Dueling Fops of Vindamere

LOVE FAST

Greg Stolze's procedurally generated game puts you in the corrupt, dissolute city-state of Vindamere, but don't worry. You play the best people there, spoiled children of privilege with nothing better to do than pursue swordplay, flirt outrageously, and snack on delicious vol-au-vents. A single game session covers the social year from Ye Midwinter Balle through the prestigious Alle-Valley Fencinge Championeshippe. Your louche elite blade-swanks fall in love, brawl, sneer and engage in truly petty social rivalries.

Imagine a game that's "Bridgerton, only extremely violent" or "extra-horny Cobra Kai, with swords."

DIE PRETTY

All the game's complexity is emergent. You can play it over and over without having to prep it or continue a meandering story. The hard stuff has already been built into the mechanics and the step-by-step procedures for generating drama, intrigue, and coarse humor. All players have to do is make the key decisions and roll on combinations of four stats (Foppish, Serious, Duelist and Aristocrat) to subtly humiliate rivals, engage in duels of wits (or more commonplace duels of swords), make earnest plights of troth, and carry on with the restraint and dignity you'd expect if Romeo was madly in love with Lady MacBeth.

FIGHT LIKE A FOP!

The game's about 44 pages, or 22,000 words, and it's funny. Rolling up characters takes about five minutes, or seven if you giggle at the list of suggested names. Every session of play starts with the primary characters falling in love at a winter ball, progresses through a spring cotillion, and culminates as their fencing schools vie for triumph at a year-end tournament. But between those three fixed scenes, there are random events encompassing everything from grog-house brawls, illegal duels, erotic machinations and even a locked-room murder mystery. You never get through all the possible scenes in one game, and every scene has a variety of options, so it plays differently over and over. The only thing it doesn't do is get dull.