The Thing About __________ Is....
A downloadable Workplace Simulator
The Thing About _________ Is : Modern Day Metaphysical Workplace Warfare : A Rejoinder to Springing Owl's Game Supplement 'Let Us Relitigate the Potatofire Incident', or TTA_I:MDMWW:ARtSOGSLURtPI, is a tabletop card, dice, and storytelling game about bad employees at a bad company fighting over the chance to go on a two week vacation.
For 3-6 players, taking roughly 1-3 hours depending on player count and relative rambliness.
Please do not donate money when you initially download this. If you play it, and if you had fun, then consider coming back and leaving a few in the tip jar, but save your money until then.
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The Thing About _____ Is is a TTRPG adaptation of the I'm On A Boat music video.
The PDF is 9 pages, with a clean business infographic style layout.
The writing here is uncommonly sharp, burrowing into corporate synergy-speak, parasitizing it, and hatching humor from inside.
Gameplay-wise, this is a solid party game. It has simple turn-taking and guns-and-butter style building yourself up or sabotaging others, but it constructs all of this around having to give weird narrative justifications based on whatever random thing your manager has become infatuated with at the moment, as you try to wrangle your way into an employee of the week vacation.
In terms of layout and usability, this is also a banger. The Thing About _____ Is does a really good job tutorialing its gameplay through a text conversation on the side of each page. I don't think I've seen this kind of running color commentary tutorial in anything else outside of the Dresden Files TTRPG, but it's a really good technique and it works excellently here.
Overall, if you want a small icebreaker rpg for a group that either doesn't play any TTRPGs or that plays a *lot* of TTRPGs, this is an excellent pick. It isn't often that I get to call something a The Office TTRPG (positive), but this is that. It's smooth to play, easy to learn, and produces good comedy and just-sweaty-enough gameplay to make everyone feel like they have stakes. If you're a designer, I'd strongly recommend checking this out. And if you're not but you've read this far anyway, I think you'll like it too.