On the empty space where For the Queen ends, and the two things I built The Launch to do about it.

My last note ended on a small complaint I could not let go of. For the Queen stops the instant you answer its final question. The Queen is under attack, you decide whether to defend her, and then the game is simply over: no falling action, no morning after. There is nowhere to stand once the choice is made. I said that empty space, the missing “and then?”, was what set me designing The Launch. This is that diary.

First, in case you have not met it: The Launch is a GM-less story game for three to five storytellers, played from a deck of prompts across a single evening. You are a crew who built a ship to leave a home that can no longer hold you, and over three acts, the Launch, the Crossing, and the Colony, you answer the deck’s questions in character and weigh each answer toward the venture’s Promise or its Peril. When the deck runs out, those two stacks are the ending. It is the debut of the Auspice line, and what I am handing you is an early, rough edition.

I want to be precise about what For the Queen leaves on the table, because The Launch grew from two different lacks and it helps to name them apart.

The first is the one most people feel. Andrew Holmes, reviewing the game for Meeple Mountain, found the ending “narratively jarring”: “the plug is pulled and the cursor blinks for the last time.” Holmes wished for “follow up question prompt cards,” somewhere for the story to go once the last card turns.

The second is quieter, and it took me longer to see. The ending of For the Queen is guaranteed, but it is not earned. The final card lands hard no matter what you built in the hour before it, because nothing you built actually bears on it. The climax is certain; the story you told does not tip it one way or the other. That is a real design choice and it has its virtues, but it left me wanting an ending my table had made, rather than one the deck delivered.

So the first thing The Launch does answers the quieter one: it lets you weigh the ending yourself, one truth at a time. You still answer prompts, the same GM-less deal-a-deck rhythm For the Queen taught the form. But once you have answered, you place the card on one of two stacks: the Promise, or the Peril. You choose which. The loyalty you just swore, the sound repair, the steady nerve go on the Promise, the reasons this venture will hold. The hidden fault, the old grudge, the lie carried aboard go on the Peril, the reasons it will break. You are not voting on how it ends. You are weighing, one card at a time, what this crew is actually holding. When the deck runs down, the two stacks are the answer: if the Promise stands well above the Peril the venture holds, if the Peril stands well above it is lost, and if they end a card or two apart, which is the most common and the richest fate, you go on, but you go on wounded. The ending is as dramatic as For the Queen’s. It is just dramatic because of what you made, not in spite of it.

I did not invent reading an ending back out of what a table has already built. Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco taught a generation of us that a story could be brought to a reckoning out of the mess the table had already made, and that a game could turn on a hinge partway through. From it, The Launch takes its central bet: that the storytellers’ own choices, not the deck, decide how the story goes.

The second thing The Launch does answers the one most people feel: it gives the story somewhere to go when the choice goes badly. For the Queen is one act, one deck, one decision. The Launch runs three: the Launch, the Crossing, and the Colony, each its own deck, each ending on its own weighing. And failure is never a dead end. When an act goes hard, or goes on wounded, the Peril carries into the next act. The troubles you named earlier are true now and active, and every prompt afterward is answered in their shadow. The broken thing becomes what the crossing tests. The grudge becomes the wound the colony has to heal or die of. The defeat is diagnosed in your own earlier answers: the trouble you loaded is the trouble that comes due. There is no clean slate to retreat to. Even when a table chooses to play a hard act again, one card from the Peril stays on the table and follows them into the retry. Nothing here is ever simply undone.

Multiple acts are not mine either. Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year moves through four seasons, each with its own weather and its own character, long before I arrived at any of this. Where The Quiet Year’s seasons each turn the world forward on their own, The Launch carries failure between them: the trouble you load into one act becomes the raw material the next is built from.

There is a reason a weighed, yes-or-no ending works at all, and Alex Roberts built For the Queen around it. In a Story Synth design talk with Randy Lubin, Roberts describes For the Queen’s final card as the one question that breaks the format, the card everyone answers together, after the whole deck has spent its length building the feeling that makes answering hard. That single unbearable choice is the thing I wanted more of. Roberts builds a table to one yes-or-no and then, rightly, stops. I found myself asking what happens if you keep the deck’s habit of making people decide, and ask the yes-or-no three times, each one loaded by everything the crew has brought into it.

