I got a copy of Kevin Allen, Jr.’s Sweet Agatha (envelope containing one 32-page full-color digest book and one 11×17 instruction sheet, $16) at GenCon, but I had to wait awhile to review it. I wanted to play it with my wife, who is as devoted to true crime and tragic drama as she is uninterested in roleplaying games. So it took awhile to convince her that this was something she wanted to do. The day after Christmas, she gave in. Now she wants to play it again.
“Play” isn’t quite the word, but neither is “read” or “build” or even “tell,” which is probably closest of the four. Many indie RPGs are not sandbox games — go anywhere, tell any story — but quest games — go there, tell that story. At their extremes — Bacchanal, Polaris, Jeepform — they depart from the RPG as she is understood and become something kindred but unlike: “co-op narratives,” or “directed storytelling,” or “scripted improv.” The designer has become the director; the play’s the thing, and the players merely strut and fret. Sweet Agatha is one of those, except the designer has no script, no narrative, and no direction. It’s a sandbox game disguised as a quest — Agatha has disappeared. Thirty pages of evocative, strange, elliptical photographs and notes and codes and pieces of her life are there for you. As you read them, you cut out “Clues,” which are no such thing. They are narrative Lego blocks, and there is no blueprint, only a color scheme. One player — “The Truth” — picks three blocks for each of nine or ten scenes. The other — “The Reader” — decides what to make of them, and where to go next, for ten scenes until the end. It’s an exquisite corpse, and indeed, Agatha may well be just that. Or she may be a ghost, or a UFO abductee, or a flake, or a drug dealer, or a time traveler, or a spy, or a murderer, or a Gnostic deity, or a nice girl who got lost. What Kevin provides is all flavor and feel; you decide the direction and the payoff. (There’s a brilliant meta-conceit planted in the booklet to give you some directions from Kevin — or Agatha, or God — if you feel the need.) While I was playing, I realized this game has amazing replay potential, getting richer as you play it more. (There’s 67 Clues provided; at most, any one game will only use 30.) As you recognize fragments of past tellings, you assign unwarranted meaning to them, as if you could re-watch Twin Peaks for the first time. This is all down to Kevin’s uncanny ability to exactly hit the notes of half-memory, half-insight, to paint the canvas without revealing the picture.
Every so often, someone wishes that gaming still had a shared universe, that all gamers could still trade stories about our own private Keep on the Borderlands. It would be no bad thing if all gamers knew where — or if — they found sweet Agatha, at last.
