Via Daniel Solis of ¡Luchacabra Games! comes John Carpenter’s The Thing: The Party Game, which takes the paranoia Mafiaward the way Josh anticipated.

It’s interesting to note that Solis’s version makes Trust explicit, using the common design pattern of investing it in tokens, whereas our version deliberately keeps it implicit or even nonexistent. I think this is what people are calling (stop reading if allergic to theory!) the fruitful void–something that should be included in a good board or party game, but left out of an RPG.

Further connections: you may notice people in the fruitful void discussion talking about The Mountain Witch, a samurai game that does have explicit Trust points, but never mentions the word “honor” in its entire text.

Substitute the Drama-Fortune-Karma mechanic for the coin in John Harper’s Flip and you’ve practically got RPG Nomic.

What’s the smallest interesting, nonfreeform RPG you can make?

I’m sure you’ve all seen this already, but I still think it’s inexplicable that Boardgamegeek’s list of games that should have zombie expansions, but don’t, doesn’t include Clue.

I think it’s neat that some people on the Forge came up with a game that tries to solve the same problem as Diesperado, only they call it (apparently) Rervoir Dogs. They use cards instead of dice and assign roles (Rat, Friend, Loot, etc) to players at the start of the game.