None of this makes The Launch better than the game that taught it to me, and I want to be as honest here as I tried to be about For the Queen. An abrupt ending is not only a lack. The whole design of For the Queen is one held breath, and cutting the story off the instant the Queen is attacked is part of why that breath catches. Give a prompt game somewhere to go afterward and you spend some of that suspense: the single unbearable moment becomes one of three, and a little of its shock is traded for a shape. An ending you can weigh is also an ending you can see coming, at least in outline, a few cards out. And where For the Queen hands you a deck of illustrated queens to seed the tone, The Launch shows you nothing. It is text only, on purpose, so the crew can be human or something stranger, and that choice gives up For the Queen’s best visual hook to keep the door open. These are trades. I think they are worth making for the story I wanted to tell. They are trades all the same.

So The Launch is my answer to the missing “and then?”: an ending the table earns, and a story that carries its own wreckage forward instead of stopping at the first hard question.

I should be honest about the design status of this game. This is my first design in the prompt-storytelling tradition, and what I am handing you is an ashcan alpha. Ashcan is a term from comics that indie tabletop designers took up long ago, for the rough edition a creator lets out before the finish work, the art and the polish, is anywhere near done. Alpha I mean strictly: the game has not had what I count as a true playtest, and by that I mean a game run at least once with the designer not at the table. The Launch has not crossed that line, and I still have real questions about it. The deck even has a card that asks the table the things I most want to know. Does weighing each answer onto the Promise or the Peril feel meaningful, and hard in the good way? Does the carried Peril actually bite in the next act? Does the human-or-other premise hold, or does a table quietly pin it down to one thing?

And it is not the only answer to that missing “and then?”. The family For the Queen started has found a whole range of its own, some of them stranger than mine, and that is the design diary after this one.

So if you want to try mine, what I would love most is for you to play it at your own table, weigh your truths honestly, and share how it went: what your crew was carrying when the deck ran down, and where the game let you down. You can find it on Gumroad or RPG Trader while the alpha lasts, name a fair price.

The best stories are the ones we tell together.

Image: a cover for The Launch, a GM-less prompt game by Christopher Allen, published by Dyvers Hands Productions. Launch photograph by Todd Trapani on Unsplash.

On the craft around the prompts, and why Alex Roberts’ little deck seems to run itself.

Most summers I give myself a creative project: some corner of game design I want to understand by making something inside it. This summer, the project picked me. My local group, the East Bay Story Gamers, has fallen hard for prompt games, the GM-less, deal-a-deck, no-prep kind: For the Queen, A Quiet Year, and their many cousins. Playing them week after week, I kept circling the designer’s question. How does so little do so much?

The prompts are where these games really live, and I have written about that craft before, in “The Power of the Prompt”: the best questions do three jobs at once, telling you about the world, about who you are, and about what has just been set in motion, and they do it not through what they ask but through what they quietly take for granted. That craft is the engine.

But an engine is only half of it. The prompts still have to be held and dealt in some order, with somewhere for their answers to land, and that surrounding frame is what I want to look at here, in the game that turned this kind of play into a genre: Alex Roberts’ For the Queen, first published in 2019 and reissued by Darrington Press in 2024. Here is what I think it gets right.

Getting started asks almost nothing of you. No game master, no preparation, no rulebook to study the night before. The rules are printed on the cards and taught as you deal them, and the only object on the table is a deck, a thing everyone already knows how to hold. Roberts has described arriving at the design by subtraction (in an interview in French): the first prototype leaned on a Jenga tower and dice, pared down over many iterations until all that remained was a stack of handwritten index cards. Setup is a couple of minutes. A whole game runs half an hour to two hours. This is one of the reasons it has been so popular for a weekday evening with the East Bay Story Gamers.

The queen you choose colors everything. The game ships not one queen but a whole deck of illustrated ones, and the one you settle on sets the story’s tone before a single prompt is read. A soft, sorrowful queen and a horned, imperious one grow very different stories from identical rules. That same picture is what lets the form flex genre: the crown can sit just as easily on a starship captain, a cult’s prophet, or the meanest girl in tenth grade. One small deck, played as tragedy, or horror, or comedy.

