🎓⚰️🎪 First Impressions Lordsworn

First Impresssions: LordSworn

( Game Description )

I’ve been staring at this for several days and decided to stop making an effort, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be in the mental space for this. A big part of the narrative will be how different characters react to events; and that sounds much more like a group game (albeit a grim, challenging one that I would want to play only with people I trust, and I probably want to play other games more).

It’s an intriguing thought, the materials are well-presented, the tables offer plenty of customisation, and the gameplay sounds interesting, and yet this has been open on my computer for over a week, and every time I’ve looked at it, my heart sank.

It’s time to acknowledge that this game is preventing me from playing games that excite me, that make my heart sing. I’m not going to eliminate it from my life entirely, but I will be removing it from my hard drive for now.

New Policy: The One-Week Rule

In addition to the Unreviews, where I look at something and go ‘ugh, do not want’ or ‘WTF is this even’. I’m initiating a new policy:

If I open a game, read it, and then continue to stare at it for several days without actually attempting to play, it’s worth working out why I am avoiding this particular game… and then to write up my first impression and remove it.

Once I gave myself permission to never play Lordsworn unless I specifically want to, I felt much relieved. I don’t think it’s a bad game. I just don’t have any emotional curiosity about it: it’s post-apocalyptic on a small scale, and we’ve already established that this is not for me.

( Musings, and RPG-adjacent work )

So I have plenty of RPG-related things to do and a lot of games to play. I don’t want to feel I ‘have to’ give any game my game time, or put off playing other things because this came up on the random generator. It's ok for me to let go of something that I like, or could like, if it stands in the way of me having fun. I don't get extra points for slogging through boring stuff or batting my head against the wall.

Letting go of an unplayed game that was pretty close to a freebie because it might be fun, when all the evidence says that it isn't actually fun, is surprisingly hard. And maybe that's the main lesson this game can teach me. It might be for me – it shares a lot of characteristics with games that I enjoyed – but it isn't actually fun (and shares a lot of characteristics with games I don't enjoy).

Maybe I should put the 8 of Cups where I can see it loud and clear.