I hardly know where to begin with Through the Hedgerow (2024), a game I love to tiny little bits.

So, I am going to start with what I don’t want to talk about: the system. It’s on the complex side and consists of a fair number of small systems interacting in interesting ways, all very much expressing the game’s themes and narratives mechanically. I think they are good! I just don’t want to explain them here; the rulebook does an excellent job of it and if the rest of this post gets you excited, the relative complexity of the system is unlikely to stop you from playing and enjoying the game. Which is tremendous.

It takes a lot of inspiration from fantasy novels that mean a great deal to me, all tied to British folklore and landscape. So, the work of Alan Garner, to some extent Lewis’ Narnia and most of all Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence. There is also a fair amount of British faerie lore and folk horror and hauntology as well, but Cooper’s work looms the largest. Over this, pour a globby helping of creative visual design by artist Peter Johnson, to unify the fantasy and push it in surprising directions.

The idea here is that the Light calls champions to counter the machinations of the Dark. These champions (briar knights) are brought together from a variety of times and every character has a Doom which they cannot escape. Some are human: cunning men, hedge witches, lost children, fools, melancholy champions. Other are strange: living scarecrows, giant spiders pretending to be human, bird-headed fae warriors. My favorite is the reformed buggeber, once a servant of the Dark, now bound to the Light. They don’t have heads, but rather their neck is a toothy maw. Evil buggebers eat humans and “wear” their heads. Those domesticated by the Light make do with carved pumpkins or gourds. Fantastic.

Scenarios play out in the same rural region across four possible time periods. The Ages of Swords is medieval, and allows for open conflict between the Light and the Dark, who tend to be led by the Raven Margrave, a terrible goddess of death. The Age of Plagues is the English Civil War where the Witch-Harrow is the Dark’s primary champion; the political power of witch hunters coupled with the Dark’s other supernatural agents make this era perhaps the most dangerous for the Light. The Age of Steel is the 19th century and the dawn of industrialization; here the battle must be kept secret. The Feral Squires are the most powerful agents of the Dark during this period, fallen fae lords posing as cruel human nobles who leverage their class and their money to get what they want. Finally, there’s the Age of Thunder, during the Blitz, and a coven of witches has infiltrated all walks of a chaotic life.

Scenarios follow a helpfully rigid structure (there is room for lots of freedom within that structure, though). Time travel problems are hand-waved (this is magic, not science). Old Gods walk. Dark clouds gather. What a strange and wonderful game.