Thoughts on Till the Last Gasp

Till the Last Gasp is a new release from Darrington Press by designer Will Hindmarch, with additional design work by Alex Roberts.  It’s an RPG packaged up like a board game with board game elements, like dice, tokens, cards, glossy paper settings, and folding cardboard playmats.  The game is designed to help players tell the story of a climactic duel between two characters who have decided that there is no other way to settle their differences.
 
The first dedicated dueling game that I had seen is “A Single Moment,” by Tobie Abad.  That game is specifically about two samurai warriors who were once friends in a fight to the death.  Play itself consists of flashback scenes that create the narrative behind the duel, how the friendship fell apart, what lines were crossed and trusts betrayed.  In those flashback scenes the players accumulate Edge Dice that they then bring to bear in the final scene, the actual duel.  The duel is played out in a single scene and the winner is determined by the die roll.
 
Jim McClure took “A Single Moment” and reworked the game into Reflections.  In his remaking the game, he extended the flashbacks to focus on five specific moments that the friendship becomes unraveled (The Time We Were Friends, The Time You Crossed the Line, The Time You Failed Me, The Time We Strived for Peace, and The Time It Came to Blood).  To create drama and surprise in the scenes—and as a way to give players a reason to make the decisions they make during play—McClure created hidden agendas for each player in the scene, a secret thing they are pushing for or tying to achieve during play.  Success in those goals resulted in more dice for the final confrontation.  While the game itself still focuses specifically on samurai, there are proposed expansions at the back of the book for using the game to play gunslingers, or battling pirates.
 
Till the Last Gasp is designed for any dueling pair: wizards, psionics, supers, gunslingers, pirates, samurai, robots, whatever!  The dueling pair does not have any set past, so they can be long-time enemies, fallen friends, ex-lovers—whatever you want.  Also unlike the preceding dueling games, Hindmarch chooses to focus on the duel itself, rather than on the backstory.  But that doesn’t mean that this is a strategic or technical game. It is above all a game that creates a story even as it asks you to focus on the fictional actions of the characters right here and now.
 
The game begins by establishing your characters, where they are, and why they have come to this place where only a duel can resolve their issues.  The box comes with a number of pre-made characters and locations, and the instruction booklet includes a couple of pre-designed situations to get you moving quickly if that’s the way you want to play.  All characters need are five things: what they are known as (their name or title), what they are notorious for (their reputation, true or not), what they are recognized by (key facets of their dress, physical appearance, or demeanor), what their overt motivation is (why they claim they are involved in this duel), and what their hidden motivation is (what really drives this feud, whether the character themself recognizes it or not).  The booklet lists 20 options for each of these facets allowing you to either roll them up or to be inspired to create your own characters.  Notice that there are no statistics or anything other than fictional positioning required for characters.  That means that this game can be ported into your other RPGs if you desire.  You can bring your characters from another game to play out their duel in a meaningful way.
 
Next, you have to establish the stakes of the duel.  Are you fighting “To the Defeat” (one character loses the rules of the duel), “To the Exile” (the loser of the duel is banished), “To the Turn” (the winning character convinces the losing character to join them in their cause) or “Till the Last Gasp” (the loser of the duel also loses their life).  At any point in the duel, the players can agree to escalate the stakes up the chain.  Or, any player individually can choose to deescalate the stakes.  It’s a lovely safety tool built into the game’s design.
 
The last thing selected before play begins is an Objective card for each player.  Each card lists 4 objectives that that player will want to complete during the battle.  Some objectives will take multiple actions (like landing 3 hits on your opponent), and some can be done in a single turn (like escalating the stakes of the duel).  Each player is dealt 3 Objective cards and selects one for this duel.
 
The duel itself takes place in 4-6 rounds.
 
Each player has 10 Edge Dice (d6s) and a Duel Die (d20).  At the beginning of play, they “ready” 5 of the Edge Dice, but putting them in the Offensive pool or Defensive pool.  At the start of each round, the players do two things.  First, they select their starting stance and they select how many dice they want to roll to determine how many actions they get to perform this round.  Each player has a set of Stance cards.  The player can be Bold (playing offensively), Wary (playing defensively), or Quick (playing between Bold and Wary).  Each stance gives the player access to a set of actions.  Each action costs a number of action points to perform.  Striking your opponent might cost two action points.  Changing your stance to a different stance will cost two or three action points depending on what stance you are currently in.  The setting cards consist of four locations, and some of the locations give you access to location-specific actions too.  You can move to another part of the setting or destroy part of the setting using action points.  The dice you roll will determine how many action points you have to spend. In the round.  You each take turns spending action points and narrating part of the duel.  When you are out of action points, you can roleplay your character, but you can’t take meaningful actions like those stated above.  Then when both players are out of action points, you go to the next round, select your starting stance, and roll your dice pool to determine how many action points you have for the new round.  Note that you can only “ready” new dice by using an action to do so, so your die pools will naturally dwindle during the game, giving you fewer and fewer options, making each round brisker and more deadly as you spiral to the finish.
 
Once you have played to at least the 4th round, and once you have accomplished at least 3 of your 4 objectives, then you gain access to the “End the Duel Decisively” action.  The first player to reach these goalposts and pay the action points to take the action gets to narrate how the battle resolves according the current stakes.  That player can certainly narrate their character winning, or they might find it more fitting to have their character lose.
 
The last element of the game is the Drama Cards.  This is a deck of cards with narrative prompts.  They tell you to reveal what your character is thinking or remembering.  They prompt your character to taunt or plea with their rival.  Sometimes the cards will make you or your opponent change their stance, gain or lose action points, or affect the other mechanisms of the game.
 
My son and I played the game last night and had a wonderful time.  The box says that the game goes for 60-90 minutes, but it probably took us 2 hours to play from the opening of the box to the end of our duel.  Future games will likely take less time now that we are familiar with the rules.  We used the included pre-made characters and selected the Aztec Arena as our setting, making our story something of a sci-fi wrestling match between an established talent and the rising star.
 
The mechanisms of play all interlock smoothly together to make play exciting, surprising, and easy to play.  Objectives give you reasons to do things and make decisions.  We moved around the setting not only because it was good for the story, but because it allowed one of us to mark off an objective.  We changed our own stances and our opponent’s stances because it was flavorful and because we could mark off an objective.  Even when my son forced me into a rattled stance to keep me from being able to replenish my Edge Die, it was fun for both of us.  I didn’t feel like they were keeping me from playing as you could feel one character keeping the other character on their back feet.  It had the elements of tactical play without ever making anyone feel like they needed a strong tactical position to play and enjoy themself.  And the Drama Cards did their part beautifully.  Some actions let you draw a drama card, some force your opponent to draw a card, and some make you both draw cards.  The cards act both as wild cards (will they affect the game state?!) and as much-needed role-playing prompts that let us indulge in character and backstory.  Players can choose exactly when and where they want the Drama cards to get used in play which allows them to steer those moments.  And the cards prompts (at least the ones that we saw) were never daunting.  They didn’t demand us create too much backstory or character at any one time.  No one had to sit thinking for a while to answer a prompt, so the momentum was never injured by these draws, only ever enhanced.  The result of everything working together was a visual tale full of character and conflict that arced nicely from beginning to end.
 
It had been a while since I was able to partake in an RP experience, and it was lovely to get to play with my son and laugh and ooh and ahh at their character and decisions.  Till the Last Gasp is a cleverly designed game that scratches several different gaming itches.  If it sounds like your kind of thing, you should give it a try!