AAR: Great Bork Team

Finally played The Great Bork Team. Players are sled dogs, with limited vocabulary, and in fact relatively few actions.

While roleplaying in this game or making moves, players communicate solely in one word barks such as “YUP!” or “NOPE!” Players may break out of character to ask clarifying gameplay questions. Questions about your environment have to be investigated through roleplaying with your fellow doggos, as a dog!

There’s even a bum-sniffing mechanic, so my players didn’t need much persuasion.

This was a 90 minute game, for a fun end of the year session. The text and the art is very cute, e.g. “bork”, “hoomin”. The GM (“musher”) is encouraged to run a very playful game, and disagreements are handled by the dogs play-fighting.

As it’s just a d6 for rolls and relatively few stats; I skipped the VTT and we played in a Discord voice channel. Dogs decide actions in running order of the sled. Any disagreements mentioned above re-sort that order.

Story

I ran the provided first adventure “Get Little Sister Home”. The sled is away from home while the humans (adult and child) hunt fish. On the way home, they are attacked by bears, and the adult leaps off the sled as a distraction to save the child. What do you do?

This story seems much less cheerful than the playful tone up til this point:

the sled wavers sharply to one side and the big hooman goes tumbling, the doggos want to stop, we know we should stop, but the roar of a bear, the biggest of the predators cracks the night

The players elected to run the sled back round to the adult and attack one of the bears to intimidate them all and perform a rescue. They didn’t really communicate outside the game in monosyllabic barks. I don’t really see how that would work beyond some Lassie type bit of me asking very leading questions all the time. However credit to my players¹, they got into the idea of well-meaning dogs with short attention spans.

Due to the session length, the rest of the game was really set up and then a skill challenge to run back home.

Thoughts

This was fun, but I finished with a lot of questions on how to run the game that was a surprise for the size of it. I don’t think I really ran it correctly as there are some references to disasters that can occur on some bad rolls but I didn’t work out what they were.

The rules also imply the game is an exploratory point-crawl, but then you’re the sled dogs: you don’t really get a choice of direction. If I was going to run it again, I’d concentrate on the theme, and probably run something a bit closer to Honey Heist. Few rules, lots of mood.

Also I’d tell a story with fewer threats. For instance, some kids have taken the sled out and you’ve realised they are actually getting lost and are going to get shouted at if they’re not home soon. Not, because they’re going to freeze to death or get eaten.