Insatiable Cravings
A downloadable game
Insatiable Cravings is a two-player roleplaying game about
meal-making, courting, and bluffing.
One plays as the ravenous Monster, and chooses whether to eat
the meal or the meal-maker.
One plays as the Monster’s Admirer, and chooses whether to cook
something nourishing or deadly.
Can you stomach it?
- 20 page A5-Sized Zine
- 2 players
- 2-4 hours, single session
- Requires a single standard 52-card deck and a few six-sided dice
Insatiable Cravings is a roleplaying card game. Using a standard 52-card deck and some d6s, you’ll build a hand of cards that will either kill the other player’s character or blossom a relationship between the two. It’s a game of bluffing, courting, and finding the fastest route to their heart (through their stomach, of course).
Through playing scenes, you will build your hand of cards. In the scenes, you’ll have opportunities to get more cards, find out more about the other player's character, and tell a beautiful, vicious story. At the end of the game you’ll reveal your hand and your intentions.
Touchstones:
- Beauty and the Beast
- Romeo and Juliet
- The vampire fervour we all had in the aughts (and some of us still have)
Potential Content Warnings: romance, betrayal, manipulation, violence, exile, power dynamics.
This game was created for the 2023 Wondercabinet Invitational: a collection of unique tabletop games made by a curated group of designers inspired by randomized collections of oddities and ephemera.
Among my oddities were an antique "Food and Drug" stamp, ads for vintage grocery stores, and a tooth. I found inspiration in the intimacy of sharing a meal with another.
Thank you to Adam Vass for organizing the Invitational!
Please check out the rest of the submitted games, and consider picking up the whole bundle!
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $8 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Download demo
Comments
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This is such a fun game! I was a bit worried that the cards might get in the way, but they were an excellent mechanic that flowed really well even online. Using the wildcard to swap hands at a pivotal moment was a delightfully satisfying moment on my side, even if it was playfully unappreciated! The game is well structured and easy to play in a few hours, and the variety of potential outcomes and settings makes for excellent replay value.
I think next time I play we might increase to one extra phase or an extra scene in each phase - we had such a good time that we wanted a bit more play with our characters than we got in the four scenes across the two 'main play' phases. We also contemplated drawing cards between scenes as well, since we rarely had more than three cards in our hands for most of the game - but that might also have been because a lot of the hearts were just at the bottom of the deck...
A great duet oneshot, beautifully simple and gorgeously illustrated, I will come back to this one.
A follow up note to this one having replayed a few days later - we got an outcome that is not on the table thanks to a last minute hand switch in the final scene - Black Hearts and Red No Hearts.
We chose to play that as the Black player trying and failing to betray, and the Red player accidentally killing as a result. However, any update on that one would be awesome.
Thank you so much for playing, and for commenting! I really appreciate you taking the time to write this.
Your interpretation of the final swapped-hands outcome is exactly how I would have ruled it too. I'll likely release a digital version in the future that clarifies this, in the meantime, I'm glad you were able to reach a conclusion with the information presented.
Thanks again!