Ranking FATT Games by How Much I Want to Play or Run Them

Wordy title but who said I had to be brief. I’m going to go through the list of games Friends at the Table has played, according to the FATT Wiki. If it’s a game I don’t remember much about it’ll probably rank low.

Let’s get to it.

Games I Have No Clue About

Sorry games, it’s not personal but I don’t know enough about you. Sorted alphabetically.

Action Movie World, Anomaly, BFF!, Cold Winter, Downfall, Dusk To Midnight, Follow, For the Queen, Golden Sky Stories, Honey Heist, Inspectres, Lacuna, Noirlandia, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, Shooting the Moon, The Skeleton, Stewpot, The Sundered Land.

Don’t I know you from somewhere?

These games I don’t have much to say about. They exist like the flavor in a seltzer water: A faint memory of something that was there. Some of these games are a memory because of the big lineage of Blades in the Dark post I did, others I just barely remember them.

Dialect, Primetime Adventures, Dream Askew, Misspent Youth, Wagon Wheel.

A couple rungs off the floor.

We’re onto games I can actually have opinions on! A miracle. Well, somewhat. This is also games that I feel like I know more than the previous tier, but may not have Full opinions.

27 : Microscope - They didn’t quite get into this game fully, but the base game doesn’t seem as interesting. I think what they did for this game was a decent way to glide past it.

26: Ech0 - shrug From what I remember, it was cool but sadly I remember too little.

25: Tower - While it’s made by Austin and Jack, it’s not really high on my desire to play because it sounded rough and needed more runs. Might be something there someday.

24: Lady Blackbird - I feel like I’ve read this one before, ages ago, but I can’t remember enough to go higher than this. I think it was a like… 1-2 page game that was neat?

23: Orbital - I can’t tell if my placement here has to do more with what they did with it versus what I’d like to do with it, but whatever, there’s no real grading rubric here.

It’s not you, it’s me.

We’ve got games that are good, but just not great for me.

22: The Fall of Magic - OK, so this one I contemplated putting in the last tier because it’s right on that memory barrier. I remember this travelling game being really interesting, but I can’t remember exactly how, which sucks.

21: Lasers and Feelings - Sorry, you’re just a bit too light for me. I need more to work with than just “Lasers” and “Feelings”.

I see what you’re going for, and I respect it.

This category is for games that I wouldn’t balk at playing but I wouldn’t be super enthused about.

20: Fiasco - Fiasco is one of the games I’ve been closest to playing on the list. It seems cool, but part of this lower ranking is based off the group I’m normally playing with and it wouldn’t feel great there. It feels like, more than other games, requires hard player buy in from everyone.

19: The Veil - I think the emotion system is really really really interesting, but something about it feels not as good as the system is conceptually. Spiking is cool way to put a curb on just using the game ability over and over.

18: Dungeon World - Generic fantasy is still a genre I think I really like, but with how much I’m struggling with generic fantasy prep with Pathfinder, (and how much I struggled playing 5e), I don’t know if the genre and I mesh right now. Dungeon World is crowbaring Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics around the Dungeons and Dragons type of fantasy, for better and worse.

17: Stars Without Number - Really, I just want to play the faction game.

16: Masks - Despite never reading this game, nor hearing the FATT episodes with it, and only knowing the game through osmosis elsewhere, it seems fun! I’ve been on a superhero kick lately (partner and I had watched the 90s X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons with breakfast over the past few months), and it feels like it could be an interesting space to get into.

Alright, sign me up.

Now we’re getting into it. These are games I’d enthusiastically endorse if someone I knew was running it.

15: World Wide Wrestling RPG - I am a wrestling fan, and I like how this game tries to handle the booking aspect. I feel like this is a game that could be way higher if I heard the episode in question and read the book more recently than I have, but still. Color me interested

14: Scum and Villainy - I’m not a huge Star Wars guy, but something about that space opera genre seems really enticing. The Forged in the Dark system should lend itself well to that sort of action and drama, but I think I’ve heard it, unfortunately, doesn’t change enough from Blades to live up to the genre.

