Look. Like many of you, my brain has problems. And I can never, ever, ever say the name of this absolute banger of a game from Rowan, Rook and Decard without the supergroup also named Royal Blood popping into my head. I think it’s a feature not a bug, but the constant loop is important to how I am mentally framing this game so I suggest you go listen to the first 10ish seconds of Hook, Line & Sinker so you can have the same earworm I do.

Okay, now that is out of the way, on the the game!

Heists!

There are two heist wolves inside of me: One that wants the heist to be hyper simulated where all the variables are more or less set and I can just give the players a stack of documents and let them figure out how to infiltrate the impenetrable vault. The other wants the thrill of competency that comes from something like Blades in the Dark where we can start right in the action and the genius level planning happens as flashbacks when the players need to squirm themselves out of a sticky situation.¹

To me, each extreme has one major flaw. My issue with super simulation is that I think planning sessions are really quite boring, especially when part of the appeal of heists is having something go horribly wrong. So either you pull off your heist in immaculate fashion and miss any actual danger, or you run into a major obstacle and all that time spending planning ends up in the bin. Lose – Lose!

At the other extreme, the more loosey-goosey, plan-as-we-go side has an issue in that all danger and its solutions are manufactured on the spot. In hindsight it makes for a really compelling montage of scenes but for some reason that approach never quite feels like the players ideas are solving or creating problems, their dice are.

Royal Blood has solved these problems by making the two wolves kiss in a really clever way.²

The Plan

Royal Blood follows the structure of Ocean’s Eleven almost exactly, it’s incredible. Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if the design process was Grant Howitt locking himself in a room for 48 hours with nothing but an old TV/VCR combo, a bootleg copy of the film, and a strong set of hallucinogens.

The first thing you do is assemble your team. Instead of a barrier to play, character creation is a clear element of play. You form party bonds through questions on friendship, love, and betrayal. It takes a chunk of precious playtime to do this, but it is the game. Over 45 minutes we spun rivalries between our characters, hid secrets in plain sight, and built up an emotional tower we would have to break through in order to take down our mark. This is the montage of Clooney and Pitt collecting the team.³

Creating the heist is a similar process. You all contribute details about what makes it so important you take down your mark, whether it be for power, money, or to save your city, you all are hooked into the heist beyond just another job. Our mark was Justice, effectively the DA in the city, and she was running the biggest crime ring in town. We made her my unfeeling, uncaring, unattached sister, significantly raising the stakes in this silly little one shot game.

Importantly, you also create all the obstacles between you and the mark. In the same way Brad Pitt walks the team through all the troubles they will face getting into the Bellagio, the table lays out three major roadblocks that must be dealt with before you can strike at the mark. In this process, Howitt has cleverly hidden all the prep for the GM. Along with the roadblocks, the table also submits weaknesses to be exploited in each roadblock, telling the GM exactly what scenes are going to come up in the session.

We put Justice’s offices in the penthouse suite of a major casino that cut corners during construction, a guardian that couldn’t resist a tall brunette, and the pitboss’s weakness? Tigers.

But importantly, all the roadblocks and stakes were set. Once we built the world together we had solved the simulation planning problem because we made the security and it’s blind spots. No need to spend hours hunting for weaknesses. We settled my writer’s room problem by setting all the stakes and roadblocks before the game, then once the game started, we stayed within the bounds we created together. There was always something solid to fall back on.

And that was the game. We all picked a roadblock to go after and picked them off one-by-one until we ended up at the top of the casino, kicking Justice out of a 10 story window and blowing up the building.⁴

Matt Damon is a Lightning Mage

This is where Royal Blood departs from Ocean’s Eleven. You can approach your problems the direct route, using wits only, but in true Howitt fashion, every PC is provided with a list of batshit insane abilities to help in dealing with those pesky roadblocks. I was able to control the weather and move so fast I could phase through solid materials. Hell. Yes.

