Psychics Save the Free World!

A line of cars, black, with the Stars & Stripes fluttering from the bonnet. The scene jumps. A cheering crowd, flags in their hands, waving. A band strikes up with the anthem that always announces his arrival. Men in black, sunglasses hiding their eyes, but you know they are looking. Are they looking for you? You look up. The man in the suit. Striding. Waving. Grinning to the crowd, but not to you. The scene jumps again. Looking at the man. Looking at where you are, but from far away. It jumps again. Hands move quickly. They know what they are doing. There is something in those hands. Is it a device? A trigger? A rifle? There is bang. Close to you. The scene jumps. There are screams. People are running. You cannot see the man… Oh my god! Is it real? Will it be real? Will you be there? Fortunately, this is a vision, a premonition, it has not happened. Yet. But it might. Someone really wants to assassinate the President of the United States and that someone is the USSR. Nobody is going to believe you though, nobody except your fellow psychics in the program. Certainly not since the head of the program was killed in a car crash—why did nobody see that coming?—and funding from the US government got cut… Now it is just you, armed with your premonitions, which stands between you and the death of the leader of the free world and the consequences that would have.

This is the set-up for Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War, a roleplaying game of secret government projects and conspiracies in which the psychically gifted, trained as part of a program to spy on the Soviets, are the only ones who know that the President of the United States’ life is in danger. Except, of course, for those involved in the conspiracy to assassinate him. Published by LunarShadow Designs as part of ZineQuest #3 following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is designed to be played as a one-shot, of the Player Characters responding to the premonition and attempting to prevent it from happening, but it can be played as a longer campaign and it need not be about the assassination of the President. There are plenty of pinch points throughout the Cold War, from the Hungarian Uprising and the Bay of Pigs to the Moon landings and the stationing of Pershing missiles in Germany, which serve as inspiration for Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War.

However, given its subject matter, what inspires Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is not the obvious cinema and television of the period. So instead of dark psychological thrillers or the constant dread of all too many of those who lived through the era, it takes its inspirations from lighter fare. The question is, what exactly is that inspiration? If not The Manchurian Candidate or The Parallax View, or similar films and television series, the most obvious inspirations, what then? These after all, are not only great cinema, but also great inspiration in terms of tone and atmosphere. Unfortunately, Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War does not include a bibliography and that is a serious failing. So why not dark psychological thrillers or the constant dread? The simple answer is Safety Tools. This is not a criticism of Safety Tools in general. They deserve a place in the roleplaying hobby and they deserve a place in Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War since it is set in the past when negative social attitudes were rife. Yet to ignore the inspirations for its inspiration means that Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is really doing a disservice to its audience. It should not only have included them, it should have included them as an option and allowed the Game Master and her players to make that choice given the genre of Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War.

A Player Character in Project Cassandra has an Identity, a Background, ten Skills, several Knowledges or areas in which he is an expert, and a single, unique psychic power. The Skills are divided between three categories: Mental, Physical, and Specialist. The Skills can be anything that a player likes, but the Mental and Physical, skills are broad, whereas the Specialist skills are fairly narrow. To create a character, a player assigns a Rank value of one to one of the three categories, and a Rank value of two to the remaining pair. The player assigns four Skills to one category and three skills to each of the other two. The Player Character starts with a single Knowledge. It has no numerical value, but is used once per session to introduce a fact or truth related to the Knowledge into the game.

Identity: Maureen Herslag
Background: Housewife
Premonitions: 14
Mental – 2: Intimidation, Haggle, Chutzpah, Being Nosy
Physical – 2: Cleaning, Look Anonymous, Dodge, Athletics
Specialist – 1: Pistols, Self Defence
Knowledge: Cookery
Power: Yesterday

Project Cassandra uses what it calls the Precognition Engine. To undertake an action, a player must roll six six-sided dice and obtain as many successes as he can. Each roll equal to or under the value of the skill counts as a success. The difficulty and the number of successes that a player has to roll varies between one and seven, the latter being almost impossible. Successes can also be spent to overcome a challenge, such as picking a lock or punching out a senator’s aide/Communist sympathiser, representing both the amount of effort it takes and the amount of time it takes. It might be done in a single action, or it might take several. A failed roll will result in a Player Character suffering a consequence, typically a narrative consequence, but it can also be a condition, such Paranoid or Bloodied. A player can choose to have his character suffer a Condition in order to gain an extra success, meaning that it has come at some cost. A Condition can increase the difficulty or it can make a Player Character’s Premonitions more difficult to use.

