Face the Consequences: Preview

In a first, Fairway plays two games at once: he reviews the metagame: Face the Consequences.

Face the Consequences is a two to unlimited number of player metagame that plays alongside another game. While you play your base game, if certain things happen, then a player will draw a card and must take the action on the card.

Initial Impressions ^

  1. The game is dead simple. Telling players how to play wasn’t an issue.
  2. Because there isn’t a lot of guidance in the box, it really relies on players to plan over which “events” should cause the player to “face the consequences.”  If the actions are too frequent, you can really derail the main game. If they don’t occur frequently enough, then it’s likely the consequences will be unequally distributed.
  3. A few of the cards have real potential to disrupt a game (like forcing someone to “miss a turn”) so before playing the game, the deck needs to be thoughtfully culled.

How to play ^

In Face the Consequences, players will play another game — any game — and when certain things occur, draw from a deck of consequences cards. These consequences cards typically have some embarrassing, silly, physical, difficult, or play-impeding actions.

To play, the deck of cards is shuffled and placed in a stack.  Then, players must decide what sorts of main-game events require a “consequence.”  For example, if you’re playing Jenga, you might think that knocking over the tower also requires a consequence. We played two different games: Photosynthesis and Roll For It!. For Photosynthesis, we made cutting down a tree cause the player to draw a consequence — our first time we said “plant a seed,” but that turned out to be a terrible one.  For Roll For It!, we made “not placing any dice” cause for a consequence — similar to our Photosynthesis experience, our original idea of “completing a card” turned out to be a terrible choice.

Alternatively, we also played such that the player who performed the “action” could “assign” the consequence.

In either case, each time one of these events occurred, the person who drew the consequence and performed the action described on the card.

That’s it!

On the green & where it comes up short ^

There’s not a ton to be said about this game.

Consequences. Setting aside the NSFW cards for a moment, there was a lot of clever “consequences.” We preferred the consequences that didn’t have actual in-game consequences, but rather just made the player feel uncomfortable or do silly things.  Cards the forced players to “skip a turn” did not go over well.

The NSFW cards were clearly raunchy. None of them sat well with any of the game players. [I probably should have known.]  They weren’t Cards Against Humanity obscene-but-afar, these were much more interactive.  I have a hard time seeing how to really deploy these and clearly I’m not the target audience for them.

We also wanted way more “safe” cards — that is the cards that didn’t actually require that you do something silly, embarrassing or difficult to perform.

Refactoring & planning.  Any host thinking about using this metagame should probably really plan it out: figure out a good “event” and figure out which cards actually make sense for the game. We did a bad job in both categories when we played the game.

In the hole ^

Face the Consequences is exactly what it aims to be: a metagame challenging players to make other games harder to play. When deployed in moderation, the consequence cards did add a good amount of levity to the games we played. There was an unexpected amount of planning to find that right balance, though. If you’re looking for a metagame to spice up game night, this one might be worth a look.

Face the Consequences is in the hole for a par. ^

This post was originally published on The Indie Game Report: https://www.theindiegamereport.com/2018/07/face-the-consequences-preview/

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