Our story begins in a sprawling old house outside time and space, where it’s always September 15th and there’s always room for a new visitor. A teen girl sits on the windowsill, reading a well-worn paperback and listening to the splashy-crashy rain come down. She’s alone in the world, but soon enough the strangers who reside here will become her closest friends, family, and mentors. Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is many things. It’s a bed and breakfast, of course, but it’s also this book. And this book is a book, of course, but it’s also a role-playing game—the sort of game we can play with our friends around a table, or on a voice call while hanging out, or even very, very slowly by mail. Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is played over the course of 48 chapters, each of which is a 1 to 2-hour scenario with its own unique but quick-to-learn rules. Players can take control of one of the 7 long-term residents of the B&B or choose from a cast of 50 quirky guests, each of whom has their own ongoing storylines. The adventures contained within each chapter include lazy afternoons, frightful nights, insurmountable chores, and zany competitions, so every play session is full of surprises. There are bespoke game rules for overcoming mountains of laundry, picking berries, surviving a trip to the scary basement, naming constellations, and everything else that matters in a slice-of-life story. These mechanics are simple and modular, meaning you only need to know the rules for the chapter in front of you. It can take as little as 15 minutes to start playing. After each chapter, we’ll be able to make changes to our characters and to the book—unlocking new guests and chapters and advancing the individual storylines of each character who played. Whether they’ve traded their heart away for magic powers or are just doing the everyday business of growing up, everything about a character can change through play, including their core identities. Over time, your copy of Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast will become a unique artifact of your group’s play experience, a treasure that you can revisit and replay for decades. Yazeba’s unusual blend of premade characters, modular rules, and legacy mechanics makes it a perfect game for pick-up play: busy players can drop in and out without ever feeling lost, and anyone who wants to jump in can make a long-term impact without a long-term commitment.

Magic is waning. The last of the sun’s shards illuminate only a small valley of the world, while the remainder is bathed in perpetual Wildernight. Roots of the elusive Midnight Muscadines grow deep into the earth, concentrating the last tendrils of magic into its grapes. Find, collect, and preserve these grapes into highly coveted jams, sustaining the world’s magic.

Brindlewood Bay is a tabletop roleplaying game that combines Murder, She Wrote with H.P. Lovecraft. In it, you play a group of elderly women, members of the local Murder Mavens Mystery Book Club, who help the authorities solve murder cases in a picturesque New England Town. Over the course of their investigations, they become aware of a dark occult conspiracy that connects the cases, and will eventually have to face that conspiracy in order to save their community. The game is low-prep and easy to play no matter your experience with tabletop roleplaying games. (From the publisher’s website)