The feeling comes first. The premise lands before the first card is drawn. You belong to a Queen’s retinue, and you love her, though she is not always kind to you. A few short opening lines sketch that bond in broad strokes and still pin down something painfully specific about it, and then the game hands you a Queen no one at the table plays. Because no one speaks for her, no one can soften her or explain her away. You are emotionally invested before you have built a single thing.

The ending is fixed before you begin. The entire game is one suspended moment. The final card is the instant the Queen is attacked, which means every prompt before it is quietly asking you to build the hours leading up to that attack: history, not plot. And the deck is the clock. That final card is not fixed to the bottom; at setup you bury it somewhere in the back half, so once you are deep into the game you know the attack is near without knowing which turn will bring it. The thinning stack becomes a countdown you can feel, and the not-knowing-when is a quiet dread all its own, until the card the whole evening has been building toward finally turns over:

“The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?”

Everything you have invented over the last hour is what decides your answer. The climax is certain; what fills it is entirely yours.

Even hard, intimate play stays safe. For the Queen was, as Jason Brown put it, the first game they had seen “that gives the players explicit permission to use the X Card as a narrative tool as well as a safety tool.” The X-Card normally lets anyone at the table pull the story back from something they would rather not play out, no reason owed; here you are also allowed to use that same pull for the story’s sake, waving off a thread not because it hurts but because the fiction is better without it. Between the queen you settle on and the freedom to wave a thread away, no two games arrive at the same place.

One sure sign that a design is sound is that it turns out to be copyable. Roberts released a reference document for the system, and the family that grew from it, “Descended from the Queen”, now runs to some forty+ published titles with a community how-to guide of its own. People do not clone a structure unless the structure is doing the real work.

None of this makes it the right game for every table, and it is worth being honest about what the form trades away. For all that it welcomes newcomers, a blank page can intimidate. Andrew Holmes reviewed it for Meeple Mountain having never played a roleplaying game before this one, and even he would not recommend it as a first RPG for a table where everyone is new: some of its questions carry undertones a brand-new player might not be ready to read. It prizes collaborative authorship over in-character conversation, so if the pleasure you chase is talking as your character across a table, this offers a different one. And the shuffled deck, the source of all that variety, is also its greatest weakness: every question has to earn its place no matter when it happens to fall, and honestly, not all of them will.

There is one more thing it left me wanting, and it is the useful kind of wanting. When that last question is answered, the game simply stops. There is nowhere to go after the decision, no falling action, no morning after. That empty space, the missing “and then?” is exactly what set me designing The Launch. But that is my next design diary.

So let me hand you the deck. If you have played For the Queen, or any of its many descendants, I would love to know which queen you drew, and what she made of you.

The best stories are the ones we tell together.

Image: the For the Queen box (Darrington Press 2024 edition), a game designed by Alex Roberts, shown here for design commentary.

A Design Diary, on writing a question that does three jobs at once.

A while back, my friend Deanna got me thinking about exposition, about how a storytelling-game prompt can hand the storytellers a whole world without ever sounding like a lecture. I’d been treating exposition, character, and plot as three separate jobs: three things a good prompt had to take turns doing. Her way of looking at it knocked that idea loose for me. What if one question could do all three at once? That single shift reorganized the way I write prompts, and it’s the thing I most want to pass along here.

I’ve come to call it the tri-fold prompt. Nearly every prompt in a collaborative story game is reaching for one of three things: it tells us something about the world, it tells us something about who a character is, or it sets something in motion. The flat prompts manage just one. The ones I’m proudest of do all three in a single breath.

Here’s the trick I kept circling back to: a prompt does its real work in what it takes for granted, not in what it asks.

Ask a storyteller “what is your character like?” and watch them freeze on the blank page. But ask:

“What did you promise the people we left behind that you already knew you couldn’t keep?”

And a whole world arrives with the answer. There are people back home. There was a leaving. And this person made a promise in bad faith. You only asked for one thing, the broken promise, but to answer it at all, the storyteller has to accept everything else that came riding in with the question. One small ask; three jobs done.

If you want to test a prompt of your own, here’s a little habit I’ll share. After I write one, I jot three lines beneath it and try to fill each from what answering would make true: What does it establish about the world? What does it pin down about the person? What does it set in motion? If a line comes up empty, the prompt has a hole, and the fix is almost never to pile on another question. It’s to deepen what the prompt already assumes, until the missing piece falls out of the answer on its own.

