Spotlight on Pickets and Blinds

Pickets and Blinds by Kevin Allen Jr. is a crime drama game about murder in small American towns. All the players are characters who are about to commit a murder and, in the end, only one of them will get away with it. The game is easy to overlook because, let’s face it, it’s super niche from the premise all the way through the implementation.

In addition to the real-world setting, characters, and topic, which are always a hard sell, the game really isn’t a role-playing game. It’s a storytelling game and the text fully commits to that. You are telling your character’s story to the other players. Although, given the game’s subject matter, I think it would be fun to narrate strictly in first-person as though you were at a bar (or perhaps a jail cell).

If being purely a storytelling game isn’t niche enough, the game is competitive. There’s a winner, and everyone else is losers, and this strictly maps to who gets away with their murder, and who does not. So how does one go about winning a storytelling game about being a murderer?

Setup is fairly simple. You take a deck a of cards and pick one black suit and one red suit and shuffle them together. This is called the Tone deck, and which suit combo you choose results in one of four flavors of game: Out the Ordinary, The Gonzo Life, A Dark Banality, and This World Gone Mad.

You then take the remaining two suits, shuffle them together, and lay them out in a five by five grid face down. This leaves just one lonely card. This card is called The Downfall, and you set it aside, facedown.

After this, everyone decides who their character is, which pretty much consists of just deciding on a name, age, gender and occupation. From there you begin taking turns telling your characters’ stories. To be clear, at the start of play all you have to go on are three things:

The game takes place in an American town.
Your character’s name, age, gender and occupation.
The mandate that your character must commit a murder before their story is over.

That seems like an intimidatingly minimalist place to start. There are a few ways the game helps. First, the game is played in turns. Each turn is about narrating one scene of your character’s story, and the text encourages you to keep it short and snappy. These scenes begin and end in very specific ways.

At the top of your your turn, you draw two cards from the Tone deck. Together these cards indicate an entry in a series of charts and tables provided by the game. Each entry acts as a kind of writing prompt for the scene, and they range from the extremely simple like, “the cobra” to weirdly specific like, “There’s a box of shells buried in a Mason jar down by the banks of the river. I tied an old Molly Hatchet t-shirt in the tree branches above where it’s hid.” The goal is to incorporate the elements of these prompts into your scene. Fortunately, you don’t have to use these prompts verbatim and have some leeway to massage them for your convenience.

As a bookend to the Tone deck draw, a scene always ends with a Trigger. A Trigger is a new point of tension or unexpected twist. Anything can count as a trigger, but the text explicitly call out a few general categories: significant criminal behavior, violence (both physical and verbal), injury, sex, introducing a character from another player’s story into yours, and of course, the murder you’re building to.

Tone cards and Triggers together provide a kind of road map for your scene. The tone cards provide a platform or pivot on which to hang your scene. The Triggers provide a goal to move your scene toward.

Once your scene is over, you basically get to play a variant on the game memory with the five by five grid of cards on the table. You get one shot to make a match. If you make a match, you get to keep the pair. The interesting bit is what you do with these pairs.

On another player’s turn, you can spend a pair you have collected to introduce a complication into their story. This is basically an obstacle they have to overcome. There’s no dice rolling, or card play to overcome the obstacle. It’s purely a creative challenge to the other player to decide how their character deals with it. It’s meant to add drama and complexity, not impede their story.

The game ends when there are no more cards to match in grid. Before epilogues are narrated, a winner is determined using a scoring system. There are three ways to score points.

1. At the end of each scene the other players score how well you used your Tone deck prompt on a scale from 1 to 3.
2. When you spend a collected pair to introduce a challenge you score 5 points if it’s a pair of numbered cards, and 7 points if its a pair of face cards.
3. At the end of one of your turns, instead of trying to make a pair, you can try and guess The Downfall card that was set aside and doesn’t have match in the grid. Your guess is written down and only validated at the end of the game. If you’re right, you score a bonus: 10 points plus the number of cards remaining in the grid at the time of your guess. However, if you’re wrong, you automatically lose regardless of point totals.

