Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast
I know I should have done this on September 15th. but doing this on Halloween sadly beat it out as a bit
Genre: Sitcom adjacent? I guess?
What is this game?: Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast is a game about playing as the guests and employees at a Bed and Breakfast in the middle of nowhere where its always perpetually September 15th
How's the gameplay?: Yazeba's core gameplay is pretty simple, there's no dice and no method of resolving things, if your character can realistically do something in the fiction they do it. The draw of Yazeba's comes in its simplistic and fast-paced structure. Instead of having GMs create stories whole cloths, the game has a ton of "Chapters", short Days in the Life of specific characters, Chapters will determine what this session's storyline will be about, and also will often introduce new gameplay mechanics! For example: in Chapter 3, Laundry day, the characters are trying to work on the B&B's massive pile of laundry, and to represent this characters get a pile of Chaos Coins, if they have no chaos coins they must take one before trying to tick up the track, but if they do they need to flip all their chaos coins! and if all of them get heads, they get to tick up the track, then they take another coin, and at any point they can cash in 5 coins to tick up the track for free. Once they fully tick up the track 3 times (to represent washing, drying, and storing the clothes), Laundry's done! Characters are also pre-made, you have a list of characters you can choose from, which might sound limiting but characters will often have silly and interesting interactions within each chapter, adding to both their personalities, and the gameplay, for example: in Laundry Day, Gertrude can become grossed out and be unable to help out fully until she's calmed down. All of this adds to Yazeba having a frantic, almost microgame-esque style of gameplay. At the end of each chapter, characters can paperclip major developments that happened during the session in order to bring it up to another chapter, for example if 2 characters had a fight, they can paperclip that as a prompt for the next chapter played with this group and these characters.
What's the setting (If any) like?: You are in the magical B&B owned by the witch Yazeba, and you must attend to its guest and help run the place! there's additional details, such as the Moon Prince's extended lore, and the general strangeness of the B&B and areas around it, but frankly a lot of this game is best experienced blind? its interesting!
What's the tone?: Yazeba's B&B's tonally most similar to a sitcom, things can get serious but its mostly comical throughout, I'd struggle to call it "Cozy", mostly because "Cozy" is a stupid fucking term, but its definitely a more low stakes game
Session length: Yazeba's microgame format means you can often play it in shorter bursts
Number of Players: Honestly, in this game number of players doesn't much matter! the gameplay mechanics are deliberately made it so any player can pick up any character at any point, meaning that it really doesn't matter how many people are playing at any given time. I generally will recommend a minimum of 4 people, though!
Resources: There used to be a VTT but that's sadly defunct, but the game's got basically everything you need to play it in the book already, and you can improvise the rest
I reaaaally like this game, its super cute and fun, Its really cute and its gameplay is genuinely genius at times, a definite must play in my opinion