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
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
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.
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!