(Header image from Ben Griffiths on Unsplash)

The Recommendation

I think this is a must-own game. This gem is concise enough that you can probably read the base rules in less time than it will take to read this review, so you may as well go buy it, read it, play it, then come back and see if you agree with my review. Find it here.

The Review

I have long wanted an amuse bouche for RPGs. A bite sized game that could be easily picked up and put down, that would shake off the rust off my theatrical bones and help me get in the mindset for roleplay. Board games are way ahead on this. I have fond memories of playing Love Letter with my older brother as we waited for everyone to arrive for a game of Twilight Imperium,¹ and I have always wanted that for RPGs.

As it turned out, I just wasn’t paying attention. That game already exists. It is called Before the Bog God.²

The premise of the game is simple. One player acts as the wisher, some poor soul who has come before the altar of an old god, an eldritch being of immense power, and is seeking a great favor. The other player acts as the patron, cruelly twisting the fate of the wretch that dares stand before them.

The mechanics are simple. The wisher seeks to create a specific arrangement of numbers across 6 dice, using an action to alter them in some way before answering a corresponding prompt. The Bog Lord then uses their own great power in an attempt to lock the wish away, fizzle its magical power while retaining the wisher’s soul by sealing the dice in unnatural ways.

This process makes it a beautiful game to introduce new players to roleplaying. I am so pro prompt-based games, and the entire game can be played in twenty minutes.³ It also has great legs as minigame in an ongoing campaign where these patron relationships may come up, giving players an opportunity to try and outwit their GM in this direct game of wits and chance.

The mechanics are clean, the writing for the prompts is top notch, and the layout and art vibe is immaculate. Maybe my favorite part of the entire game is one single rule:

While you are not required to know
what the Wish is at the start, it must
remain unspoken until the very end,
when the Ritual is either completed or fails.

This was interesting as the wisher, but it was game-changing as the old god. Many of the prompts deal with the wish specifically, narrating the deadly consequences of the wish or displaying what led to the wish. But as the Bog Lord, you don’t actually know what that wish is. You have to act as this elder trickster god, using pure guile to piece together what the wish is and why the wisher seeks it from the breadcrumbs they lay out in their prompt responses.

I love it. It turns this simple dice game into a game of psychological warfare. One simple rule changes the entire dynamic. That’s good game design.

Acknowledgements

Thank you so much to Andrew Beauman and Matt Best for filling a hole in my library that I have been staring at for years now. This will absolutely be a go to game from here on out, both for new players, and to kick off my rare in-person sessions. The art is immaculate, especially the dark variant cover.⁴ I have been shouting at everyone I know about how cool this game is. Well done.

Thank you, as always, to Matthew Ayers, who is himself a brilliant designer and both introduced me to the game and facilitated it for us. You always find the best stuff.

P.S. I wish that more of my RPG interactions were held face to face. I spend so much time online, and I am truly grateful for the online tools that I have that have connected me to some amazing people across the world that I otherwise would have never met. But it also just causes so many problems. So much drama, and miscommunication, and misunderstanding that gets blown out of proportion due to the anonymity and distance and increasingly siloed nature of the internet. I hope we can all meet in person some day, but until that day comes, I hope we can perceive others as multidimensional people with strengths and flaws and enormous potential and treat them as such and not as a two-dimensional object made up of lines on a screen.

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In the spirit of that desire to connect, I am going to post some contact details in the blogs moving forward. Feel free to send me your thoughts at brett@birdmilkcafe.com, I am happy to engage in pleasant discussion.

1. I never won Twilight Imperium, so the only W’s I could catch were in Love Letter. Maybe that is why I remember it so fondly. ↩︎
2. I am sure there are other quick-to-setup, quick-to-play rpgs that predate Before the Bog God. Ninja Burger comes to mind as a game intended to be played in short bursts, and BtBG itself is based on a a DNGN CLUB minigame called Safe Cracker. I am guessing all of the games in Quinn’s boxed set review could theoretically be played as a pre-game to a main event, but there is something magical about Before the Bog God that nothing else has quite hit for me. ↩︎
3. It may be even shorter if you are an idiot like me and hand the Bog God the tools to seal you away on the first turn. ↩︎
4. It makes sense to have two copies of this game so each player can freely review their moves and prompts, and with that foresight they made two different covers! ↩︎