Earn Treats and Be Best Friends As Senior Shelter Animals In Golden Good Girls
Play as a tight-knit group of “un-adoptable” senior furballs living their best lives together at a local animal shelter and use flashback episodes inspired by sitcoms like The Golden Girls to tell your story.
Picture it: Kickstarter, August 13th, 2024…
Scryptid Games returns this summer with a zany new TTRPG: Brigitte Winter's Golden Good Girls, now live on Kickstarter. Set in the same universe as Scryptid’s critically-acclaimed 2023 release, Psychic Trash Detectives, Golden Good Girls is a stand-alone game that invites you to play senior shelter animals living out your golden years with your fellow furballs, looking back on the times you’ve shared together: the good, the bad, and the pugly. And around the gaming table, as you bring your own Golden Good Girl to life, you perform stupid human tricks to resolve challenges and earn tasty treats.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Imagine, if you will, a game that mashes up heartfelt sitcom nostalgia with goofy, snoot-booping hijinx. Like its predecessor, Golden Good Girls is a replayable, single-session, shared-GM game for 3-5 players that explores themes of chosen family and finding value in the overlooked and discarded. But while Psychic Trash Detectives uses pulp mystery vibes as the inspiration for storytelling, Golden Good Girls pulls from the treasure trove of nostalgic sitcom tropes and touchstones.
You start off building the sitcom world of Shady Pines—the local animal shelter—and the motley mutts and mongrels who live there. The best part? Your character playbooks are based on the original silver-haired seniors: the Golden Girls. You start your character journey as “a Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, or Sophia” and build out your character from there. Then, you roleplay a flashback episode where your characters reminisce about the wacky and heartwarming times they shared with their fellow fuzzballs, friend and foe alike. Rather than roleplaying a single episode of a sitcom, the players collaboratively generate the lore of an entire sitcom series.
But it wouldn't be a suitable sequel to Psychic Trash Detectives if there wasn't a bit of mystery and drama, would it? The reason your troupe has gathered to look back on your adventures is because—against all odds—one of you is about to be adopted and leave Shady Pines fur-ever! You won't know which of you it will be until the end, and the game builds to this climactic reveal. And it is then that your Good Girl must make a choice...
How to be a Golden Good Girl
Golden Good Girls is a stand-alone game–which means you don’t need any other source material to play it–but the characters live in the same universe as the characters in Psychic Trash Detectives. You’re the cozy animals—think house cats and huskies and hamsters, but don’t rule out horses and hermit crabs. But you’re also the misfits, the animals nobody wanted, the “un-adoptables.”
Each character playbook includes several unique narrative lures—character behaviors that players can enact to earn treats during gameplay. But bark not, friends: not all playbooks need to be represented in a game of Golden Good Girls, and more than one player can select the same playbook. So yes, you can play as a bevy of Blanches, an assortment of Sophias, a deadliness of Dorothys, or—dare I say it and is the world really ready for—a ridiculousness of Roses?
Tricks and treats
In what may be a first for TTRPGs, the game has players performing silly human tricks around the table to delight and earn real treats from each other, which are then used in the game to affect the storyline. Each player brings a stash of shareable treats to the table. The treats are pre-negotiated by the players and may be small edible items–candy, crackers, cookies, fruit snacks–or they may be tiny trinkets–stickers, patches, gemstones, or cool dice.
During character creation, players also identify three silly human tricks that they can do when called upon–like hopping on one foot in a straight line or catching popcorn without their hands. Whenever a Golden Good Girl takes an action that could fail, the director asks the player to do a trick to resolve the outcome. If they succeed, the action also succeeds and they are rewarded with a treat for their efforts.
Treats are also awarded for things like fulfilling your character’s narrative lures and making other players laugh, so the game is guaranteed to inspire memorable antics worthy of a nightgown-clad night of reminiscing while eating a whole heckin’ cheesecake.
“The folks at Scryptid Games are thoughtful and clever, and the ode to synanthropes that they've created in Psychic Trash Detectives is beautiful and profoundly odd."
— Avery Alder, designer of Monsterhearts 2, A Quiet Year, and Dream Askew, on Psychic Trash Detectives
So when can you have this treat? Right now! The Kickstarter for Golden Good Girls got let off of the leash on August 13th!
Who’s running this dog show?
Scryptid Games is known for offering unique, quirky rewards to backers, and this campaign features some special backer tiers where you can receive bespoke rewards like old-lady purses filled with grandma candy (think Werther’s butterscotches and those nameless strawberry hard candies). The classy clutches are rescued from Baltimore-area vintage shops and then filled with sweets you can use in the game.
Additionally, everyone who backs Golden Good Girls within the first 48 hours of the campaign receives a limited edition sticker featuring Chickpea, a real-life Golden Good Girl from Baltimore, Maryland.
A limited number of backers may also select a special Custom Pet Portrait tier that invites you to submit a picture of your own Golden Good Girl for the game’s artist Ava to illustrate. You’ll receive a high resolution PNG/JPG of your pet portrait—and your pet will appear in the Golden Good Girls book.
And the final stretch goal of the campaign will unlock a launch celebration in partnership with an animal shelter, inviting backers to celebrate with real senior shelter animals and hopefully help them find their forever homes.
Brigitte Winter is a childless cat lady who just brought a fifth shelter cat into her home and heart. Brigitte is also a writer, photographer, and Ennie-nominated game designer based in Maryland. She is a Co-Founder of Scryptid Games, and the Executive Director of Young Playwrights’ Theater, a DC-based company that inspires young people to realize the power of their voices through storytelling. The capacity of storytelling to connect, inspire, and incite is central to Brigitte’s art and her activism. She consumes and creates stories and games that are queer, feminist, intimate, and deliciously weird. She was a 2023 Dicebreaker Table Tabletop Awards Finalist for Designer of the Year, and her 2023 TTRPG, Psychic Trash Detectives, is a 2023 Crit Awards finalist for Best Indie TTRPG and Best Cover Art. Psychic Trash Detectives is available at scryptidgames.com.
So fetch your favorite people and your favorite treats, and explore the angst and the antics of day-to-day life at Shady Pines!