I lean on this constantly in my own designs. In The Launch, a game about a crew leaving a dying world, one card asks:

“A seat aboard cost more than most could pay. What did you give up — and who decided you’d be the one to pay it?”

The world (seats are scarce and dearly bought), the person (what they sacrificed, and whether the choice was even theirs), and the tension (a debt that may yet come due) all arrive together. And in In Confidence, a game of whispers in a grand hotel where one of your own circle is rumored to hold a poison pen, a card turns to the accused:

“A secret only you were trusted with is suddenly on every tongue. Tell us how it got loose — and let us wonder whether you’re telling the truth.”

Same three jobs, folded into one question: a leaked secret, a character put on the spot, a suspicion tightening.

One hard-won caution, because this is the kind of power that’s easy to overuse. Since the magic lives in what you assume, you can quietly assume too much. The line I try to hold is this: presume the situation a character is in, never the verdict on who they are. “What did you do in the war that you’ve never told anyone?” lets a storyteller make their past shameful or noble; they still hold the pen. “What war crime are you hiding?” takes the pen out of their hand. Edgy is fine. Foreclosed is not. The best leading questions walk right up to that line and stop.

I owe this whole thread to Deanna, who started it, and to the designers whose games taught me the shape of a good prompt: Alex Roberts’ For the Queen most of all, along with A Quiet Year, Alice is Missing, and Dialect. (There’s even a small study out of a behavior-analysis lab¹ suggesting that the richer and more thematic a prompt is, the longer players take to answer it. That matches what I see at the table, where those are the prompts people enjoy most.)

So let me turn it over to you: what’s the best prompt you’ve ever been handed at a table, the one question that gave you a whole world to step into? I’d love to hear it.

The best stories are the ones we tell together.

Tableau offers a cinematic storytelling experience that unlocks endless possibilities. The game system emphasizes collaborative storytelling and character development, allowing players to create stories across various genres and styles. The mechanics are designed to be approachable for players of all skill levels, encouraging creativity and player agency. This is your chance to embark on imaginative adventures and build captivating stories with friends, family, and gaming communities.

We’re introducing the Tableau with three initial playsets:

1. Twilight Road: Journey through choices and transitions, quests and trials. What will you discover along the way? Will you find your destination or return home? Each game session is different, each road, each journey is unique.

2. Gate Watch: You and your companions are members of the Gate Watch, tasked with monitoring the border between realms. Each session brings new mysteries to uncover, with every world, every gate being unique.

3. Improv: Ignite your spirit of improvisation to weave unique tales together, one scene at a time. Perfect for roleplaying, improv, and creative writing, this playset encourages you to create unforgettable narratives across genres.

To learn more about Tableau Games and these first three playsets, please visit our dedicated webpage www.DyversHands.com/Tableau, or order directly from DriveThruCards.

By inviting your friends to join in and encouraging your favorite local game stores to carry our *Tableau Games playsets, you can enrich their gaming experiences and help us build a vibrant community of Tableau enthusiasts.

And, we have even more in the pipeline! Our next playset, Lovecraft Country: ‘A Study in Madness’, is currently in early playtesting. Don’t forget to subscribe for announcements.

We thank you for your interest in our game system, and we can’t wait for you to explore the endless narrative possibilities that Tableau offers. If you have any questions, suggestions, or exciting stories to share, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

– Christopher Allen & the team at Dyvers Hands Productions

“The best stories are the ones we tell together!”

Tableau offers a cinematic storytelling experience that unlocks endless possibilities. The game system emphasizes collaborative storytelling and character development, allowing players to create stories across various genres and styles. The mechanics are designed to be approachable for players of all skill levels, encouraging creativity and player agency. This is your chance to embark on imaginative adventures and build captivating stories with friends, family, and gaming communities.

We’re introducing the Tableau with three initial playsets:

1. Twilight Road: Journey through choices and transitions, quests and trials. What will you discover along the way? Will you find your destination or return home? Each game session is different, each road, each journey is unique.

