Game Reflections The Time We Have (sad zombie prompt game for two)
Link: https://moreblueberries.shop/products/the-time-we-have
The Time We Have: A Conversation Between Brothers is a game about what it means to be a brother—about all the complexity, vulnerability, and
I backed this on Backerkit last November, and the physical game arrived just a week or so ago. I've been very excited to give this one a go, and as it is 2-player, and plays straight out of the box with no prep, my spouse and I have already played it.
The basic pitch is that you are two brothers. One of you is infected and dying. This can mean straight up zombie apocalypse, or some riff on it. You each get a unique pile of prompt cards to shuffle and pull from, taking it in turn. Most prompts are a question to ask the other player. I don't believe I've seen it referred to as Descended From The Queen specifically (I might have missed it), but that's the style.
Oh, and you're supposed to play this physically sat against a door! Very good, love it. Honestly, we didn't really have the setup and I think the dog would've been too confused, but we sat on chairs with our backs to each other and made sure not to look around etc. It's not just a gimmick - I really felt like it changed the dynamic, not being able to see the other person. I was actually much more comfortable roleplaying, maybe I can shoehorn this rule into all TTRPGs...
There's a series of door cards, fantastically illustrated, with details to help you set up the fictional world your apocalypse is occurring in. The prompt writing is really great. As ever with discussions of prompt-heavy games, you want some good specificity to provoke your imagination. We didn't see a single card that was so open-ended that we struggled to riff off it. Very quickly, we came to good understandings of our characters, that we layered on top of as we went. By the end we had quite a touching closing few moments, and I'll remember the characters from this hour long game, that we never even named, more than many characters from bigger games.
I've had a lot of fun with For The Queen in the past, but for 2 players I'd now open this as a first choice. The setting is extremely open in For The Queen, and in some games I've found it a challenge to build a sufficiently full sense of the world to use as a launchpad in answering prompts. Here, we've all seen a thousand zombie movies, and more than that it's contained to two brothers with a ticking clock as one is dying. It's simple, and opens up a tapestry of fulfilling story possibilities.
This is one of those concepts that feels so painfully obvious when you experience it that you wonder how it hasn't been done before. On top of that, it's been executed beautifully here, and is definitely worth picking up if you get the chance.