May You Fish in Interesting Times
May You Fish in Interesting Times is a role-playing game for 3-5 players, played using a deck of playing cards and a 6-sided dice (purchased separately). A typical game session takes 90 minutes to 3 hours.
You play as anthropomorphic birds going on a fishing trip, who also happened to be rebels in a failed revolution that took place in the past. This is a cosy fishing game, but at the same time about broken birds bonding over shared past trauma.
Instead of coming up with backstories for the characters at the beginning, the players learn about the bird anglers' backstories as they play the game.
Mechanics
To play the game, each player picks one of the bird angler playbooks. The players take turns drawing cards and answering questions on their playbook. When a player manages to collect a trio of cards that fit certain requirements, something is caught on the hook. Certain questions allow characters to deepen their relationships with each other, and for the players to manipulate the cards in their hands.
After fishing, the bird anglers would share a meal using what they've caught. At the end of the meal, the secret police would show up.
The game mechanic draws inspiration from For the Queen by Alex Roberts and Brindlewood Bay by Jason Cordova.
What's included
You will find the PDF of a 20-page A5 rulebook with instructions on how to play the game, beautiful illustrations, and bird trivia.
Printable playbooks can be found in the "demo" section of the page.
Credits
Art by Carol Wu
Writing and layout by W.H. Arthur
Card joker, hearts, spades, clubs, diamonds, queen crown, round table, duration, poker hand, perspective dice 6 faces 6 icons by Delapouite, Skoll and Lorc, from Game-icons.net, under CC BY 3.0.
Special thanks to the backers on Kickstarter who supported this project!
Physical Copies
You can purchase physical copies from the following places (while stocks last):
- Leisure Games
- The Arcanist's Tavern in Shoreditch, London (available in-store)
Actual Play
Check out this actual play by Science & Sorcery with Sam Langford, Rachel Williams, Alex Holt and Khalil Thirlaway!
You can find Science & Sorcery on Twitch, YouTube and Twitter/X.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $5.12 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Exclusive content
Support this game at or above a special price point to receive something exclusive.
Free Community Copies
If you are unable to afford the listed price of MAY YOU FISH IN INTERESTING TIMES, you can grab a community copy. This goes especially for people in marginalised communities, and those who want to review the game.
Download demo
Comments
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I played this at our Story Games LA meetup with our friend Kat facilitating, for a total of 5 players. This games is super up my story games wheelhouse, with simple prompts, and mechanics that are light and playful. The subject matter for us felt serious and emotional and high stakes at times, but also light and funny and silly at other times ("flap flap flap for freedom" revolutionary anthem).
I love that this is such an easy game to just drop on a table, and I can see it being a part of my ready-to-play stack for things like Games on Demand or other ad hoc play.
The art was evocative and beautiful. I really enjoyed the story prompts. Some of them seemed similar / same between playbooks, but some were obviously specific to the character in some ways. Would play again!
Thanks for playing the game and sharing your experience! :D
I recently played this game with a group of three. None of us are frequent tabletop gamers, but we all enjoy roleplaying, which made this game particularly appealing. One of the main reasons I don't usually play tabletop games is the time commitment, so I appreciated that this game included instructions for playing with a time constraint. The flexibility in tone also stood out to me, making the game approachable for a younger audience. We all had a great time creating our characters within the unique game world and found the experience to be a lot of fun.
I do have one minor critique: some of the questions in the game seemed to limit the ability to create a truly individual character. For example, one question required that your character be romantically involved with another character, which became a stumbling block for our group. This was partly due to our odd number of players and also because I had envisioned my character as aro/ace. In the end, we simply skipped that question, which worked fine and didn't negatively impact our experience.
Overall, we all appreciated the game's concept, its worldbuilding, and the artwork in the handbook. I would recommend this game to both seasoned tabletop players and those who are new to the genre.
Thanks for playing the game and the feedback! I am glad you enjoyed it! :)
Some really gorgeous layout!
Thank you! :)