Squire

This is a storytelling game designed for one player. Using dice and cards, develop challenges for your squire and their knight to confront; process what your squire learns from their knight’s triumphs and failures. The squire is supposed to support their knight, but is also a young person trying to understand the world as an adult for the first time. Will they risk their potential future as a knight to pursue their own goals and values? Will they survive the grueling war and violent pleasures they have been led to by the system that they were raised to perpetuate? Do they even want to be a knight, and does what they want even matter in the end? Squire is flexible in setting and built to adapt: the prompts will refer to knights as in a medieval fairytale setting, but it is built around the myth of knights that is woven into different genres and settings. Your knight’s steed can be a horse, a dragon, a mech, or a motorcycle— adapting the themes to different settings is part of the fun. The gameplay of Squire involves drawing cards and interpreting challenges based on the values of the world the player has built; play is structured to create a limited three act story with an ending, and is built to enable repeated play with different outcomes. The content of Squire heavily depends on player choice and does not contain explicit violence, but is intended to make room to reflect on and make stories about systems of power and violence.