Hearts Blazing you will always be famous

It is almost impossible to purchase a physical copy of Heart Blazing. I’ve found two copies on eBay and… that’s it. This is deeply disappointing because Hearts Blazing is one of my favorite tabletop roleplaying games, period, and it deserves to be available to anyone who wants to purchase it. In addition to being a fun TTRPG that’s easy to teach and delightful to replay, it’s also accessible, portable, and smartly designed. True, the full game is in the Creative Commons and is available to download for free on DriveThruRPG, but the card-based format means that having a physical copy of the Hearts Blazing deck remains the best way to play. 

This is a travesty, as Hearts Blazing is one of my absolute favorite games, and it deserves to be played many, many times over.

Using beloved, well known tropes and archetypes in order to push a collaborative and conversational playstyle, Hearts Blazing has just enough guardrails to keep players on track while giving them freedom to explore emergent storytelling. The game encourages over-the-top melodrama within structured roleplaying segments—called episodes—that focus on characters. It’s an incredible game, ahead of its time, and I simply cannot get over the fact that the original deck isn’t available anywhere! It should be everywhere! It should be people’s first TTRPG, and I say that because for many of my friends, it was!

Hearts Blazing was published in 2016 by Games by Play Date after a successful Kickstarter campaign. It comes in a neat little box with a bunch of cards and a slim rulebook. In early 2020, Games by Play Date shut its doors, and all the copies of Hearts Blazing suddenly became heritage pieces, along with the other games that Play Date had published. 

And the hobby is lesser for it.