See Issue X – A solo game review
After waxing lyrical about my conversion to solo games, I thought it would be constructive to post a review of one of the systems I am playing at the moment. Rather than do yet another review of Ironsworn, I’ve decided to focus on ‘See Issue X’ by Chris Longhurst (@potatocubed), available on itch.io. For the purposes of good form, this is not a paid review, but it is a played review.
See Issue X (or SIX as we will call it, because superhero comics love an acronym) touts itself as a game about superheroes and the people who write them – more on that later. It uses a deck of cards within the resolution and encourages you to deface them with details of the game. That’s kind of cool. There’s also an option of a spreadsheet but who wants that action when I can set to a deck of £1 Sports Direct cards with a Sharpie?!
The System?
I’ll admit it took me a few read-thrus to ‘get’ the system, as the interplay between the different decks can seem complicated. You start off with a Blank Deck, a deck of cards with the jokers removed. You select cards from this to become your Personal Deck, which the game then instructs you to draw cards from. You attach these cards to Statements – prompts – within the chosen Arc you are playing through, and then they are sent to your Discard Pile. When your Personal Deck is empty, you shuffle your Discard Pile and it becomes your deck again. Simple eh? There are some more complications like cards which are ‘put aside’ and cards that go into Limbo, but that’s not really what we’re here for.
The game is broken down into Arcs. You will start the game with the ‘Origin’ arc, which sets up your superhero and gives you some marked cards for your Personal Deck – a description of your superpowers, an important person, an ideal and a place, each represented by a different suit. Suits are important to the game, by the way. The game then takes you through your first encounter and the consequences. You end up with a nicely stacked Discard Pile filled with potential.
You then choose another Arc and play through that in the same way. Some Arcs may require cards of a certain type to be available in your Blank Deck. Others may require something to be established, like another superhero to Team Up with, and others may be ‘Slow’ Arcs that can be split up and carried out as interstitial scenes between other Arcs.
The Arcs cover just about every instance of superhero comics you can think of, especially for a solo superhero. If you wanted to emulate Spiderman for example, you could easily do it in this system. Want to rumble with the Kingpin? That’s ‘Crime Fighting’. Want to tackle the Sinister Six? That’s ‘The League of Evil’. Want to become Venom? That’s ‘Transformation’. Want to become one with Captain Universe? ‘Cosmic Adventures’ has you covered – you get the picture?
You keep on playing, marking and editing cards, and eventually being asked to reincorporate characters, places and themes back into your story, just like in the comics. This is the place where SIX really shines. It compels you to not just create new things, but to find interesting – and sometimes perplexing – reasons why something from a few issues ago has popped up now. In this strange place?! Anyone who has read comics knows that continuity can become labyrinthine and this game really does emulate that perfectly.
You play until you have no more cards in your Blank Deck, at which point your hero has reached the end of the run – death, retirement, the passing of the mantle, who knows? But the game is over.
The Experience?
I have been thrilled by this game, although it took me a while to trust the system. There was one point where I was asked to put blank cards into my Discard Pile, and I was sure that they should have gone into my Personal Deck! I checked and double checked and then decided to ‘trust the system’, which was the right decision. Those blanks got shuffled in eventually and seeded just enough new stuff to keep the game fresh.
I think you do need to have a pretty solid concept for a hero when you enter the game, or be able to develop one quickly, on the fly. This might not be to everyone’s taste but there are thousands of examples of heroes you can riff off on the internet, if you want to ‘trace the outline’ of an existing one.
You’ve got to be clever in your choice of Arcs too. Think like a comics writer. You don’t go straight from the Origin story to Cosmic Adventure! You have to build things up a little – an Adventure, maybe some Crime Fighting or a bit of Sidekick Life, building up to some Big Time action and maybe a Team Up with your mentor. I found myself wanting to pace the story so I circled back to Adventure for a second time, taking it in a different direction.
Does it feel like a comic story? Absolutely, but with a twist that you aren’t just going through the tropes A-B-C fashion. In every Arc you have choices – which suits do you use? Which marked cards do you use? Your choices might be limited early on, but they are choices and you know what? They emulate the feeling of a new comic, where things are rapidly introduced but then seem to be the focus for the next few issues, as other things are also introduced to broaden the storytelling palette.
The challenge of reincorporation is real in this game, and if you go in with hard and fast preconceptions of what something is, you’ll be tearing them up within a couple of Arcs. Similarly, if something doesn’t get defined in the game, keep it loose. You might be tempted to detail some bit-part NPCs but until they get their name on a card, they’re like clay in your storytelling hands.
The experience is brilliant and if you love superhero comics, I think you’ll like this game.
The Downsides?
Not a lot, to be honest! The artwork is ok, but nothing amazing. It reminds me of the art on one of the editions of Icons – very cartoonish superhero stuff. OK if you like that sort of thing but not to my taste. That said, the rest of the design and layout is really accessible and fits the genre.
I suppose my one hiccup is that I never really got the sense that this was a game about the people who write the comics, as described in the description? That made me think of some sort of Work/Shoot style game where it would have more framing around ‘Bullpen’ politics – i.e. ‘The editor has decided that this character needs to be resurrected’ or ‘The publisher has decided that the comic needs to go Grimdark, with big guns, lots of pouches, cropped jackets and no feet’ etc. There’s nothing like that in the game. I can only surmise that the game puts YOU into those situations without calling them out specifically. I was expecting something different.
Recommended?
Absolutely. I’ve found playing the game to be compelling as I really want to know what happens next?! I’ve introduced two ongoing storylines and a romance and I hardly feel I have got out of the starting blocks despite being five Arcs and 14/52 cards into the game.
I have always maintained that Masks by Magpie Games is the undisputed champion of superhero games, delivering the young teen team dynamics I loved in 80s X-Men and Teen Titans to the table. I’m confident to say that SIX delivers an equally good experience when it comes to solo hero gaming and is something I will definitely play through more than once. Great game and a cracking bit of design.
You can buy See Issue X here and you can follow my ongoing game of ‘Death Mask’ here