A Player Character starts play with fourteen Premonitions. These represent his ability to see the immediate future and can be used to reroll any dice that did not roll successes. They recover slowly, at a rate of one Premonition per night of rest. A Player Character’s tenth and fifth Premonition is special. It grants the Player Character a more detailed vision of the future, specifically about the next scene. A Premonition is also used to activate a Player Character’s power. Most people will be unaware of psychic powers, but some are Nulls, who have no psychic footprint and who can negate a Player Character’s power if it is used directly on them. The conspiracy does employ Null agents as well as psychic agents.

The set-up to Project Cassandra is intended to be fairly freeform. It begins with the players and the Game Master building a conspiracy. Together they create an Opening Vision and answer some Conspiracy Questions. This should set the era, the nature of the conspiracy, and so on. Typically, this will involve the assassination of the President. For example, ‘How will the President be killed?’, ‘Where will the attack take place?’, and ‘Why will the world believe you are responsible?’. Project Cassandra incudes some sample questions, an example of play, and good advice for the Game Master on running the game and what Safety Tools to use. There are notes too on running longer term conspiracies—longer than four sessions—but they are fairly brief.

Besides five ready-to-play Player Characters, Project Cassandra includes two Mission Profiles, also ready to play. The Opening Vision of ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ sees President Kennedy assassinated in Berlin in June 1963, and starts with a bang for the Player Characters, whilst ‘The Dark of the Moon’ is pulpier in tone, asking the Player Characters to confront what hidden secrets Apollo 12 brought back from the Moon. Both come complete with questions to set the stakes and details of the conspiracy.

Physically, Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is generally well presented and nicely illustrated. However, it could have been much better organised and it takes a while to work out quite what is going on. Once done, the roleplaying game is easy to grasp. The other aspect of the roleplaying game which could have been made clear on the cover is the fact that it is a storytelling game.

Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is in need of a bibliography and really some general background about the period, because not everyone is going to be familiar with it. However, for those that are, Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War does have an enticing set-up. That though is far as it goes, for Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is storytelling game, and the uncovering of the conspiracy and the prevention of it coming to fruition as well as the set-up depends on both players and Game Master working together. For the most part, Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is best suited for a group which has some experience with storytelling roleplaying games and some understanding of the period.

The US Election Game I

Like clockwork, the US Presidential Election rolls around every four years and with it, come a slew of US Presidential Election themed board and card games. Although strangely, they really only seem to appear in years where is the chance of switching from one party to the other, so Republican to Democrat or vice versa. So Z-Man Games’ 1960: The Making of the President was released in 2007 and followed by Campaign Manager 2008 in 2008. 2016 is no different with a half a Super Pac’s worth of games with a presidential theme coming our way in the run up to the US Election in November, most of them funded through popularity and pledges, just like the US Election itself. Of course, these games are funded via Kickstarter rather than through the ballot box. 

The first of these is The Contender: The Game of Presidential Debate. Funded via a successful Kickstarter campaign and published by The Contender, this is a social or party game in the mode of Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity. So it works by one player posing a question from a card to the other players, who will use their answer cards to supply answers to the questioning player who will select what he thinks is the most suitable answer from these cards. The person who played the selected card wins that round. Then the next player gets to pose the question whilst everyone else provides the answers, and so on. Play continues one of the players has won an agreed number of rounds.

Designed to be played by three or more players, aged eleven and older, The Contender uses this same mechanic, but with an extra twist that comes from its theme, that of US Presidential Debates. In The Contender, the game is played with Topic cards rather than question cards and Argument cards rather than answer cards. The player setting each Topic is the Moderator and the players making the Arguments are the Candidates. The Contender comes with forty Topic cards and some five hundred Argument cards. Each Topic card has a subject and a question intended to be read aloud to the Candidates, for example, ‘Guns – Candidate, the debate over the Second Amendment has only grown louder in the last five years. As president, do you intend to pull the trigger or dump ammo on the right to bear arms?’ or ‘Police Brutality – Candidate, law enforcement has come under fire as viral videos of alleged police misconduct make headlines. Do you believe our boys in blue are seeing red, or is the current outrage white-washing a complex issue?’ All of the Topic cards deal with contentious subjects.

