Guillotine Earrings is a mini journaling ttrpg about being a jeweler in a city on the brink of revolution.
The PDF is two pages, with clean, readable layout and a really pleasant visual aesthetic.
Mechanically, Guillotine Earrings is a little loose, and it requires you to GM yourself, but the game also has a definite structure to it, and each game of it comes with a gauntlet of skill checks for you to roll.
Those checks are rolled with a d12 on one of two stats, and succeeding a check boosts the stat you used while failing penalizes the stat you didn't.
With the increasing difficulties and penalties for failed rolls, it does feel very possible to enter a losing spiral---but the game has alternate rules for using a jenga tower or a bunch of pieces of jewelry to track your success, and these feel more forgiving.
I think one interesting use for Guillotine Earrings might be as a worldbuilding tool.
It has you flesh out a few important features at the start (such as your tyrant and your city,) but it ends with a random number of years passing before the tyrant is overthrown, and *that* stood out to me. Creating a setting, fiddling with it a bit, and then ageing it a bunch is a great way to set up a sandbox.
I do think Guillotine Earrings is an interesting experience on its own---and I don't believe I've seen many other games about making jewelry---but especially if you want to do a bit of urban worldbuilding, I'd check this out.
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Guillotine Earrings is a mini journaling ttrpg about being a jeweler in a city on the brink of revolution.
The PDF is two pages, with clean, readable layout and a really pleasant visual aesthetic.
Mechanically, Guillotine Earrings is a little loose, and it requires you to GM yourself, but the game also has a definite structure to it, and each game of it comes with a gauntlet of skill checks for you to roll.
Those checks are rolled with a d12 on one of two stats, and succeeding a check boosts the stat you used while failing penalizes the stat you didn't.
With the increasing difficulties and penalties for failed rolls, it does feel very possible to enter a losing spiral---but the game has alternate rules for using a jenga tower or a bunch of pieces of jewelry to track your success, and these feel more forgiving.
I think one interesting use for Guillotine Earrings might be as a worldbuilding tool.
It has you flesh out a few important features at the start (such as your tyrant and your city,) but it ends with a random number of years passing before the tyrant is overthrown, and *that* stood out to me. Creating a setting, fiddling with it a bit, and then ageing it a bunch is a great way to set up a sandbox.
I do think Guillotine Earrings is an interesting experience on its own---and I don't believe I've seen many other games about making jewelry---but especially if you want to do a bit of urban worldbuilding, I'd check this out.
Thank you so much for such a thoughtful and considered review, I really really appreciate it!
Thank you for writing the game!