Games Within Games

This came across my DriveThru feed the other day:

At the height of the Cold War two master spies are called to Berlin to catch a mole.

The two spies were once mentor and protégé, now they’re reunited as equals for a dangerous mission. Wrestling with years of unresolved conflict, they have to find a way to trust each other and answer the question… Who is the mole?

Its for four players and a facilitator. Four players because it responds to the Le Carre genre (where the story is about two people staring at one another across a desk in a smoke-filled room, with flashbacks and a lot of meaningful silence) by Jeeping it. So they have two players per character: “Cover”, who actually plays the character, and “Control”, their inner monologue who helps steer the game. And of course it uses the usual Jeep techniques of scenes, editing, explicit steering instructions, and a pre-planned story-arc. Note “arc”; the actual details are invented by the players, so there’s no secrets to spoil.

Its a very interesting design. Not sure I like the multiple players per character idea, but this is the best implementation of it so far (in that it actually seems genre-appropriate, rather than just experimentation for the sake of experimentation). Obviously it won’t scale up well - but it might work for this sort of game.