Last week I played a game of Breaking the Ice over G+ hangouts with Victor Gijsbers (I may have mentioned him to folks here as the guy who wrote the Veil-shredding storygame Vampires). We don't play a whole lot of two-player games at SGS, and "two-player romance game, plus you have to share a little bit about your own life" is kind of a scary pitch given our setup. So I thought a report might be valuable to some folks.

Victor did a write-up here. The main thing that impressed me about the game was how powerfully the mechanics made you trade off short-term success against long-term relationship happiness - in order to earn re-rolls to earn Attraction, you have to make your character look vulnerable or bad, and after a prolonged bout of poor rolling, we were left with characters who, on paper, had very strong Attraction and a good-sized list of Compatibilities, but were also obviously Totally Not In A Functioning Relationship and failing to connect on anything other than stoned or shallow levels.

It's very, very recognisably working from the same principles as Shooting the Moon: character-creation is deeply collaborative, and continues as you go along in a Play To Find Out kind of way. Anyhow. Good times. Not ideally suited to SGS, but absolutely worth checking out if you find yourself in need of a two-player storygame.

I looked at this a long time ago but never got a chance to play it. Thanks for the write-up.