The wild west is a rough place.

Hitting that ol’ dusty trail will age you. But any hardship is worth it, when you’ve found your calling, right?

If you’re lucky, you’ll live a good life, and get to end it  facing the sunset.

Introduction

In this game, you are a cowboy (the term being gender-neutral).

Each turn ‘round the table is one year, but a person can feel quite a bit older than they are, and a trip around the sun can age you more than you might think. As you age, think about the things that may have happened to you out there among the dust and cacti to weigh your body down.

Are you a bronco rider, making the rounds of the rodeo circuit, and feeling it more every time a horse throws you in the dirt?

Are you a lawman, going toe-to-toe with outlaws, trying not to meet your end staring down the barrel of a six-shooter?

Maybe you’re a rancher, trying to avoid rustlers as you drive your cattle across the plains.

Whatever the case may be, you just want to...

Die Facing West

About The Game

Die Facing West was made for the 24-Word RPG Jam, using the prompt "Time passes, again" from BreathingStories. It's meant to be printed out on standard 8.5"x11" paper, with the game itself on one page (front and back) and the cover on a separate page.

The game rules take up only a small portion of the page, because you're meant to cut it into a square and fold it into an origami box! The folding instructions from Wikimedia Commons are on the page itself for convenience, but I find them a little hard to follow, so I recommend using this site instead.

If you fold it right, the cardinal directions on the back side of the paper should wind up on the inside edges of your box, creating a game board for you to track what direction you're facing. You want it to end up looking like this:

Knowing that the rules themselves would be extremely short, by design, I wanted to come up with a clever way of making it printable while utilizing as much of the page as possible.

Rule Clarifications (just in case)

Due to the deliberately restrictive nature of the jam, I had to keep the rules ultra-concise, so I just want to add a tiny clarification— you move yourself around the compass 1 space each time you Age. So, if you start at North and Age +3, you would wind up at West. 

Also, if you're playing with others and wind up in a Duel (aka landing facing the same direction), you Age by however much you lose your Duel by. So, if you roll a 4 on your 2d6, and your opponent rolls 8, you Age +4, and move around the board accordingly.

Final Thoughts

This was an incredibly fun challenge to take on! If there's a 36- or 48-Word RPG Jam next year, I will participate for sure. It took SO many passes to ensure I got the rules down to just 24 words while keeping them comprehensible. Thanks so much to the Jam hosts for a fantastic idea! 🥰