Review: Gentleman Bandit

I wanted to play this game for so long... that I was quite surprised to see it is not a exactly an RPG, but a role-writing exercise. You incarnate the role of the Gentleman Bandit, a robber that leaves enigmatic poems at the crime scenes. I must confess it was very strange to play as a thief cause I was robbed (for real) one day before the game session. A guy stole the lunch from me and my family last Sunday. So walking on his shoes was painfully interesting, I guess. The experience gave me an important lesson, though: we shouldn't take the stories we play on our games too seriously. They are just a small fraction of the whole reality.

The system 

The game is about writing a 13 line poem you leave at the crime scene. You draw a card from a 54 standard card deck and check the suit and the value to discover the theme and the issue of the line. Do that 13 times and you have your Bandit poem. End of the game.

Not exactly a game, right?

Don't get me wrong, it was very cool and  cathartic to play it, to say the least. But I was expecting something closer to a solo game, I guess. It felt more like a poem writing exercise and there was a lot of different ways to gamify it, mechanically and thematically. Maybe my expectations were to high. I was expecting something closer to the experience I had playing English Eerie 1ed by Scott Malthouse. 

The game session

The whole session took me something like 20 minutes. I'm an advocate for short sessions specially after becoming a father, so I loved the duration of it. It is the kind of game you can play while waiting for a work e-mail to come back, or while the lasagna is cooking at the oven.

Layout

Beautiful. Really beautiful. It comes with a mobile layout and with a Letter-page printer friendly version. Both are very well designed graphically. I can't suppress that I did missed an A4 version to print it outside USA.

Is it worth it? 

Maybe to someone who's looking for a very poetic and loose interpretation of what a game is. I'm definitely not the target public, at least at this moment of life. I think the game has it's merits for surprising the players, though. I'm not much into poetry at all, so I think I wouldn't play it again, but if you are a poetry-geek I totally recommend it.

Got curious? Buy it!