The Yawhg - What Will You Choose?

The Yawhg

As a kid I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure series of book. They may not have been the best written stories but they were always exciting, different and best of all put you, the reader, in the driver seat. Enjoying them lead to years of table top role playing games which eventually softened as I got older and then video games...but the basics of giving a player a story in which they can really participate in without all the baggage of RPG systems was something I always remember liking.

The Yawhg is exactly that, a choose your own adventure, distilled down to only the most important choices. And then it does something that the books of old could never have done - it allows others to play along with you, forming the story together.

This is a bit sized game. It takes about 15-30 minutes for a play through, depending on how many people are playing, up to 4. Each player picks from one of the four characters (pretty sure this only dictates what color the player is) and you are presented with the plot - In seven weeks the Yawhg will arrive...how will you and your village fare?

The game is broken down into 7 rounds, each round being 1 week. During the round each player picks one of the locations in the village to go to and they spend the week there. Each location gives you a number of choices to pick from, what you are going to do there and how you will respond to what happens at that location over the week (only a single player can go to each location each week). Depending on your choices you will gain and loose points on your characters attribute scores and more importantly cause permanent story events to occur. Some of these events only affect you others can affect the game state for everyone (such as destroying a location for the remainder of the game).

Once everyone has picked and resolved their choices for the week you get a little bit of story and then move on to the next week. I am being deliberately obscure on the story and choices information here as I do not want to spoil the various things that can happen. There are not a huge selection of choices, but each have impact and the order or time in which they occur changes how the story resolves.

At the end of 7 week The Yawhg arrives and...well I will let you discover what comes next. 

I recommend this game with some caveats. It's best played with others in person, so if that's not something possible for you then maybe steer clear. Also it's not a big game, though it is small and well made if you are looking for epic adventure this isn't it (there are enough choices and endings that it will stand up to multiple play throughs). 

Technical Note: I had to run The Yawhg in Windows 8 compatibility mode (on Windows 10) to get it to work properly. So if you are having trouble with it try that.