The Argument cards are slightly more complex. They are divided into three types—Attack, Distract, Fact. Each gives a short phrase that can be used as an Argument and the source from which it is drawn. So the ‘You’re a national embarrassment.’ is from the Bill Clinton quote, “We can’t have any more instances like what happened when Mr. Bush went to Japan and the Japanese prime minister said he felt sympathy for our country.”; the Distract card, ‘I would like to be the first to say…’ is based on Jimmy Carter’s “Tonight I would like to be the first to say a few words about this most special office, the presidency of the United States.”; and the Fact card, ‘I’ve had actual responsibility’ is based on the Sarah Palin quote, “I guess a small-time mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”

At the start of the game each Candidate receives five Argument cards and the person with the most presidential hair is the first Moderator and poses the first Topic. Then going round the table each Candidate can respond with one, two, or three Argument cards. A Candidate does not have to play all three cards at once, but can choose to hold some for use later in the round, typically as a response to another another Candidate’s Argument. Once a Candidate has played three Argument cards though, his contribution towards the debate about the Topic card is over for that round.

For example, Dave, Debbie, and Louise are playing The Contender and it is Louise’s turn to be the Moderator. She turns to the others and says, “Christmas. Candidate, over 50 percent of the voters who describe themselves as Christian claim there is a culture war on Christmas. Do you believe the reason for the season is under fire? Or should those concerned realize there’s more than one way to deck the halls?”

Dave’s opening statement is, “I will not rest until all Americans have Christmas.” (Fact) to which Debbie responds, “Are you taking crazy pills?” (Attack) and “I will not support this boondoggle.” (Attack). Dave looks over at Debbie and raising his eyebrows, says, “Suck it up.” (Attack) “We have to strengthen Christmas.” (Fact). Debbie gets in one last comment, “You can’t even spell Christmas.” At which point each Candidate has played his or her three Argument cards and it is up to the Moderator to decide upon the winner, at least for this topic. Louise decides that Dave has made the most cogent argument and awards him the Topic card as a victory point.

At the end of each round, each Candidate draws back up to five Argument cards and the next player in turn becomes the Moderator. Play continues like this until the Candidate with most Topic cards wins. Or at least this is how I think that The Contender is played. The problem is not the basic structure of the game, but rather the use of the Argument cards. Does each Candidate read them out verbatim or can he adapt them? Neither is suggested. Nor is the use of the Attack, Distract, or Fact cards explained. The lack of an explanation does leave the rules open to interpretation, but coming up with your own explanation or interpretation should not really be much of an issue.

Physically, The Contender comes in the same style of box as Cards Against Humanity, but has an obviously American theming in terms of its graphical design. The cards themselves are sturdy enough, easy to read, and the quotes on the Argument cards are interesting to read.

In addition to its underwritten rules, the other issue with The Contender is its subject matter. The players have to be interested enough in the process of the US Presidential Election to want to play this game. Firstly, this makes it of limited interest outside of the USA; secondly, it makes it of limited interest to a younger audience—especially the suggested age of eleven plus; and thirdly, whilst the subjects presented on the Topic cards are rude or adult in nature, they are potentially controversial in nature. There may be some Topic cards that the Candidates do not want to debate. Whatever the players’ attitudes towards the subject on the Topic cards, The Contender is best played with an older audience and with more than just three players unless you want to play out the final US Presidential Debates.

Now despite its underwritten rules, The Contender is nicely themed game that does a bit more with the traditional Apples to Apples, using the Attack, Distract, and Fact Argument cards to help Candidates build their arguments in each round. There is also plenty of scope for the players to roleplay too, taking on a particular stance for one Topic, switching to another for the next Topic, and so on, whether playing it straight or for comedic effect. Ultimately, The Contender: The Game of Presidential Debate is a solidly themed party game that gets you ready for all of the hoopla of the US Presidential Elections.