The Most Tabletop Games per Square Centimeter

That's just a great title.  "The Most Tabletop Games per Square Centimeter by Andrew J. Young.  You can find this one-sheet game on itch.io.  It is priced at $5, which one could argue is crazy for one sheet of words, but there are ten ideas here that you can take and run with, and have an improv good time.  It was last updated on 5 Jun 2023.

It does manage to fit 10 games on one sheet of paper.  The creator could have cheated by using incredibly small fonts, but these are all a reasonably readable size.  The challenge about discussing this is, if I quote even one sentence from any of these games, I will have given away a significant portion of the work.  I certainly can't post a screenshot, because that's all there is.

Actually, there are more than ten ideas here.  The games themselves are a fun mix of themes and genres, where you can be animals or halflings or programs or regular joes, battling zombies or robots or the time cops.  Or ride dinosauars on the Moon.  Or use your cellphone to escape from Hell.

What really caught my eye was that some of these games propose a conflict resolution method I have not seen before, and these are fiendishly simple.  Or are they?

In one, you attack by rolling d100, and the roll has to be higher than the last roll to succeed.  You get chances to tweak it using skills or items or a mulligan, but that sounds so easy.  Of course I can roll 8 or 10 numbers from 1-100 in order (up or down).  But I tried that, and ... it's not going to end well.  I ran a ton of these d100 rolls, and it looks like you can maybe get 4-6 runs of four going up or down per 100 rolls, but I did not see more than one sequence of five rolls out of 100, and out of 600 rolls, not a single sequence of 6 in a row going strictly up or down.  After 50 years of playing with dice and obsessing over the odds, this actually caught me off guard.  It felt like it should be easy to roll 7 or 8 or 10 in sequence, but no, the numbers are random and if you start with a 92 and an 81 and think you're on a roll (haha), you're just as likely to roll a 4 or a 93 next time.  The 4 would still be descending, but it squeezes off the options, so you have a 96% chance of failing roll after that one.

Here is a set of a hundred d100 rolls with the only rising/falling sequences of 4 underlined in green.  This run had 8 runs of 4 and no runs of 5 or more.

So, ignoring the details, some of the game mechanics here are weird and totally worth trying.

In another game, you start with three d6s.  If you roll them and a 5 or 6 comes up, you get a point, otherwise you lose a die.  Again, your gamer gut might be telling you this a no-brainer.  You have three 2-out-of-6 chances to roll a 5 or 6.  But then the randomness hits.  I could not get past 7 points, though Anne just casually rolled 10 points in a row.  The game as written lets you choose to roll fewer dice, but why would you do that to yourself?

Using my die roller again, here is how quickly you can fail with 3 dice:

5,2,1 POINT
6,2,6 POINT
2,2,3 FAIL, lose a die
2,4 FAIL, lose a die
2 GAME OVER

I even tried it with four d6s.  Can I get to 10 points before running out of dice?  I got 7, then 9, failing both times.  And somehow Anne sat here and rolled 10 points in a row with those same four dice.  Again, my lifetime of having a good feel for dice has come into question.

I just rolled up my worst run of 4d6 ever:

2,1,3,1 FAIL, lose a die
1,3,4 FAIL, lose a die
3,3 OH COME ON...
6 WIN a point
3 GAME OVER

And here's a run where I got 9 points before my luck ran out.

4,1,5,5 = 1 point
5,3,2,1 = 2 points
3,1,5,2 = 3 points
6,1,5,2 = 4 points
5,3,2,3 = 5 points
2,1,4,2 lose a die
6,3,1 = 6 points
1,4,5 = 7 points
6,3,1 = 8 points
4,3,6 = 9 points
1,3,2 lose a die
4,1 lose another
1 final fail

You can see how these simple dice mechanics, with some basic rules giving you ways to reroll or tweak the results, are totally playable and highly unpredictable.

One of the other games here, called "Who Gave the Halfling a Ray Gun?!" -- another great title -- resolves conflicts by playing high-low with a regular deck of cards, but once per encounter you can use this ray gun to win one guess.  We tried it, and it's good, pure, chaotic fun.  The rules give each encounter a good fantasy name, so you can build a story around it.

These are all solid sketches that you will find yourself expanding on.  Some of them can be rigged as solo challenges, like I have done here.  Others can be adjusted by choosing a different number of encounters, or adding a bonus item or two. 

So, while "The Most Tabletop Games per Square Centimeter" is not a full-blown, super-complicated rule system, it is what it says it is: a clever bit of brainstorming that made me lose sleep rolling imaginary dice and wondering what would have happened.

The creator's page is full of other projects, a wide range of other things to explore.  Things like "Four Sherlock Holmes and a Vampire (Who Is Also One of the Aforementioned Sherlock Holmes)" and "Build Your Own RPG (the RPG)" and "When the Guilds Pay in Copper, Crime Pays in Gold".  I like how this guy thinks.