Dead Friend (2018) is a two-player storytelling game about, well, friends: one living and performing a necromantic ritual; one dead and returned, for the moment. Its by Lucian Kahn, whose name you might recognize from his most recent game, the excellent Visigoths vs. Mall Goths.

Dead Friend is essentially played through a series of questions – some set, some randomly determined by a deck of cards – that encourage the creation of a collaborative fiction, with both players defining their characters, circumstance and history together through their answers. The prompts also form the general narrative arc of the game.    

For those familiar with story games, this should be a familiar mechanic. What sets Dead Friend apart is how it uses the trappings of a necromantic ceremony to structure its storytelling prompts, literally ritualizing your actions. You sit with a pentagram between you. You move a coin along its line, invoking, but also tracking the turn. That deck of cards used to randomly determine the prompts? A tarot deck is preferred.

This use of ritual works extremely well at maintaining narrative focus. I also think it is interesting in that it makes the rituals of tabletop RPGs explicit, to great effect. RPGs are full of ritual and magical thinking, even if you don’t recognize it as such – how many of you have “charged” your dice by leaving it on the desired number before play? So, even as Dead Friend is an intimate storytelling game about friendship and death, it also inevitably provokes thoughts about the nexus of play, ritual and storytelling. But maybe that’s just me.

At any rate, a well done game, tightly themed but full of potential variety – no two ceremonies will be quite the same. Dead Friend is morbid, of course, but flexible enough to be serious, silly or something else entirely, depending on your fancy.