Dread is a collaborative horror storytelling game with a very novel core mechanic.

The basics will be familiar to anyone who had read or played a storytelling game before. The host sets the framework of the story and provides a character creation questionnaire – not unlike a game master. The host and the players work together to flesh out characters and the world on the fly, so every game of Dread is unique and improvisational.

The novelty of Dread, and the way it earns its moniker, is the way it resolves conflict. Any time a player wishes to do something when the result is not guaranteed, they pull a block out of a Jenga tower. Pull it without knocking over the tower, the character succeeds in the action. Knock over the tower, and you character fails the action and is out of the game (usually because they died as a result of the failure, though the game allows for deaths to be banked for a more dramatic departure when necessary). In fact, if you knock over the tower at all, even if it isn’t your turn, your character will suffer a terrible doom. Once the death is resolved, the tower is re-stacked and play continues.

RPGs so rarely have stakes that are present at the gaming table in a physical form. By tying success and failure to something so precarious as a Jenga tower standing in the center of the table, Dread introduces some very real, very terrifying cause and effect for players to manage. It removes characters from the abstract of statistics and dice rolls and puts their lives quite literally in the hands of the players.

It’s genius, really.