2. Gate Watch: You and your companions are members of the Gate Watch, tasked with monitoring the border between realms. Each session brings new mysteries to uncover, with every world, every gate being unique.

3. Improv: Ignite your spirit of improvisation to weave unique tales together, one scene at a time. Perfect for roleplaying, improv, and creative writing, this playset encourages you to create unforgettable narratives across genres.

To learn more about Tableau Games and these first three playsets, please visit our dedicated webpage www.DyversHands.com/Tableau, or order directly from DriveThruCards.

By inviting your friends to join in and encouraging your favorite local game stores to carry our *Tableau Games playsets, you can enrich their gaming experiences and help us build a vibrant community of Tableau enthusiasts.

And, we have even more in the pipeline! Our next playset, Lovecraft Country: ‘A Study in Madness’, is currently in early playtesting. Don’t forget to subscribe for announcements.

We thank you for your interest in our game system, and we can’t wait for you to explore the endless narrative possibilities that Tableau offers. If you have any questions, suggestions, or exciting stories to share, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

– Christopher Allen & the team at Dyvers Hands Productions

“The best stories are the ones we tell together!”

We are thrilled to announce that our Tableau Games Kickstarter campaign, which ended on April 17th, was a resounding success! We are deeply grateful for the overwhelming support of our backers, who have made it possible for us to bring Tableau Games to life and expand its reach within the storytelling community.

This Tableau Kickstarter featured our inaugural three playsets: Twilight Road, Gate Watch and Improv. With your support, we brought these narrative-driven playsets to life, to allow other players to experience the joy of collaborative storytelling and weaving unforgettable tales together.

As we move forward, we want to keep you informed every step of the way. Here’s what’s coming up: Our current focus is to fulfill the orders of our Kickstarter backers, ensuring that they receive their playsets as soon as possible. We are working diligently to ensure a smooth and timely delivery of all rewards.

For those who missed our Kickstarter campaign, don’t worry! We plan to make all three playsets available to the public via DriveThruCards and Indie Press Revolution by mid-summer. You’ll soon have the opportunity to dive into the captivating worlds of Tableau Games and experience the unique and customizable storytelling it offers.

To stay informed on the latest news, including the official release date, future Tableau Games projects, events and promotions, make sure to sign up for our Tableau Games Announcements Mailing List.

As we embark on this new adventure, we’re eager to see the incredible stories you’ll create with Tableau Games. We’d love for you to share your own storytelling experiences with Tableau and see photos of you during play at your Table, and your Table layout. Follow @DyversHands on Twitter and use the #TableauGames hashtag to share your stories. If you do a review, or plan an Actual Play or podcast, we’d be glad to publicize it. If you have any other questions or need assistance, don’t hesitate to contact us at Team@DyversHands.com. Your connection with our community is truly appreciated.

Let’s come together and remember, “The best stories are the ones we tell together!”

We cannot wait to share the world of Tableau with you and explore the endless possibilities that collaborative storytelling can offer. Thank you for your support, and let’s bring Tableau to life!

“The Power of Constraints: Embrace limitations and boundaries as a source of inspiration. Appreciating the obstacles helps you see more fully how to overcome or adapt to them. Accepting constraints, they can morph into useful forms that open up new possibilities, spurring creativity.” [^1]

I’d like to discuss some design choices in my Tableau Games system that set it apart from other storytelling games you may be familiar with.

One striking difference is the presentation of the entire game’s rules on poker-sized playing cards. This idea was inspired by a periodic challenge I set for myself as a designer, in which I picked a design constraint (usually length & size) to explore my creativity.

One of my early examples of this is my free Monster Smash game that I originally wrote in 1994, where Play-Doh creatures grow fangs, legs, wings, tentacles, poison stings & more, and players compete for the right to smash them. My goal was just to see how simple and elegant I could make a board game. All the rules, table of costs for the “monster parts,” a monster tracking sheet, and even the ruler needed for range attacks, all fit on a single sheet of paper. It was a huge success over the next few years at various Bay Area local game conventions and became so popular that in 2001 I wrote “The Next Page” on the back side of the page, offering some optional rules. Almost 30 years later, the game continues to be a convention favorite. I will walk in early in the morning and smell Play-Doh filling the halls, and hear both adults and kids yelling, “Smash! Smash! Smash!”. A few kids I played the game with in early have shared with me that they are now bringing their own children to conventions to play!

