A game to let your drives burn your soul or —alternatively— burn the world

Not many gamers are familiar with the tabletop RPG called The Burning Wheel. It's a great, really great game, in more than one sense.

It is a game of passion. It is a game in which your every decision matters, for better or worse. It is a game designed from the ground up to reward you as you play it more and more: The more intimate you become with the rules, the more enjoyment you will have with it.

And as you know the rules better, you begin to understand how they can be used to express your character's passion, and through it, yours. It is, after all, a game of passion.

It is a great game not only in the almost trascendental experience you can achieve as you play RAW (rules as written), but also in the amount of granularity and density found in the rules. 600 or more pages written, not one without a specific detail you will need in some moment of play; not a single page without another rule to learn, to use, to improve your experience, but also to keep track of.

So, one day, some people decided that they would like to play the game with a simpler version of the rules, one that manifests the same passion, the same care, the same barroque elegance. The same authors published one of those simpler alternatives: Mouse Guard, another great, really great game. But it had a lot of things to keep track of, still. Also, it had its own identity, and while it had similar goals and mechanics, the end product is very different and required somewhat different skills to play it.

Later, I found out some fans tried to come up with "light" or "reduced" versions of The Burning Wheel. One such attempt, very successful in my view, is Hot Circle, a "spark" (its author's way of saying "this is a fan hack") of the original. It aims to abstract the game and make it more freeform, changing the rules a bit too much for my own taste. I recommend you check it out, and judge for yourself if it is something you would play instead of The Burning Wheel.

Now, I've spent a lot of words introducing my own take on the idea of having a simpler game that explores the same themes than TBW.

And my take is called The Gold Hack

What is The Gold Hack?

It is a mini-game of passion. Its core rules are contained within 16 pages. It's a standalone game that asumes you already know how to play tabletop RPGs. If you have any knowledge of BWHQ games, it should be useful, but definitely not required to play.

Next time I'll talk about certain design decisions I made. I hope you enjoyed this text, and I am excited to share my work with you all in the coming days! Stay tuned!

Sincerely,

Martín Van Houtte

Designer and translator for Rúnica Games