Playing – Alice is Missing

New game to my table, would play again (after some down time)

I’d heard a lot of talk about Alice is Missing (2020) on various game reviews and top ten lists, so I was excited to get a chance to play it when a buddy offered to run it for a table of us. I had a rough idea of what to expect but the big selling point of the game is the experience of playing it. I’ll try to avoid major spoilers as I go through my own play through.

16 year old Alice Briarwood went missing from the small town of Silent Falls. The PCs are her close network of friends dealing with her disappearance. The game is played out over the next three hours, most of it in silence and over chat.

Our game master opened up with the game’s introduction to the common safety tools (X Card, veils and lines, and a discussion of potential triggers of helplessness etc. and how to use these tools; for this game safety tools are a good fit with the emotional intensity of the play). We then sorted out the roles / relationships, backgrounds, secrets, and motives. The GM shuffled up the Missing Person poster for Alice and primed us to start discussing these relationships to Alice and to each other. Being the studious gamers we were, we scribbled down lots of notes on the provided Character Records. We then took turns recording a message for Alice that would have been placed before she was reported missing. This took us about an hour, but to be fair we were asking a lot of questions about the game and making suggestions about characters / suspects / locations. Once the cards were handed out, the GM was one of the players and was as much in the dark about the story as the rest of us.

That done, an online chat was set up as the next 90 minutes of game was to be played in silence, using only the online chat to communicate (any sort of chat room would work, group texts, whatsapp, or even Roll20 I suppose, but something that allows for communicating with the group or with an individual). We did occasionally communicate outside of the chat for purposes of confirming game mechanics, but the rest was all online and the tools of memes, emojis, and at least one googled photo that was used as a cellphone photo of a scene. As the screen timer ticked down (there’s an official Youtube video timer that has some mood music as part of the experience). The timer soundtrack definitely sets a mood and I was glad for it to provide something to fill the emptiness left by a room of people hunched over their devices.

Cards were shuffled and two were handed out to each of us, to be read and acted upon as the timer matched the time code on the back of the cards. I started reading my cards a couple of minutes early as I’m a slow at typing on the iPad I was using. The important thing was there was a stream of prompts about every ten minutes, give or take. The prompts have instructions to do things like draw suspects or locations and message something about them. There is a mechanic that allows you to draw clue cards if you feel that things need a little kick but we didn’t really figure that out until after but that kept it simple for our first playthrough.

Given that the prompts are randomly shuffled and handed out, both the starting ones (5 starting ones for background and motives) and the timed ones (3 per timer card), there is definitely room for replay, though limited by the permutations of how the cards interact like in a game of Werewolf. Overall, I kept thinking a lot about Fiasco as another RPG that comes closer to being a board game crossed with an improv night as there is a tight framework of the roles being played but openness in filling in the blanks provided by the prompts i.e. “You and Alice had a fight. What was it about?” or “Draw a location card. It’s on fire. What is found that survives the blaze?”. It definitely is a game that you have to play to find out (to borrow a phrase from Powered by the Apocalypse games). It definitely isn’t Clue as the suspects and locations are entirely random and the accusations can swing pretty quickly, but the point isn’t the solving the mystery but the emotional journey.

There is a debrief at the end and we talked about what was behind our actions and guessing at the motivations other players had. I kept my Character Record as a well marked document and an artifact of the play. I definitely recommend NOT reading through the cards beforehand as the discovery is the primary hook for this game. Also, why is there a nightclub as one of the locations? Not that I’m saying an underage girl couldn’t try to sneak in, but it just seemed out of place.

Throughout the game we tossed in a fair number of our own spurious rumours and high school drama tropes that were entirely from outside the game. Like many storytelling games, there’s a serious temptation to try to push your own narrative over those of the others. There’s a level of trust and letting go that helps make the game run. Even the person who runs the game is more of an administrator to keep things running than direct the story.

Overall, I’d play it again but I’d want a decent length of time between plays two and three, just to keep each experience a unique one and I’d aim to play a different character and with different people each time for the same reason. If you’re looking for a game with crunch, this is not the game to find it. It’s not even a game of social deduction as the suspects are all NPCs. But if you’ve got an open evening between game campaigns because your down a player or just looking for a change of pace like a murder mystery party without the murder, it’s worth giving Alice a try. It’s available as a PDF (a nice feature for those concerned about shipping) and a VTT on Roll20 and the game’s homepage offers some downloadable content so it’s pretty accessible to get.

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