Keep the Faith does for Religion what Dialect did for language
This half-board game, half RPG stares directly into the political heart of modern faith.
One of my favorite genres of tabletop RPGs eschews character sheets and individual progression, instead situating players ten thousand miles above the world. In The Quiet Year, they combat the needs and troubles of a community preparing for a fated disaster. In Dialect, they represent linguistic forces shaped by time’s inexorable tide. Players will use characters to tell stories wrought by these elemental forces, but ultimately their job is to manage the existential levers and witness the results.
Keep the Faith, an upcoming tabletop game from designer and academic Greg Loring-Albright, fits squarely into this imagination space. Players shepherd a religion from its unassuming beginnings through several centuries of development and complication, either calcifying into orthodoxy or plunging into schismatic upheaval. Everyone takes turns playing cards that augment a ring of Values that define how the religion materializes in the world. Perhaps adherents favor performing works over private devotion. Maybe collecting and trading secrets constitutes worship.
The cards are intentionally simple, designed to convey broad ideas that players will fill with details through small roleplay vignettes. But the real magic of Keep the Faith, which I demo’d at PAX Unplugged in December last year, is the competitive nature. Loring-Albright hails from the school of board game design. His previous credits, Ahoy and Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, are semi-cooperative at most, and he’s professed being more comfortable with that kind of game design. In Keep the Faith, players will start the game with hidden goals and values that will guide their style, pushing them towards protecting the faith’s orthodoxy or ensuring that their core value remains a dominant feature of worship.
Luckily, it works beautifully. This tug-of-war struggle stretches over several turns as cultural churn and outside forces shape the religion as much as its internal champions. Aspects redefine old practices, which become artifacts themselves as the years (and tactically deployed influence) dictate. Keep the Faith is a game of politics, or at least politicking, at its heart. No faith survives a brush with power unscathed, and it can either wield authority directly or subtly redirect the blade to a more advantageous target.
The following interview, which has been slightly edited, took place during PAX Unplugged 2024. Keep the Faith is currently crowdfunding on Backerkit by publisher Central Michigan University Press, which is fast making a name for itself developing educational tabletop games that appeal to audiences well outside the classroom — 500 Year Old Vampire, Eyeball to Eyeball, and Rising Waters, among them.
