Friday Filler: For the Queen

The kingdom has suffered trouble and strife for as long as many of its citizens can remember. Yet there is hope on the horizon. The Queen has decided to entreat with a distant power and hopes to enter an alliance that will ensure peace for the nation. She has assembled the retinue that will accompany her on what will prove to be a long and arduous journey, testing the loyalties of members of the retinue, and ultimately forcing each of them to decide whether their love of the Queen is enough to guarantee their support in the face of an attack! This is the set-up for For the Queen, a collaborative storytelling game published by Darrington Press. Designed to be played by between two and six players, aged thirteen and up, it has a playing time of between thirty minutes and two hours. It is easy to set up and play, requires no preparation, no Game Master, and in asking a lot of questions of the players, creates characters, relationships, a world, and ultimately a story.

The place to start with For the Queen is not with how the game is played, but with its physicality. For the Queen comes in a very sturdy little box—designed to look like a pocketbook—which slips easily into a bag and makes a very handy addition to any game night or convention. The artwork on the box is eye-catching, but it is only a hint of things to come. Inside the box there are ninety-one cards. These consist of sixty Question Cards, seventeen Rules Cards, an X-Card, and thirteen Queen Cards. The Rules Cards contain one rule or aspect of the game each and they are read out in order, one player after another, and in the process, set the game up. There are barely eleven rules in the game and they are very easy to grasp. The sixty Question Cards consist of one or two questions which will serve as prompts to the players’ imaginations. For example, “Why are some others at the royal court jealous of your relationship with the Queen?” or “What question do you wish you could ask the Queen? What keeps you from asking it?” One Question Card has the statement and question, “The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?” When this Question Card is drawn, it indicates the final round of the game and unlike the other Question Cards, it is one that everyone answers.

However, the most eye-catching cards are the Queen Cards. There are thirteen of these, each doubled-sided, with an illustration on each side, except for the last card which lists all of the Queens. Each illustration depicts a queen, but a different queen each time. A Birthday Queen. A Pirate Queen. A Drag Queen. A Queen Mother. A Cyberpunk Queen. A Shadow Queen. And so on, with the players picking just one of these as their Queen for their journey and their play through of For the Queen. The choice of Queen will heavily influence the story told. A journey made with the Pirate Queen will lend itself to a very different journey and story compared to one made with a CEO Queen. This is the main variable in the game—a different Queen Card means a different genre and a different story. Essentially, the Queen Card serves as the initial prompt for the players and is something that they will return to again and again over the course of a game.

The last thing done as part of set-up is to shuffle the sixty Question Cards and then the “The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?” Question Card is placed into the deck. The closer it is placed to the bottom of the deck, the longer the game will last. Then the game begins. The players take it in turn to draw a Question Card and answer it. The Question Cards really do one thing—they push each player to examine his relationship with the Queen. In doing so, the player will also create a character for himself and establish that relationship, which depending on the Question Cards drawn and answered, will probably be a negative one, or at least a nuanced and conflicted one. As a player draws and answers more and more Question Cards, it will ultimately influence his answer to the last Question Card, “The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?”.

When a player draws a Question Card, he is not duty bound to answer it. If he does not want to answer it because its question makes him uncomfortable, he can simply tap the X-Card included in the game and move on. Similarly, if the game is straying into a subject matter that makes a player uncomfortable, that player can simply tap the X-Card included in the game and the subject matter can be excised from the game. The other option if a player does not want to answer a Question Card is for him to pass it to the next player, which can sometimes reveal something big about that player and his character. When a player is answering a Question Card, the other players are free to ask questions of him and to get him to elaborate and reveal more about his character’s relationship to the Queen. This, though, does not mean that For the Queen becomes a game of interrogation, but one of gentle inquiry, and if it does become of interrogation, there is always the X-Card.

Physically, For the Queen is beautiful. The writing is simple, clear, and direct.

For the Queen is about discovering who you are in relationship to a central figure, the Queen, and what the nature of the relationship is. The longer the player, the more Question Cards are drawn and answered, and the deeper and more nuanced the relationship becomes, and thus the more difficult answering the last Question Card, “The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?”, becomes. It constantly asks direct questions of the players, pushing them to improvise answers that build both the relationships between the Queen and her retinue and the world through which they must journey. The result is a tensely enthralling experience as each Question Card is drawn and more secrets are revealed about the relationships between the players and their Queen, that you immediately want to play it again.

For the Queen is a brilliantly tense and engaging storytelling game of creative improvisation. Its easy set-up and portability means that it is ready to play in minutes wherever you are. For the Queen is the perfect game to pack for game nights and for conventions to play when there is no game, in between games, and when a player or two cannot make it.