Because of The Downfall, it is possible for everyone to lose. But if there is a winner their character gets away with their murder. Everyone else meets some kind of retributive fate. There is one last round of narrating scenes as each player gives an epilogue to their character’s story, taking into account whether they are the winner, or one of the losers.

And that’s, pretty much, the entire game. However, the text of Pickets and Blinds contains a few things I find particularly illuminating about the game’s focus. For example, this is how you decide who goes first: “The player with the most felony convictions gets the first turn. If there is a tie in this regard then the player who has spent the most time in jail starts things off.“ I don’t think I know anyone who meets either of those criteria. It seems to raise the question, “Who is this game for?” But really, I think it reveals, “Who is this game about?”

I think, in some ways, those first player criteria are about getting the players in the mindset of a certain kind of person. A person who is no stranger to a jail cell after a bar fight. A person who can turn a routine traffic stop into a contempt of court charge. A person, maybe, not unfamiliar with low-risk breaking and entering, or small stakes armed robbery. Rough people whose lives are about to get rougher. That’s who Pickets and Blinds is about.

Another interesting bit of a advice can be found in the section concerning spending pairs to create complications in other player’s stories. It’s a warning to avoid creating obstacles for your own character during your narration. This confused me, at first, because I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to get to the excitement of Triggers if I’m to avoid putting obstacles in front of my character. Thinking about it, I realized, there are a lot simpler reasons violence, injury and crime happen that aren’t necessarily a means past an obstruction to a goal.

For example, I might narrate my character going to a bar after being laid off from his job. I could describe how at the end of the bar is young man in a suit is buying rounds for everyone, and talking about the big bonus he just recieved. I might then describe how my character can’t take it anymore, strides up to this braggart, and punches him in the face. This is a much more emotional expression of violence than something more action oriented, like describing how I suddenly find the liquor store surrounded by cops, while I’m holding it up.

By avoiding direct confrontations and challenging problems, I think, the stories will stay more grounded. They will feel more real and more mundane, while still feeling dramatic and tense. Just narrating a scene of my character doing a smash and grab at jewelry store because his son needs cancer treatment is heavy enough, without me getting into counter-security measures, or high speed chases.

Finally, as an avid reader, it’s a rare day in which a game presents a bibliography where I am unfamiliar with all of the authors. Pickets and Blinds says it’s inspired by, “the short fiction of Raymond Carver, John Cheever, James Salter and Wells Tower.” I did some research. I discovered that all four of these men are more known for short stories and poetry than novels, and all but one of them hit their height in the mid-20th Century. I think that speaks to a certain kind of values.

It’s increasingly rare that an author would choose to focus on the short story as a form. Even most short games pull their structural assumptions more from cinema than literature. Short stories often have intimate focuses. They frequently focus more on ideas, experiences and emotions than plot. And they often have open ended conclusions that can raise more questions than answers. In the context of playing Pickets and Blinds that is both extremely freeing, and extremely terrifying.

I have no doubt that Pickets and Blinds is not an easy game to play. The tabula rasa nature of your character and the setting, combined with the mandate of just free flowing your character’s story is a tall creative order. I think, however, working from the Tone deck prompts, moving towards triggers, heeding the advice about avoiding direct obstacles and confrontations, and keeping the concise nature of short stories in mind, Pickets and Blinds has the potential to offer an intense, emotionally satisfying experience, not found in may other games.

Pickets and Blinds can be found here in pdf format:
https://payhip.com/b/I6Xm

Next Up: RavenDeath by Iacopo Frigeria. In contrast to Pickets and Blinds’s understated tale of murder in America, RavenDeath offers a passion driven tale of revenge from an independent design house in Italy. I’ll be working from the English translation by Joe J. Prince.

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