13: The Quiet Year - I have actually played this one, with my wife, and it was fun. I think it’s down here because A) I have played it before, B) I don’t trust my group (see The Veil) and C) it might be too small scale for what I want to use it for (pregame session -1 type stuff).

12: Questlandia - This one is interesting because the first Finale of Palisade seemed to flounder with it, but I think starting this game without a preexisting world and characters would make it sing a lot more. I don’t know how much I’d like this sort of death spiral-y game, since you’re always on the back foot and are going to lose at least 1 matchup every turn, but I’d like to find out.

11: Heart: The City Beneath - This is such an interesting system and I love the pushing of forcing people to spend resources to do things. Not my normal genre of media, but I’d love to play something weird in a creepy world.

10: Blades in the Dark - This only has higher placement than Scum and Villainy because it’s a ground-level game for an entire like, subgenre of games.

Games I would try to subliminally and… outerliminally(?) convince someone I know to run.

Now we’re getting to games I want to play. Like, games I wish I could play at least once.

9: The Sprawl - I have grown into more and more of a cyberpunk fan, but most of my experience with it, to the point of hearing about The Sprawl, was Shadowrun 4th edition. So when I heard a game that captured a lot of the tropes and action I liked in Shadowrun, without a lot of the rules overhead, I was fascinated. Doubly cool that Shadowrun in the Sprawl exists if you do want to get that magic back into it from Shadowrun.

8: Firebrands - I would be so bad at this game, but I’d love to be at a table running this game at full speed. It feels like a game that would be so cool to be at a table of, seeing what everyone else is getting up to.

7: The Ground Itself - This one is bonkers as a world builder. Having your worldbuilding take place over days/weeks/months/years/centuries/millennia changes every card draw so much because you can either have a week where Everything Happens So Much, and you could have huge spans of time reflect drastic changes. It sounds cool as hell.

6: Beam Saber - I want to play the Bureaucrat so much. I want to play a character that hides in plain sight, under the radar, who can influence a war, not from the battlefield, or the shadows, but from right under people’s noses. And sure, piloting a hugeass mech is cool, it has that going for it too.

5: Kingdom - This feels like such a cool way to play a kingdom at a crossroad. It’s so cool sounding, the tension feels like it’d be great. This is the perfect mid-season game in my opinion, because shit can change so much and it can feel right

Fuck it, I will run this game.

Here we fucking GO. Games I would try to harangue my group into playing because I want to see them in action.

4: LANCER - God, LANCER rules. I loved running it. Prep was sometimes draining, but it rules so much in action. My game running it didn’t have a lot of non-combat stuff, which, yeah, that’s on me, but combat kicked ass.

3: Armour Astir Advent - Like my mention of Shadowrun in the Sprawl, Sci-Fi and Magic together kick ass a billion ways. This game has really cool playbooks (even if we’re not counting the vast array of amazing third party content) that cover so many cool archetypes. It has a built in faction game for you to play with your players that feels like there should be a push and pull with adding and removing grip from pillars. This rules.

2: Technoir/Mechnoir - I have started making a hack of this game because it’s one I enjoy so much. You can find it on the Technoir tab on this website. I also have a review of it. My feelings on Technoir should be known by now.

1: Fabula Ultima - They have not run this game, but just reading the free quickstart for the game makes me vibrate. It feels like a Final Fantasy game you can bring to your table. It feels like it captures the strategy of a turn-based JRPG, with managing healing, status effects, and so on, with the open endedness of a TTRPG. It plays right into the tropes I like, and the art in the book is just… It reminds me of looking at the official art for like, Final Fantasy 9 or 10.

There you go, an non-exhaustive list of games that Friends at the Table have played and how I feel about a lot of them.