Cottage

> You are standing in a small cottage.  There is a fishing pole here.
Exits are: Out

One of the big buzz items from PAX East last weekend was Gabe & Tycho’s impromptu live playing of Action Castle.  Before I even saw the video, I had to order it from Memento Mori.

What is Action Castle?  It’s basically an interactive fiction text adventure game (ala Zork) turned party game.  Called a parsely game,  after the programs that ran the old text adventures, the game consists of one person playing the parser, and the rest playing the player.  As the player, people take turns issuing commands to the parser, who returns a response in the style of the old text parser games.  You lose by dying, or win by meeting the victory conditions of the game.

The physical game comes simply of a double-sided 11″ x 17″ z-folded glossy card, one side consisting of parsely game rules, and the other consisting of the specifics of the game, in this case Action Castle.  See the video from PAX East after the jump.