In 2019, I challenged myself to create a small, elegant RPG game. I discovered an interesting price break at 18 poker-sized cards (probably because that is the size of many sports trading card decks), so I decided to work within that constraint. This led to a successful Kickstarter campaign for my original Gate Watch game. Its rules fit on 6 cards, with the remaining cards dedicated to a random card drama mechanic and storytelling prompts. Since card backs are just wasted space, I put 18 different inspirational images on the backs of the cards.

Initially, my plan for a 2020 sequel, Twilight Road , was to create another 18-card game. If Gate Watch was about living on the borders and edges, Twilight Road would be about the roads that pass through them. However, the lockdown halted not only my gameplay but also my playtesting efforts. The constraints of lockdown and revisiting my game designs over and over led me to realize that the two games could be intertwined. After discussions with my colleagues Aaron Reed and Shannon Appelcline, I discovered even more kinds of of story playsets were possible, each with different sets of cards, which could be all interconnected. This idea culminated in the two Tableau playsets offered in this Kickstarter, with more to come later this year.

Another constraint I encountered was the limited space on each card. I found that I could fit a maximum of 350 words on both sides of a card. As a naturally verbose writer, I would repeatedly trim the text of each card down to about 250 words, only to have it expand again during revisions. However, after multiple iterations, the essence of each card emerged. I hope that the final result is as powerful and inspiring for you as it is for me.

So, how have you used constraints in your creative life? Time limits? Size limits? Did they result in success or frustration? I’m curious to hear about your experiences. If you’d like to continue this topic in conversation on Twitter, here is the 🧵:

One of the striking features Tableau🎴 (just launched on #Kickstarter) is that all the rules & prompts are on poker-sized playing cards. This idea was inspired by my periodic design challenge to explore creativity within constraints🧵…#PowerOfConstraints https://t.co/CBAxfLJSm5

— Dyvers Hands Productions (@DyversHands) April 1, 2023

Christopher Allen

“The best stories are the ones we tell together!”

[*1] Quote from GroupWorksDeck.org CC-BY

• Image credits:
  • Another Bonsai by Dyogi on Flickr licensed CC-BY.
  • Monster Smash Family by Christopher Allen, CC-BY, permission granted by mother to include her children in photo.
  • Delicate Arch at Night with Headlamp by Jacob W. Frank at JWFrank.com, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC0.”

This Tableau Kickstarter features our two inaugural playsets: Twilight Road and Gate Watch. With your support, we can bring these narrative-driven Playsets to life, allowing players to experience the joy of collaborative storytelling and create unforgettable tales together.

Explore the storytelling themes of Tableau: Twilight Road🛣 & Gate Watch🚪 playsets in this 2-minute promo video! Immerse yourself in the rich narratives and inspiring images of both playsets, showcasing the endless possibilities for collaborative storytelling and cinematic adventures.

Here’s what you can expect from the Tableau game system:

• A versatile and easy-to-learn game system designed for collaborative storytelling across diverse genres
• Unique character “composable traits” that encourage creativity, customization, and in-depth character development
• The ability to mix and match cards from different playsets for a truly expansive and customizable gameplay experience

By pledging your support, you’ll not only help us bring Tableau to life but also become a vital part of our creative community. As a backer, you’ll have access to exclusive updates, playtest materials, and the opportunity to provide valuable feedback on the game.

Discover the rich narratives possible with the Tableau: Twilight Road🛣 playset in this detailed 14m video overview!

Special Offer for Backers: As a token of our appreciation, every backer at any pledge level will receive a free copy of the full “Print and Play” playtest version for both Twilight Road and Gate Watch playsets. This will give you an exclusive sneak peek into the Tableau universe and enable you to participate in the development process.

So, are you ready to embark on transformative journeys and create unforgettable stories together? Join us on this exciting adventure by visiting the Tableau Kickstarter page and pledging your support today!

Click here to visit the Tableau Kickstarter and make your pledge!

We cannot wait to share the world of Tableau with you and explore the endless possibilities that collaborative storytelling can offer. Thank you for your support, and let’s bring Tableau to life together!

***“The best stories the the ones we tell together!”