Players: Tanya, Terry, Dani, Tim

A bittersweet and ultimately tragic tale of love...as told through the medium of playing cards.

Hot Guys Making Out is a very unique sort of game, mechanically speaking. Scenes are played out as a sort of story-card-game, with the card you play determining the sort of action your character is aloud to take, whether that action succeeds, whether some other special event might take place instead, or whether you may find yourself describing the light pouring through the study window. Obviously, this is not the place to go deeply into the rules, but the upshot of all of this is that we ended up taking a good amount of time before we started playing exploring those rules...and not being sure, at least in my case, what the heck this was actually going to look like in action.

However, once we got going we had a lot of fun. While the mechanics certainly influence the story, they challenged us to explore the scenes in new and interesting ways that might not have been our first impulse otherwise.

And yes...hot guys did in fact make out.

The story, as with every first game of Hot Guys Making Out, begins with a young ward (Gonsalvo) arriving at the mansion of a dashing former nobleman (Honore). Honore's butler (Olivier) has brought the young man here at his master's request, and Honore's maid and bodyservant (Maria) is not at all sure she is happy about the arrangement. Maria, you see, has a secret crush on Honore...but Honore very quickly only has eyes for his new ward. The threat in any first game of HGMO is Maria's jealousy...and, in our game, events inspired by her unrequited desire quickly spiraled completely out of control. What began as simply trying to set Gonsalvo up in a room as far from her master's room as possible, eventually escalated to arsenic poisoning, and climaxed with Fascist soldiers in pursuit of our just flowering lovers. Honore takes a bullet to save Gonsalvo's life. They fall into the underground stream, and Honore breathes his last breath into Gonsalvo's lungs, so that he might survive.

A romantic, dramatic, and utterly unique game. I recommend it. Thanks to Dani, Terry, and Tanya for taking the ride with me, and thanks for reading.

This was my first experience with a game using a card-based mechanic and I felt it worked out pretty well. We did some cool things with describing the environment around these characters. It really enhanced the atmosphere and some of it fed into the story very well. It didn't take very long for us to figure out how to make the best of the hands we were dealt I felt.

A fun story that had a bittersweet ending. We had a good time around the table too. So glad I finally had the chance to try this. Was not sure what I expected but I enjoyed it.

Thanks to Tim for facilitating and to Terry and Tanya for their creativity and energy!

- Dani