Squire
A downloadable game
This is a one-player storytelling game. You will draw cards and roll dice to find out some elements of your story, get prompts to come up with others, and improvise how it all goes together. You will tell the story of a squire, a young person apprenticed to a knight.
Squire is inspired by traditional adventure stories and games where a young character goes off to learn about the world and themselves, but the story it tells is different. In many coming-of-age stories, a young person is thrust out into the world without adult support or guidance, only to find their own friends and forge their own heroic future. The Squire, like most of us, comes of age within a system that eagerly pulls them into step with the rhythm of previous generations. This is a game for telling stories about what it’s like to be in the middle of the action, but rarely be given attention, credit, or control over what happens next.
As the squire, you play a young person who is just on the cusp of agency, respect, and power. You will witness your knight’s journeys firsthand, provide them crucial aid and backup, and build relationships and competencies of your own. As you go, you are preparing as best you can to step into your own knighthood at the end of the game. Growth requires taking risks, but risking carefully, always trying to build more strength and ability. When you reach knighthood, all your effort will pay off and you’ll be able to steer your own destiny… right?
How you choose to dedicate your effort and attention helps determine whether or not you can become a knight. How you react to and make sense of your journeys helps determine what kind of person you will be, and what story you will tell.
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Built for replaying and adaptation into multiple story genres: what is a mech but a big fancy horse, really? What is a knight but a relatively independent, heavily armed fighter whose advanced weaponry requires lots of upkeep? What is a sidekick but a squire? Metaphors about knighthood are already woven through pop culture; this game focuses on the other side of the power fantasy, taking the perspective of a young person being trained into a role, trying to find their own identity in the chaos.
This game has been a passion project for over a year. I have played so, so many games of it. For now, it is available free to download: please read, play, share, and let me know what you think! I would like it to have some broader playtesting before making everything final, and I would love to be able to fund original art for a final copy. I greatly appreciate all feedback, questions, encouraging comments or donations.
Thank you and I hope you enjoy the game!
Detailed gameplay instructions included. PDFs for download are for digital use or booklet printing with public domain art.
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This was a great game to play, I plan to do so in future and I will look out for the final release! My only issue I had during playing was that I would find it harder to come up with the problem to overcome for the first scene in each act compared to the rest of the scenes due to it being more of an environment set up than an obvious conflict (though this forced me to be more creative which led to some fun results).
I loved how the player is not able to choose their character's upbringing as it immediately makes it clear that you aren't the main character in this world, just a child trying to survive in it, and there is plenty of freedom in the choices the player can make regarding how they interpret the challenge cards. I'd absolutely recommend this game to anyone even slightly curious about it, and I cannot wait to play again and ruin another fictional squire's life.
Thanks so much for your feedback!
This is a pretty cool game. I really enjoyed the Prologue!
I think it could really use some extra oracles for figuring out what happens in each Scene.
As it is now, the game provides the context of the Act, and then the beginning of the Scene, and the rest is up to the player. I think some extra support for determining what happens in each Scene would be very helpful. I've found myself a little stuck on the second Scene of the Quest.
Maybe the Quest is a little more difficult than the other two because it steps outside the historical context and into a more fantastical realm, so the player has to make up more stuff.
Thanks so much for giving it a try! I really appreciate your thoughts and feedback, I will definitely take that into consideration. The Quest is one of the aspects I'm most interested in getting feedback on because it is currently one of the loosest chapters, and yeah, right at that intersection of historical knights vs. folklore knights. (Pardon me if this is long, and zero pressure to keep playing if you reached the end of your fun, but if you'd like to keep going I had some ideas.)
On the mechanics side, rather than treat the Challenge card & prompt as the beginning of the scene and then have the rest of the scene be open-ended, I would try treating the Challenge card as the climax of the scene, and the Knight's draw/Squire's roll as the resolution that moves us to the next scene. (The establishing detail can show up anywhere in the scene.)
It's a little bit reverse engineering: when I draw the card, I find out the type of challenge that will be the main climax of the scene, so I go back and set up just enough to connect the dots from the previous scene to a challenge that fits the card and the detail. So when the challenge card is resolved (by drawing the knight's card/rolling the squire's dice), the scene should be ready to resolve in success or failure, and transition to the next scene. So hopefully, in the Acts, I'm always steering towards the next challenge, and it limits how often I feel like I don't know where to go next.
On the story side, I do recommend taking big mythic swings in the Quest. In some ways the player does have to make up more stuff, but it's ok if that stuff feels a little simple and dream-logic-y. Knight quest stories are full of weirdos who want nothing more than to wear disguises and test the chivalry of strangers; they don't really even need a reason. The test the knight faces on the quest can be a really literal, intentional test, like the classic Gawain and the Green Knight "come let me cut off your head or else you're a coward" tests, or more realistic "you are in a foreign land, try not to start a war by accident by breaking an unfamiliar custom."
It's also worth saying: scenes can be Very Quick. A successful scene might be as simple as a few visual shots of the knight hearing tempting voices, clutching a holy symbol, and riding on past with determination. That's a perfectly good scene! It's ok to think of it as a scene in a montage more than a long dramatic scene; sometimes it's easier to color in a smaller picture. If it feels like you've already resolved the scene's challenge card and aren't sure where to go next, it may just be time to cut to the next scene.
I hope this is not too much of an essay! If you found any parts of it more/less helpful I'd be glad to hear as it could help me edit the next edition. And/or if you'd like to, feel free to share more about where you got stuck and I'd be happy to brainstorm a way forward. Thank you again!