And every single ability is like this. We used pre-generated abilities, which is probably good because I went back after the game and scrolled through all the possibilities and found myself giggling well into the night at each ability’s knife edge balance of absurdity and cleverness.

The heist is cool, don’t get me wrong, but the pages of Royal Blood just bleed this pure energy that I would want to be a part of in any capacity, the excellent heist mechanics just bring it all together. They recently redid the full game, including an entire tarot deck with this incredible film negative style that hits the slight acid trip that is Royal Blood. Look at the kickstarter banner below. Come on! They. Do. Not. Miss!

(Art from the Royal Blood Kickstarter)

Ocean’s Thirteen was a mistake

I assume most readers have tabbed out to go and pre-order this beaut, but if you are somehow still here, let me give you my two main criticisms:

1. This is pitched as a fast paced single session game. I think that is partially true. Realistically I can’t see a game going more than 2-3 sessions, though I can imagine multiple marks in the same world being strung together in a very satisfying way. The short timeline should be perfect for me since I mostly run one shots, but we barely made it through our heist in 4 hours, with very limited roleplay.

That is a serious issue because just spent a bunch of time creating these cool characters and their relationships, then our GM just had to go from player to player asking, “what do you do?” then resolving it and moving on so we could get a resolution by the end of the night. I needed more time to steep in these characters and let the scenes breathe.

Realistically, I think you need two sessions to do Royal Blood justice. It deserves two sessions. ⁵

2. You should play Royal Blood in person. I had a lot of fun playing it online, and Gemelli‘s google sheets VTT was immaculate as ever.⁶ But the tarot deck is a really important artifact to this game. There are built in mechanics for the GM to look ahead in the deck and allow their expressions to give away our fates. Hearing, “I sigh loudly and shake my head as if the future is troubling” works, but just isn’t the same. I love the idea of seeing those beautiful tarot cards being read as our divine futures, not just the product of an excel script. And that is a tough pill to swallow when 99% of games I play are online these days.

Recommendation

If you play in person and can manage to get some folks together for more than a single session, buy this game. If you are a hypnotic photo-negative art maniac, buy this game. If you are a tarot card sicko and need a new deck, buy the fancy version of this game. And even the small contingent of online and one-shot only gamers should probably get this anyway so they can dream of what it would be like if they could play it.

Acknowledgments

You can buy Royal Blood in PDF and pre-order the new physical copies here.

Thanks again to Grant Howitt and the entire team at Rowan, Rook and Decard for taking the time to make these works of art. And it’s not just the games that you make that are incredible, the community you have cultivated is wonderful. Every serious RRD-head I have come across has been kind, intelligent, welcoming, and extraordinarily helpful. Well done.

Thanks to Gemelli for bringing us this game as Fate, herself, and my delightful co-conspirators: Geoff, Kyle, and TundraFundra.

P.S. I recommend people buy a lot of games. Do I exist just to spread rampant consumerism? Am I part of the problem? Do something to absolve my sins. Build an RPG commune. Leave Royal Blood in your local library.

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1. Full disclosure, I have not read or played Blades in the Dark yet. It sits along with Deep Cuts, still in its shrinkwrap, shaming me each time I pass the bookshelf. I promise to get to it this year. For real. My entire understanding is second-hand, mostly through this Zee Bashew video. ↩︎
2. Okay, fine, I will abandon the wolves analogy… Unless?? ↩︎
3. I just learned that the version with Brad Pitt and George Clooney is not the original and the 1960’s film had Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr???? Ignore that for now, but go watch it later. ↩︎
4. For those keeping track, this is the second RRD that has ended up with me blowing up a building, which is a sign of good game design. ↩︎
5. I realize this is a pretty weak critique if it is solved by just playing the game more. What can I say? The game is great. ↩︎
6. The Royal Blood VTT is not available for public use yet. My understanding is they are still determining how it works with the game’s license, so it may never see the full light of day, but the rest of his VTT’s are fantastic. ↩︎