered the public domain that year. But this time we’ve got something very different. Tower Tree Stories isn’t based on a famous painting or an artist, but rather on something a little more low-key: the 1927 yearbook of Greensburg High School in Indiana, a full copy of which is the backbone of the game.
If you’ve ever flipped through an old yearbook, you surely know the feeling that powers this game: all those faces, all those little slices of people’s experience, every one of them providing just the slightest hint of the fully lived life underneath. It’s a sort of mystery, but one you can’t solve, so the imagination runs wild — and what better starting point for a storytelling game? In Tower Tree Stories, players will surmise and invent the relationships between the students who look out at them from the pages of the yearbook, flesh out details about their personalities and the school’s activities, and ultimately confer awards on them at an end-of-year ceremony.
Rather than put each player in the shoes of a single student, the game gives you a more bird’s eye perspective as it moves through a series of rounds. The rules are surprisingly robust without being overwhelming: first, players set up the game by inventing some facts about the class president; next, they collaborate to place random students on a relationship map and improvising the connections between them; finally, they nominate students for awards and cast their votes. Along the way, players must make narrative presentations about specific students, though the amount of first-person roleplaying required is very flexible, meaning different groups could find very different styles in which to approach a session.
The key to it all, though, is the yearbook itself. Players must make use of the many details it contains (clubs, awards, activities, and all kinds of scattered breadcrumbs) while also adding additional inventions of their own. This is the magic of the game: the way it weaves the real-life facts on the yearbook’s pages and all the mystery they hold together with the imaginative flights of fancy they are sure to inspire. In addition to the core rules, there’s a marvelous set of additional “special rules” to be invoked as needed, which are designed to keep play snappy and fun and full of variety: players can find themselves delivering a dramatic reading of a class poem, improvising advertisements for the yearbook’s sponsors, and creating canonical details about the more enigmatic clubs and students.
By the end of the game, players will have built an entire world based on this small slice of student life in 1927. No two results could possibly be the same, and it would be fascinating to compare notes across sessions and between groups. David Harris’s past games always impressed us by offering rules of play that subtly harmonize with the artwork being explored, demonstrating real understanding of both the subject matter and the power of game design. Tower Tree Stories shows that this ability doesn’t end with the visual arts, as it brings the same level of elegant and insightful design to something so completely different. We’re thrilled to name it this year’s Best Analog Game.
Congratulations to David Harris for the win! You can get everything you need to play Tower Tree Stories on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut!
And with that, we’re all done for this year’s jam. Thanks again to all the designers who submitted games and to everyone who took the time to play them. Stay tuned for next year when we’ll be back with Gaming Like It’s 1928!
Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming, gaming like it’s 1927
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