Played this earlier today, great cooperative journey familiar to anyone who's seen house hunting tv shows. We made each room slightly odd or supernatural, and found reasons to like or dislike each thing to debate which house we wanted to buy. Enjoyable low stakes interactive game, would happily play again. Good for less experienced gamers too.
A beautiful game capable of producing transcendently nightmarish house designs. Easily matches Delver as a game for producing surreal situations that nevertheless remain perfectly legible, and as such I'd call it one of the truly great procedural map generation games. Absolutely play this; the Zener card mechanics in particular are inspired.
Surreal Estate is a oneshot-friendly rpg where you take on the roles of house buyers contending with a supernatural threat.
It definitely tends towards a wacky comedy tone, but depending on how you run it, it can be either HGTV meets Control, or HGTV meets Hill House.
Surreal Estate is 13 pages, with a clean layout and only a few graphics, and it uses Zenner cards (those ESP symbol cards) for its core resolution mechanic. Basically, your opponent picks a card, you try to guess it, and your number of guesses is determined by your statline.
That said, everything in the book is very clearly explained, and the game itself is easy to pick up without feeling too simple.
Gameplay-wise, Surreal Estate has a bit of an odd feel. It definitely cleaves close to the HGTV format, but it also has the GM play as the Realtor---who is covertly the PCs' enemy. This can cause some weirdness with the tone (i.e. the Realtor shows the PCs a house, commands it to eat them, and then when that fails the Realtor offers to show them another house.) However, if you lean into the wackiness (or simply make the Realtor not be the villain) this resolves itself pretty easily.
There's also some fairly soft adversarial mechanics in the game, with the players facing off against each other at the end to get *their* choice for the perfect home. There aren't canon winners and losers though, the game's just mirroring the format of the source material, but this might be a thing your group wants to play up or play down.
Overall, if you like shorter comedy games and you're familiar with HGTV, you should absolutely get this. If you haven't seen House Hunters or the like and aren't familiar with the format, this can still be a lot of fun, although it benefits a lot from the group being comfortable improvising story elements on the fly.
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Played this earlier today, great cooperative journey familiar to anyone who's seen house hunting tv shows. We made each room slightly odd or supernatural, and found reasons to like or dislike each thing to debate which house we wanted to buy. Enjoyable low stakes interactive game, would happily play again. Good for less experienced gamers too.
A beautiful game capable of producing transcendently nightmarish house designs. Easily matches Delver as a game for producing surreal situations that nevertheless remain perfectly legible, and as such I'd call it one of the truly great procedural map generation games. Absolutely play this; the Zener card mechanics in particular are inspired.
Surreal Estate is a oneshot-friendly rpg where you take on the roles of house buyers contending with a supernatural threat.
It definitely tends towards a wacky comedy tone, but depending on how you run it, it can be either HGTV meets Control, or HGTV meets Hill House.
Surreal Estate is 13 pages, with a clean layout and only a few graphics, and it uses Zenner cards (those ESP symbol cards) for its core resolution mechanic. Basically, your opponent picks a card, you try to guess it, and your number of guesses is determined by your statline.
That said, everything in the book is very clearly explained, and the game itself is easy to pick up without feeling too simple.
Gameplay-wise, Surreal Estate has a bit of an odd feel. It definitely cleaves close to the HGTV format, but it also has the GM play as the Realtor---who is covertly the PCs' enemy. This can cause some weirdness with the tone (i.e. the Realtor shows the PCs a house, commands it to eat them, and then when that fails the Realtor offers to show them another house.) However, if you lean into the wackiness (or simply make the Realtor not be the villain) this resolves itself pretty easily.
There's also some fairly soft adversarial mechanics in the game, with the players facing off against each other at the end to get *their* choice for the perfect home. There aren't canon winners and losers though, the game's just mirroring the format of the source material, but this might be a thing your group wants to play up or play down.
Overall, if you like shorter comedy games and you're familiar with HGTV, you should absolutely get this. If you haven't seen House Hunters or the like and aren't familiar with the format, this can still be a lot of fun, although it benefits a lot from the group being comfortable improvising story elements on the fly.