← Richard Hames
A table of players builds a world, breaks it, and then lives in the wreckage. Forty-seven cards across seven decks carry the structure: a collapse and six world cards to establish what this place was, a hand of events that each player spends bringing it down, a card that says how you arrived, three rounds of living in the aftermath with an aftershock landing at the end of every one, and a final card each for reflection.
It was made with the Crude Futures gang, out of the two-week studio in France that produced the Crude Futures magazine, and was published with select copies of it. The game is credited to phm, Marce and Collapse Camp. The card game later featured in The Seashore of Endless Worlds at Le Commun in Geneva.
You can play it online. The web table below runs the whole game in the browser, so a table that is not in the same room — or a single player — can still deal it.
The rule that gives it its shape is what happens to cards you don’t play. When the table moves on, whatever is still in your hand is discarded — the collapse events you were saving never happened, and the life you didn’t get round to describing leaves with you. What is already on the table stays. The story keeps only what it actually told.
The web table
I built a browser version: a shared table that deals the cards, tracks whose turn it is and holds the table to the phase it is in. It carries the game, not the conversation — players are on a voice call, or sitting alone. There is no chat, no transcript, and nothing is ever saved. The room dies thirty minutes after the last person leaves and takes the world with it. The archive exists in the players’ minds; bring a pen.
Its one piece of real interface argument: as new cards are played, the older ones desaturate and dim. Nothing is deleted and nothing scrolls away — the past just gets progressively harder to read. There is also a mod that opens the game with three real headlines pulled off the newswire instead of a collapse card, in case the fictional apocalypse feels insufficiently urgent.