Helvetia

I set out to make a short larp about the most boring thing I could think of, as a reaction to lurid genre-inflected (popular, fun) games, and the most boring thing I could think of was evaporated milk. I looked into the history of evaporated milk and, as is always the case, it isn't boring at all. It is tied up with colonialism and it is tied up with American poverty, and I guess I could have written games that hit on those points, but before I got there I read about the Helvetia Milk Condensing Company and its 1907 coup d'etat. And that was that.

In '07 there was a sort of palace coup at Helvetia, and one of the founders of the company was both decorously and perfidiously forced out. It's a good story and I don't know which side was in the right, but it makes for instant drama and really got my wheels spinning. Luckily there's a ton of information out there, enough to build a juicy relationship map from. I love a good relationship map!

The game features a bidding mechanic - each of the three player characters is a contender to take control of the entire company - and rather than have a sit-around GM or a fourth player who does nothing but decide the winning bid, I built a sort of bot to do the deciding. Each item one might bid - be it money or a promise or information - gets written down, and it is easy to tabulate a score based on the three bids. High bid wins.

I didn't set out to make this a snappy little three-player game (originally I thought it'd be a big sprawling family drama with eight players) but the more I fussed with it, the more I realized it could be very, very tight. And three player games are a rarity, so why not find a way to make that work?

Hopefully you will give Helvetia a try. It won't take more than an hour and I think it will generate a little drama! Let me know who wins it all. -- Jason