I set out to write my own Wretched-style game. My first attempt was based on the Franklin Expedition, and how the demise of those men is captured in Inuit oral tradition. I wrote my card prompts, I thought about how the game might end, I imagined what their colonial mindset when confronted with survival and the obvious ability of the Inuit to live in the North might do, and I used canva to produce a kind of ‘zine of my rules (I recognize now that there’s a flub with my ‘salvation’ mechanism which I need to get around to fixing some day). I so much enjoyed setting up the pieces this way that I spent quite a lot of time during my sabbatical writing a few more such games – one set at the interface of antiquarianism/nascent professionalization of archaeology in late Victorian/Edwardian England, another featuring the Teutoberg Forest disaster, and one about being a new grad student in a DH program.
