God Damn Them All
A downloadable game
The year is 1778...
...and a letter of marque has come from the King to a small one-masted sloop, currently moored in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Captain Elcid Barrett is making his way into town as we speak, to find himself a privateer crew with which to roam the seas for American gold.
You are one of the local fishermen or -women who are brave, naïve or desperate enough to be persuaded by promises of adventure on the high seas.
This is a journaling game for one player. You can also play it with your friends and spin your yarns together. It's based on Stan Roger's song Barrett's Privateers, and was made for the Record Collection 2k20 jam.
Download
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Development log
- Updated files with journaling sheetFeb 23, 2020
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Delightful!
God Damn Them All is a journaling game in which you and your friends play out the events of a certain famous shanty.
It's 14 pages, with a solid, consistent visual aesthetic that makes it feel like something out of an old sea journal. It's easy to read, and there's isn't a ton of art, but the art that's included matches the aesthetic perfectly.
To play, you follow the loose structure of the shanty, gaining tokens whenever your luck is foul or your resources are poor. At the end, you can spend tokens to influence a few rolls to determine how your shanty ultimately plays out.
You don't have a lot of control unless you narrate a particularly bleak and dire tale, and even then the most you're going to be able to do is ensure one part of your outcome is somewhat favorable. If the dice are with you, your tale can end extremely happily, but it's not expected.
For GMs and designers, advice on hacking the system is provided, as well as a PbtA conversion via a single move. It's a damn good move, though, and it's practically a whole second microgame within the game.
Overall, if you got caught up in the sea shanty popularity wave and liked it, or if you're looking for something quick and creative to play as a warmup or icebreaker, I'd strongly recommend giving this a shot.
Minor Issues:
-Page 3, "willbe presented", missing space
-Page 4, I got a little bit confused here. It might help to have a "once you have played through all the other sections, roll the dice" line here. I had to read this a few times to realize that you didn't resolve this at the same time as Captain Cries The Town.
The "privateer move" at the very end made me laugh for a LONG time.
Hahaha! Glad to hear it. :-D
few months after, still thinking about how i enjoyed playing this game. Short but really well writed. I like games that you play while you read them, absolutely no prep, and this one is still perfect. thank you
Thank you so much! This kind of encouragement is so good and important for small-time creators, and means a lot to me. Hope you have a great day!
GOD DAMN THEM ALL is a solo PbtA journaling game (with the option to play with friends). You play as a privateer on a voyage that is doomed to end horribly (unless you are very very lucky with dice). This game is beautifully layout, and the rules fit snugly on two sides of an A4 (or letter) paper, with an extra double-sided sheet for your journal. I love the simple mechanics, with only one move for the player character. I also adore how much is conveyed through the three simple MC moves, especially the one to make the world "salty and harsh". The use of historical setting is brilliant in this game, as the inclusion of real life places and year makes everything more flavourful.
Hi! I love the game but I'm wondering if there is a way to have multiple stories with the same person? Is there a way to continue goals or something like that? Basically is there a way to prolong the game and continue with the same character? Thanks!
Thank you! 🙏
That’s a tough one. I think as written, it’s kind of like a song in that it’s a pretty short, self-contained story. I suppose you could come up with a way to continue the story, using the same mechanics as a base, but you’d have to figure out how to make the continuation fit the end of the first story...
So I guess the short answer is that the game as it is doesn’t really support it (sorry!) but I fully encourage any attempts to hack it to do so. 😊
Thank you!
– last lines in her journal
That's a pretty cool journaling game. I began as a poor fisherwoman hoping to heard about her brother gone missing at sea. I ended up with my character rich but in jail, seen as a dangerous pirate and convinced that her brother Jack would never contact her (if he isn't dead.)
Gold: 5 | Fame: 2 | No loss of life: 1 | Finding clues about Jack: 2
I suggest that, in the phone PDF, you could copy-paste the Dice Results text from the page 4 to page 11. And then this PDF should really be perfect to play as we read
Thanks for this game!What a great story, thanks for sharing!
I’m glad you enjoyed it, and I suspect you’re right about pasting in the dice results on page 11! Thanks! 🙏