In This World
A downloadable game
Nations have borders. Police have badges. Dragons breathe fire. You work for money.
That's the world we've come to expect. But in this world—the world we create together—we can question those assumptions and imagine alternatives.
And instead of just making one world, we'll make a whole string, each exploring a different slice of what could be… all in a few hours.
A SMALL GAME OF BIG IDEAS
In This World is a fast game of big creativity, by Ben Robbins, the creator of Microscope and Kingdom. It is designed from the ground up so that anyone can play it, even someone who has never played any kind of story game before, and have no problem just jumping right in.
It overcomes the usual challenge of inventing ideas out of the blue by starting with a framework of real world facts, things we already know, and then inviting players to stand those ideas on their head and imagine how the world could be different.
It's a recipe that leads to effortless creativity and surprising results, all while spurring new thoughts about the world around us. And it is pretty darn fun.
- Three to five players, with optional rules for two.
- Everyone gets to contribute equally. No game master.
- No prep. Just sit down and play.
- No experience necessary. Anyone can play and have fun.
You can see more examples of actual play on the In This World web page or in my blog, Ars Ludi.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $11.99 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Comments
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I played a two player game of In This World yesterday and had a great time making some bizarre worlds around the theme of space exploration. This game will immediately go into my shortlist of games for introducing new people to the types of games I like or for times I want to do a little worldbuilding.
I played it without knowing what the steps of the game looked like until we got there, but the gears in my brain immediately started the moment we were making the 'true and obvious' statements. Knowing that we'd be changing those statements later in the game, I started planning ahead with statements like "astrophysics works the same everywhere."
The world generation part follows up on those statements in such a great way. Starting each world with the very simple prompt of "choose one thing to make different and up to 2 to keep the same" lead to some fascinating variety among the four worlds we made once we fleshed it out completely.
I really like how little time you spend in the worlds you build in this game, it takes some of the creative pressure off and allows you to just let the weird ideas win the day. I'm looking forward to playing again some time and seeing the worlds that come out of different starting concepts.
"it takes some of the creative pressure off and allows you to just let the weird ideas win the day"
Yes that's exactly what I was shooting for! I find it such a relaxing game to play. You're making all these big ideas, but it just feels easy because you're working with the scaffolding you set up at the beginning.
A wonderful game. This runs light and it feels easy to keep an idea agile and ever changing. We've used this for world building a bunch of factions in the same world and that created some truly strange and interesting options. We had a real blast with this
That's lovely! Making different factions sounds like fascinating worldbuilding
Do you have any advice for doing that? It sounds like a really cool idea!
I recommend just taking whatever the mainstream faction idea would be and making that your topic, like a thieves guild or a religion, and then seeing how those ideas morph.
If the factions are all very different types of groups (one's a religion, one's a merchant cartel), play multiple times, once for each type of faction.
Thanks for the advice!
Ben nailed it already, so I'll just kind of post this as a longform agreement. We just defined the game as about cults (they're a core part of the campaign we're playing). I'm not sure how far I'd push my luck with trying to create different kinds of stuff, but if I ever needed to say, generate a host of new gangs for Blades in the Dark, or maybe immortal beings for a Lord of the Rings esc fantasy, etc etc, then I'd reach for this game again.
I'd also just play it as intended too, which I'm actually yet to do. It sits in a really nice place for prompting and easy creativity.
EDIT: In re-reading this, I've realised that I implied something without saying it. We had concrete truths as we'd been playing in the setting for a bit already. Magic exists. This is the normal technology level. Blah blah blah. Then everything above that layer is fair game as usual. We also all knew the intention of this exercise going in.
Thanks for the additions. I'm looking forward to trying this out!