We too often think of ourselves as mundane. Work, Eat, Sleep, Repeat. Indulge a hobby if we can. An ordinary life, well lived is all a lot of us can expect. For most that will be enough. Occasionally the extraordinary happens. We experience events that become synonymous with us and who we are. Deathmatch Island throws ordinary people into the most extraordinary circumstances. It asks who you are and what you will do when the rewards are great, but losing comes with the ultimate price.
Deathmatch Island is the latest project from RPG and graphic designer Tim Denee. It is published by Evil Hat Productions. Evil Hat Productions also publish Agon, the game that powers Deathmatch Island. I’ve covered the game previously in a First Read.
A GM review means that I have experienced the game from the Game Masters chair but haven’t been on the player character side of the table. RPGs can feel different depending on the role you are adopting so I think it is useful to you, the reader, to know where my perspective is coming from. I have run a full 3 island Deathmatch Island campaign at the time of writing.
I first came across Tim Denee, through his light adaption of Agon, Odyssey Aquatica. This takes the tales of heroism and tragedy that Agon encourages, and turns the system to tales of underwater Academia. No really. It works really well, and the tweaks to Agon are subtle but significant. It put him firmly on my radar.
When I heard that Tim was embarking on a more radical reworking of Agon to tell Battle Royale/ Hunger Games/ Lost inflected tales, I was in. All in. I backed for the special edition of the game with all the bells and whistles.
Deathmatch Island has a simple premise at the core: Play to Win. That goes against the norm of most tabletop RPG play round our tables. Usually our sessions might include some intra=party conflict, but overall the players are trying to overcome the threats together. The characters are normal people thrown into a battle for their lives, and their can be only one winner! You may be out for number one, but you can’t win without the help of the strangers you are thrown into the fray with.
You awake on a boat. Bleary eyed you come to life. The sound of waves breaking against the hull of a ship. The thrum of an engine. Sitting around the deck are other people, all looking as confused and scared as you feel. Each of you dressed in the same orange jumpsuit. The only thing distinguishing the outfits apart, a badge displaying your name. A letter in your pocket welcomes you to the competition. It ends ‘Play to Win’
This is how you set out into the world of Deathmatch Island: strangers brought together and thrust into a world of violence and conflict. The characters you inhabit are deliberately randomized during creation. Unlike Agon, the players make no choices about who their character is. There is no attachment here between player and character. That comes through shared adversity. Characters are also more fragile, unable to take the beating a Greek Hero can.
As you land on Island 1, you are immediately in the conflict. The GM will have chosen a Cast for this series of Deathmatch Island. This may be as mundane as a police officer throwing his weight around or as weird as powered people who may have been part of experiments on this series of islands.
As all you have is a jumpsuit to your name, the initial conflicts are brutal affairs. As with Agon you roll a pool of dice that represent your name and capabilities, skills effectively, trying to beat the GM’s roll. You take the two highest dice from that roll, whereas the GM takes one and adds a fixed number representing the threat of the current situation. Results are arranged in ascending order. The arc of the results, guide our narrative from lowest to highest. You are asked to narrate your own failure, an aspect I love, but you may baulk at it. It’s a system that demands a heavy dose of improvisation. One player is ‘the best’ and that could be the GM!
As you participate in conflicts, you gain followers. The show you are part of wants viewers, and this follower number rises steadily over the course of the islands. As it increases your name rings out more, and the value of your name becomes greater giving you a higher value dice in your pool to represent it. Between islands you’ll get to advance your capabilities to take on tougher opponents. Injury sees you improve as well, as you learn lessons from the licks you have taken.
Alongside these personal advancements, you will collect equipment to aid you. These are an adaptation of the Divine Favour mechanism in Agon. Rather than genuflecting to capricious gods, you find yourself sourcing AK47s, packets of cigarettes, and a first aid kit or two. Equipment has a rating form 1 – 3, giving you a number of d4s that are added to your pool. This makes some equipment feel more valuable than others. It introduces a wonderful point of friction between the players and their characters.
Agon was a fully co-operative experience. Sure there might be some intra-party friction, but you all had the same goals. Deathmatch Island starts out that way. However, as you hurtle towards the finale, tensions rise and friends become enemies. The game expresses the rising tension through the central mechanism I described earlier. That character that comes out on top in a given challenge becomes the leader. They can choose where the team goes next, but are also responsible for giving out the rewards from those challenges. Favourites are blessed. Selfishness is made real. Resentment wrought in the instruments of violence.
The islands themselves are more detailed and brimming with possibility and threat. In Agon you get a rough description and some important locations. Here you get an actual map! Nodes spread out across the landscape. Each bristles with opportunities for building followers, scavenging equipment, foraging alliances, and betraying confidences.
These are not just places of interest, though those are indeed part of the landscape both narratively and mechanically. You get hunger games style competitions, where the cast for the island will turn up and try and beat you to the prizes. Those prizes tend to be weapons of course. Maybe you’ll even come across some of the redacted areas of the map. Places Production does not want you to go. You aren’t going to listen to them, are you?
In between the islands you reflect and chat. What is going on? Is this really a game show? Is it some sort of grand experiment? As you speculate the game bends towards the version of reality that most players predict is the truth. It is a slightly odd piece of design that feels a little unnecessary, but is good guidance and not to be ignored. We also see flashbacks to our character’s lives before Deathmatch Island. A chance to round characters out, but also an opportunity for the GM to foreshadow what is coming.
The islands are designed such that you’ll see part of them, leaving much to explore for revisiting as player or GM. You must be thinking that I am talking nonsense. Don’t you only visit each island once in this game? Have you been here before?
The book itself speaks to the reader not only as an instruction manual of how to run the game, but also directly to you as ‘Production’. ‘Production’ is the term for the GM but also the shadowy organisation behind Deathmatch Island. In the margins and in-world artefacts depicted in the book, Production is inscrutable, mysterious, and threatening. Production’s presence is felt more and more as the game progresses, becoming a more tangible threat as the character’s move towards the endgame.
You’ll visit 3 islands in total, coming to a showdown on the last island. The previous two islands see the entire team having encounters, but on the last you are split up. The things you see will be strange, tempting, and corrupting. Then it is time to face down your allies one more time. There is a wonderful moment here where the game asks each character to secretly fill out a form. This asks each of them if they want to play to win, or break the game. If even one character chooses the former then it is a final deathmatch for all. If all choose to break the game, then. Well that would be spoilers. Production hates spoilers.
Deathmatch Island is a game that treats its audience with respect. It gives you fantastic tools to make your version of this reality feel compelling and real. Layout and writing leave you under no illusions as to the setting and theme. The system gives everyone around the table help in telling a great story, and lets players know when they are coming up short, tempting them to push harder next time. Its brutal, surprising, and a masterclass in how to present an RPG.
You’ll enjoy it.
Maybe you already have.
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