Till the Last Gasp takes its name from the stakes track on the communal game board. They don’t have any narrative weight, which is a weird thing for a game that tries to tie everything to the narrative the players are creating. Things like “destroy scenery three times” or “force an opponent to draw a drama card three times”. Similarly, the objectives that the game does have are nothing more than checklists of things to interact with in the game. The fact that it’s all conversational quips makes me think of this as less of a duel and more like marriage counseling between two killers. The drama cards should have had something like “flourish your weapon unnecessarily” or even new details added to the story like, “your opponent broke something dear to you, what was it?”. The verbal jabs and such are the punctuation to what’s really being said. The other thing that really gets me about drama cards is that they are all verbal. I think the Drama cards would have worked better as objectives to work towards, building up to situations where the action on the card actually made sense, and providing a reward when that happened. On paper, some work, like “Compliment your opponent”, but not all of them work for the narrative beat it has been drawn for. The Drama cards, which players are forced by the other player using an action to draw, don’t really feel narratively cohesive. There is a deck of cards designed to help players bring interesting narrative elements into the game, but they just feel like they get in the way. That means this game is basically unplayable with a wide array of people, and is something I will never be able to approach strangers with. If neither player is willing to “give ground”, then the game cannot come to a satisfying conclusion in any way. Because there is no mechanical weight to the fight, both players have to go into this game with a strict understanding that things might not go their way, and without a mechanic underpinning the direction of combat the reason things don’t go their way will be strictly the other player’s fault.
Players are expected to use these things narratively, but it’s here that things start to fall apart. Similarly, no mechanic exists around breaking scenery either. The player taking the wound simply describes it, and it is on the players to keep it in mind going forward. Now, you may notice I used the words “wound the other fighter”, but the game doesn’t have any method at all to track wounds given during the game. It could even mean the player taking the action surrenders, or runs away. This doesn’t necessarily mean winning the duel, but instead choosing the result.
The game ends when one player completes three of the four objectives on their objective card, and then has four action points to “end the duel decisively”. These actions will allow players to break scenery, wound the other fighter, move the fight around, force a player into a new stance, or possibly force the opponent to draw a drama card, which is an opportunity for roleplay.
Players take turns using their action points to take actions chosen from a list on their stance card and the location the fight is in right now. This will determine how many actions each player can take in a single round, and the highest number of the d20 determines who goes first in the round. Then, they each will roll a d20 and a number of d6 from the top of their board in the areas matching their stance. Finally, they take five of the six sided dice of their color, and put them on either side of initiative die on the board.įrom there, players will introduce their characters, how they enter, what they want, and why the opponent stands in their way. Then each player will choose an objective card from the three given to them, and then choose a stance to start with. There are several different thematic arenas, from an Aztec themed wrestling arena to a flying pirate ship, a magi-tech castle to a space port on the moon. Then the two players will decide on which arena to fight in. To start, each player will either choose a character from the provided set of characters, or choose to make their own. That is the basic premise of Till the Last Gasp, a two player collaborative storytelling board game from publisher Derrington Press.
The duel: two combatants enter, one combatant leaves.
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