#2 "Vesna Thaw"

Nuclear winter has come and gone. The vestiges of Russian civilization survive in underground bunkers, built a decade ago in preparation for the possibility of atomic war. You are a pilot, one of the few brave (or foolish) enough to take to the surface encased in the safety of your robot, a machine scrapped together from the remnants of the industrial Soviet state. What will you be able to rebuild?

Vesna Thaw is a light-hearted table-top story game of post-Soviet post-Apocalyptic robot action. 3-6 players take on the roles of Pilots, and use their creativity, cunning and giant scrapheap Robots to try and rebuild out of the ashes of nuclear desolation.

The game is GM-less and semi-competitive, with a strong scene structure. Each player takes on the role of a Pilot, drawing (literally) their unique robot that they have scrapped out of old parts. Through a series of Color, Action and Conflict scenes, each Pilot does their best to surmount the odds (and hazards thrown at them by other players). The game is designed for the characters to generally succeed over time, and the end comes (after 1-2 sessions of play) when a pilot finally goes out in a blaze of glory.

Vesna Thaw features three full-color maps of post-apocalyptic Russia, drawn by Tony Dowler, and a Rogue's Gallery of 14 unique Robots, commissioned by backers of this games Kickstarter campaign and illustrated by Amma Aning Odum.

This game was originally written for a design contest called Reversed Engineer, where each participant was asked to create a game based on a randomly-assigned character sheet. Every game still starts with the players collectively drawing the set of robots that they will be playing with!