Make real puppets and yell at your real friends
The fast and frantic game Sock Puppets is live on Kickstarter.
Sock Puppets is a very silly tabletop RPG about a failing children's television series. Make real, actual puppets and use them to ruin a perfectly good puppet show. The game is live on Kickstarter until February 25.
In Sock Puppets, you'll act as both puppets and their troubled puppeteers, each with their own baggage they're taking onto the show. Someone is trying to get a vape sponsorship; someone is pushing their cult; someone wants to make their cat famous.
It's a mess, basically.
The game is a 38-page zine filled with awkward relationships, messy personal agendas, goofy characters, episode ideas and a handful of rules. It's designed to be picked up and played with no work in advance – well, except for getting a bunch of puppet-making materials. But you could all just take off a sock and shove a hand in there if you're feeling lazy and gross.
Sock Puppets takes about 90 minutes to play, including time to make puppets. You'll need 3-6 people.
Sock Puppets is lovingly designed in the style of petty squabbling games like Ghost Court or Fiasco. It's a playful, crafty, fast-paced game that will get all your friends talking in wretched little puppet voices almost immediately.
But don't take my word for it. Here's Ian Howard, designer behind 5-star Match and One Breath Left, with an accolade so glowing that I'm almost too shy to put it here:
Kurt is one of my favorite people and designers, and Sock Puppets is the Kurtiest game imaginable. That is to say: it’s whimsical, funny, artful, elegant, insightful, and suffused with loving reverence for all the quirks and foibles that make us human.
As a reward for reading this far, I'll tell you that the whole Kickstarter video is presented by a puppet that took me like a month to make. His name is Herman. He claims to have designed the game. One the stretch goals unlocked Herman narrating the entire book on video, and frankly, my larynx will never forgive me.
