Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast: A Book to Be Explored
Shenuque’s Chaos Corner Explores Stakes
I should probably start by saying that Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast might be my favorite TTRPG. My official opinion is that everyone should buy two copies: one to play and one to eat, a reference to the apocryphal story about Maurice Sendak sending a child an original drawing that, upon receiving it, the child loved so much he ate it.
There is no game that has done more to change how I think about TTRPGs as a designer and as a player. And to that end, allow me to break down just a few of the ways Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast has enriched my life.
As A Designer
“The book is the game is the Bed & Breakfast,” said Jay Dragon, co-creator of Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, during our recent conversation for Talk of the Table. “The book in your hands is the Bed & Breakfast. It's got closets and corners and foyers and people who live there and weird secrets if you know where to look.” Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is not a game that wants you to simply flip through it. Instead it invites you to explore its pages.
Between the scattered in-world fiction, hidden chapters that don’t even have page numbers, and unlockable characters, every page reiterates that this is not a text meant to be kept on a shelf and used as a reference. Yazeba’s is a journey to be embarked upon; a book that should be written in and covered in stickers and handled until it is falling apart. This is not a game that you have to the side just in case you need it; this is a game that you crack open and alter every time you play. And there is something so intoxicating about that.
It is so easy as a game designer to focus too much on taxonomy and making a game easily searchable for the harried GM running a session. Yazeba’s is a reminder that the pages of a game are a playground that should include treats and surprises that will encourage you to return to the book even when you’re not looking up a rule.
During a recent discussion with Taylor Moore of Worlds Beyond Number, Jay joked that Yazeba’s is a 450-page rules-lite game. And it’s absolutely true. Because each chapter includes its own self-contained rules, Yazeba’s is free of the need to be easily searchable in the way most TTRPGs are required to be. Instead, it encourages you to get lost inside the winding halls of the Bed & Breakfast, discovering new treats on every page.
A game is not meant to live on a shelf. It is meant to be played. I’m reminded that we as game designers should do everything we can to make someone want to pick it up again and again.
As a Player
For me, Yazeba’s inspires joy and wonder far beyond just an appreciation of the deftness of its mechanics and the loving care of its physical design. It is the feeling of nostalgia and whimsy that is woven through a story that can oscillate between frantic and pensive and spooky and deep as you move through the moods of its chapters. The feeling of a half-remembered cartoon or a lost paperback book series permeates play and transports you to a state of child-like joy better than any other game I’ve ever played.
I love the limitless imagination that TTRPGs afford players, but there is also something surprisingly freeing about playing within the relatively strict confines of Yazeba’s. You are choosing from a select number of playbooks of clearly defined characters and a limited series of chapters–some of which you may still need to unlock before you can play them.
Rather than restricting play, Yazeba’s allows you a deeper connection with the characters and the game itself. It operates the same way a coloring book does. By giving you a beautiful framework of lines to color within, you are now able to focus solely on the act of coloring, unleashing your creativity on the details because the outline has been completed for you.
Have you played Yazeba’s yet? Do you have a favorite page, character, or mechanic?
Yazeba’s is also the first “legacy” style game in which I have ever been excited to participate. There are many board games that allow you to alter play through the addition, alteration, or destruction of game pieces–and most TTRPGs have some kind of “leveling” mechanic that allows you to grow and change–but the “shelves” and “tracks” in Yazeba’s allow for a gated mechanism through which you can unlock new chapters and characters that actively make me WANT to play through them rather than just skip straight to level 20. Maybe it’s the way the game makes me engage with the book as an object, maybe it’s the fact that I want to play each and every chapter, or maybe it's just that I want to slowly love this book to death until the binding disintegrates and it is more stickers than paper. Whatever the reason, Yazeba’s is a game I want to play, not just play through.
We strive to fill this newsletter with helpful and actionable advice about TTRPGs, so here is our advice: Play Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast as soon and as often as humanly possible. Also, your second copy–the one for eating–will go great with some sriracha.
— Brian
Listen to our interview with Jay about taking Yazeba’s from funding to fulfillment on Talk of the Table
Listen to our season of Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast on My First Dungeon
Setting Up Stakes and Sticking with Them
Shenuque’s Chaos Corner
Hello chaos gremlins,
I wanted to talk about stakes, why they’re so important for your characters, and how to bring them into your scenes. Stakes are the fundamental driving point of any narrative. Why would you care about Frodo bringing the ring to Mount Doom if the fate of the world didn’t hinge on it? Bingo bango, stakes are the reason we do anything! Why do I write these articles? Because if I don’t, the American economy will collapse!
So let’s learn how to create stakes to help drive narrative and make funnies! I’ll give you some tips:
Don’t ever play ambivalent or uncaring.
I don’t want to say never because sometimes it can work, but understanding what you’re doing is important here. If another player or GM introduces a scene, event, or item and you don’t have any opinions on it, you’re putting the entire onus of pushing the narrative forward on everyone else, while also rejecting whatever idea the other person came up with. That isn’t usually the intention when someone makes this choice, but that is the reality when someone appears ambivalent. Even in real life, if you’re on a date and you ask someone if they like the hit CBS Reality TV Show Survivor and they say they don’t care about reality TV, you’ll quickly move on to a new subject. In the context of a date, it’s easy to move on to something else. In the context of your actual play or home game, it can leave everyone feeling a bit stuck. I’ll also say that if your date says they don’t care about something you bring up, then 9 times out of 10 they’re a bad date. But the point is that if you simply let your character have an opinion about anything that comes up, then you’re already applying stakes, and that is key!
Have a strong opinion about things.
By strong, I don’t mean BIG like love or hate, but if someone offers you tea and you say, “Oh no thanks, I only drink loose leaf tea with a splash of goat milk,” that is a very strong choice that gives stakes to that moment. What are the stakes? Well, with that sentence, you may have just told someone that you don’t want their poor person tea, they need to work harder to impress you, you have a sophisticated palette and they are now being judged by you, or you’re an absolute freak and they should be wary of you. This is all dependent on how they want to react to your words, but by simply making a strong choice about tea, you helped establish potential stakes in a scene.
Stakes don’t have to be real.
Sometimes we create stakes that are not true to reality, but are very true for us. For instance, will the American economy actually collapse if I don’t write these articles? Probably not (at least according to Brian, Abby, and Elliot), but in my little reality, I am the one keeping the capitalists happy. I obviously don’t believe this, but in a simpler way, superstitions are what create stakes that aren’t real. Stepping on a crack won’t break your mother’s back, but if you tell a 3-year-old that after they step on a crack, they’ll start crying thinking that they just hurt their mom. It’s because, to them, the stakes of stepping on that crack were real! Believing in stakes, even if they are clearly untrue, can lead to incredibly compelling storytelling moments.
Don’t undermine the stakes you set up.
If you set up the stakes of a game to be life and death, and then a player dies and they are immediately brought back from death through some very kind GMing gifts, then you’ve just completely undone all the work you just did. Death sucks absolutely, and it’s important to discuss with your players beforehand if that’s something they want included, and if they say yes, keep that stake. If you undo death in a way that is unearned, you’re telling the audience that they shouldn’t buy into the stakes you’re setting up because if the negative outcome occurs, you’ll just undo it.
— Shenuque
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