(Header image is the real life old folks home that I grew up going to for Christmas caroling and Easter egg hunts)

I think maybe the best introduction to this RED style nursing home system is the resolution mechanic:

• There are no dice rolls because d6 is the only real dice¹ and that is for monopoly
• Any other dice is for kids pretending to vampires and they would have never made it through the war
• While the game uses a normal poker deck, all cards above 7 have been removed because no one can be bothered to count that high

As I started writing this review I realized that I couldn’t remember the exact resolution mechanic, something to do with a trump suit and getting the highest number, but 2’s are high? Struggling to remember all the house rules feels so accurate to my experience playing old school card games with my grandparents that I am just going to leave it.

It also kind of doesn’t matter because if you fail a roll, you can just grumble about it and succeed. Just whip out your best boomer impression and complain about how no one wants to work anymore and suddenly you are on a train to success town. Be warned though, each use makes you a little sleepier until you have to leave the scene and take a nap (this game’s equivalent to hitting 0 hp). It’s brilliant.

Wait, what is this game about again?

You are playing as a retired something living in a nursing home full of other retired somethings. And the something could be anything. There are no restrictions. I played a retired whaling captain named Ahab, and the rest of the crew included a former pharmacist and a reformed low level thug. There were no playbooks or class mechanics, these professions don’t exist to put restrictions on your character, but to add to the plausibility that you would, in fact, have a prosthetic leg that doubled as a harpoon gun.

Essentially you will use those professions to make the GM’s life hell as you explore the three rumors about the nursing home determined at the top of the session. This game has real “John Malkovich shooting a rocket propelled grenade with a gun” energy and I love it. It is old folks home gonzo in its purest form. In our game we started with rumors about drugs, fizzy drinks, and hidden treasure. We ended with a love confession, a temple of doom basement filled with soda, a blood cult that performed LSD experiments on the old folks, and we wrapped up the session by sending a man’s soul to hell. None of this was prepped, all of it came from our choices and our GM’s deranged mind, and I loved every second of it.

Recommendation

This is such a weird review because it I feel like most of the game came from free form roleplay, and most of what the system provided was a few prompts and a vibe. That said, the vibe was immaculate, and I don’t think we get to the game we did without the great framing from Green Oaks,

It was the most off-the-wall, absurd sessions I had this year, and I don’t remember any other games where I laughed as much as I did with Green Oaks. So I guess be warned that the system is quite light, but if that doesn’t scare you away, take a chance and get your geriatric role playing on.

Acknowledgments

Green Oaks can be purchased here.

Thanks to Roberto de Luca for writing this insane game and the team that translated it to English from Italian so I could enjoy it.²

Thanks to Gemelli for taking our off-the-wall ideas and raising the stakes on them until we hit the atmosphere of absurdity. Thanks to TundraFundra and Wyatt for being co-conspirators in this nonsense.

P.S. I don’t think this is required, but Gemelli’s NPC naming convention really added an extra dimension to the game. See if you can identify his system:

• Rodney Vajayjay
• Rodney Titwhistle
• Stephen Nutsack
• Evelyn Rawdog

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P.P.S. I asked Gemelli how he found this system and he said, “A friend of mine in Pittsburgh found it in his local game shop! He legit thought that someone had discarded an assisted living brochure while shopping.” which is a fantastic way to find an RPG.

1. I am intentionally rejecting die as the singular of dice. I am moving to dice as a zero plural. ↩︎
2. Apparently I played Hollows with one of the translators last night which is a delightful coincidence. ↩︎