Indie RPG Spotlight: ‘Alice is Missing’ Will Leave You Speechless
Alice is Missing is a suspenseful mystery-solving game set in a small town. And oh yeah, it’s played completely silently.
Alice is Missing is a 2020 tabletop roleplaying game where players investigate the disappearance of Alice Briarwood, a local high school girl from Silent Falls High School. And that description may make you picture some pretty popular and conventional TRPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. But Alice is Missing is a much different sort of roleplaying game than you may be used to.
Alice is Missing
So you get a handful of your friends together and get ready to find a missing fictional teen. Only this game may be about to go differently than you thought. You see, Alice is Missing is a game played in silent mode.
Players communicate with each other through one-on-one text messages to share information as clues are revealed. The game is guided by prompts, clues, and information given on cards. For example, there are character cards establishing the roles of the various players, suspect cards, giving a list of anybody who may or may not be involved in Alice’s disappearance, and clue cards as well as a few other categories.
Gameplay is also on a timer. This means that there can’t be any of that ever-common tabletop RPG goofing and messing about. Most of my personal RPG playing time is spent talking and joking about things that have nothing to do with the actual game. When your GM is cool with that, it’s fine. But in Alice is Missing, once your ninety-minute timer runs out the game is over. You’ve failed to find Ms. Briarwood.
Of course, this isn’t a real-time ninety minutes. Within the fiction of the game, you may be looking for Alice over the course of a couple of days. But there are a finite number of card-pulling, text message-sending minutes available to you, the player.
Character Creation and Gameplay
Considering that this is a game that plays a bit more like a board game than a classic tabletop RPG, it’s probably not surprising to hear that character creation isn’t the sort of highly involved custom-build situation you may be used to. Instead, players choose cards that represent and tell a little about their characters as well as drawing cards for that character’s motive, how they act, and relationships with the other players.
It’s all very basic and fairly random. But this is a short game with a definitive ending and classic character creation can sometimes take a long time. In Alice is Missing, there is no possibility of overthinking your character or spending more time on creation than actual gameplay. And we’ve all had those sessions spend more on creation than gameplay.
Once characters are figured out, each player records a secret voicemail to be played at the end of the game to establish some background info about the town of Silent Falls. Things like important locations and the missing-person search is started.
The timer starts, and players pull, flip, and reveal cards when prompted by the timer. Often a suspect or location will be revealed as well as a game prompt. And from here players piece together just what happened to Alice and text their fellow players to share any new or relevant information.
Players are meant to interact and chat as if they are their characters. Y’know, hence the roleplaying part of a roleplaying game. So instead of “this card says that Ryan was rifling through Alice’s locker,” you’ll say something more like…
Screenshot from the Alice is Missing Kickstarter.
This Game Has Done Well
Being something a little different, Alice is Missing has done well. A much more than fully funded Kickstarter (to the tune of $138,723 out of a $10,000 goal) resulted in a system that won the 2021 gold ENNIE Awards for Best Game, Best Rules, and Product of the Year, as well as the 2021 IndieCade award for Tabeltop Design.
So when Hunters Books went right back to Kickstarter with a plan for the Silent Falls Expansion, it was fully funded in fewer than 15 minutes and raked in $197,841 of a $10,00 goal. The expansion is available now for pre-order, and will include more characters, relationships, suspects, and just about every other kind of card the game utilizes.
If you’d like to check out Alice is Missing for yourself, you can find more information on the Hunters Entertainment official site.
Have you played Alice is Missing? Did you contribute to either Kickstarter campaign? What do you think of the text-based gameplay design? Let us know in the comments!
Happy adventuring!
