As we’ve shared on the main BackerKit page, the central backbone of Last Train to Bremen is a single, ongoing game of Liar’s Dice: roll your dice, place wagers, raise your bids, call and bust. It’s a fairly simple game, on the surface — so why does it make such an effective framework for Bremen? 

So, we’ve got a tidy little death spiral of a game with built-in elimination, snappy gameplay, and the potential for emergent storytelling. That’s all great on its own, but can we add just a little more heat to the table? 

I first learned to play Liar’s Dice on a family vacation: packed in a snowy cabin up in the mountains, I crammed around the kitchen table with roughly a dozen of my cooler, older cousins and we gambled dice into the wee hours of the morning. The game that I learned included a bonus, wild die: an element of chance that made the game that much harder to predict. 

Only years later did I learn that Liar’s Dice has many variations in gameplay, and that the more common rulesets don’t include that wild die. It adds another layer of uncertainty to the game that fits the precarious tone I wanted with Bremen, but it shakes up strategy at the table quite a bit! When writing out the rules for this version of the game, I wanted to make sure that those mechanics were communicated clearly, to establish a consistent baseline for everyone at the table. 

(One more fun little twist: Liar’s Dice is often played with hands of five, but I pared it down to three dice each for a couple of reasons. The first was to keep the story moving briskly; the second, because the rule of threes gives each player a good dramatic arc; and third, because “the thirteenth die is the Devil’s Die” was simply too good to pass up.)

Early playtests of Bremen unearthed a lot of great feedback about narrative pacing and flow, but the biggest recurring question was a consistent sticking point: sometimes one player gets knocked out of the game right out of the gate, and sits diceless for a substantial portion of Act II. How do you accommodate an early-game disadvantage? 

Secret twists were baked into the game from jump, but it took a while for the special abilities to click into place. I always wanted to add something in the game to serve as a blue shell, a power-up to let players clutch their final die just one bit longer. Once we landed on special abilities, it became clear pretty quickly that every secret needed to include its own bespoke ruleset. 

I had a lot of fun coming up with each character’s unique mechanics, and matching those mechanics to their corresponding secrets! I wanted to land on a good balance between abilities that felt a little friendlier to newcomers and abilities that required a little more complex calculation. Some of these moves might seem more powerful than others on first read — but if played strategically, every single one has the potential to upend the game in a player’s favor, and to radically change the final arc of the game. 

I’m a firm believer that the best part of keeping secrets in a tabletop RPG is when you get to reveal those secrets to your fellow players. It was a fun exercise in game design to create a framework where those revelations are guaranteed to be bombastic, game-changing surprises. 

Up next time… you all get to pick! Meet the Band vs A Sight for Sore Eyes.

 - Caro