Yazeba’s Online, an unconventional tabletop RPG and digital playground

It’s been four years since Possum Creek Games (Wanderhome) struck the match that would become Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, an innovative, rule-breaking, fun-making tabletop role-playing game that is undoubtedly the first of its kind. March saw the release of the game’s online iteration, Yazeba’s Online. This version, which also features the official release of the original Yazeba’s book in PDF form, combines the novel virtual tabletop features of One More Multiverse, the point-and-click adventuring of The Secret of Monkey Island, and the terraforming and design freedom of Animal Crossing: New Horizons into one glorious online adventure. It’s a lot to pack into one game, but the end result is a charming, sincere playground for your digital escapades.

The core Yazeba’s experience promises a slice-of-life fantasy with themes of queer found family and community care, told through novel and innovative game mechanics around the table. The game, which is set in a magical bed & breakfast run by a heartless witch, is played with entirely pre-generated characters. These characters include long-term residents of the titular B&B as well as guests who are just passing through. This lets new players jump right into playing without needing to be led through character creation and customization.

Each character has their strengths and weaknesses, and also so-called journeys to base their role-play around. Journeys are individual processes of self-discovery and growth; when a character’s journey is fulfilled, players pick a new journey to focus on. Play is segmented into short chapters, which are stand-alone vignettes featuring specific characters. Chapters can be played in any order, and take 60-90 minutes to play. Some chapters and characters are locked and need to be unlocked over time, giving the game a “gotta catch ’em all” vibe.

The physical game makes use of a ton of different resources depending on what chapter is being played; coins, tokens, and even a deck of playing cards add to the tactile nature of the experience. Unspent resources can be used at the end of a chapter to further a character’s progress on their individual journey of self-discovery, or to unlock locked materials for the whole group. Players can switch around who plays what character, play and replay the same chapters, and collect new ways to play as they go. The physical version of Yazeba’s also comes with an envelope of stickers, called mementos. The book is full of empty shelves, and when prompted, players pick a memento sticker from the envelope and place it on a shelf; filling a shelf usually unlocks a new chapter or character, and when something is unlocked, a key sticker is placed over the lock on its corresponding page.

You play Yazeba’s by changing it: crossing off items on lists, filling shelves, decorating page margins, and adding traits and doodles to character sheets. No two groups will play the same game, which means Yazeba’s really is yours to play with.

In Yazeba’s Online, residents are depicted as sprites, and players control them with a mouse and keyboard, drifting in and out of the B&B’s numerous settings. You can spend hours picking up and putting down any (or, if you’re like me, every) object in sight, and inspect them to reveal flavor text and witty quips.

Pick a chapter and the game will teleport you to the room it takes place in: Deal with a veritable mountain of clothes in the laundry room in Chapter 3: Wash Cycle, or try your luck at the watering hole in Chapter 21: Gone Fishin’. These settings make the chapters that much more real, and there just might be secrets hidden in plain sight, waiting to be discovered. (There may or may not be three new locked characters exclusive to the online edition.) The experience is made all the more immersive by the synthy vibes of the game’s original music, composed by Jordan Hartsfield of Naked Lake and tailored to the mood of each given chapter — eerie, pensive, or frantic, among others.

The ins and outs of Yazeba’s Online are a breeze to pick up; playing the tutorial walks players through how to navigate the One More Multiverse interface, modify and add to character sheets, and interact with the world around them.

The game’s sticker pad lays out the rules for each chapter, along with dispensers for tokens and other resources, and mementos you can place on in-game shelves like trophies. Like every other part of the interface, the sticker pad section is collapsible, so you can open it up when you need to, and tuck it away when you don’t.

The housekeeping mechanic built into the game streamlines the process for ending a chapter, directing players to organize any collected mementos, view new unlocked materials, and add improvements, doodles, or notes to character sheets.

Image: One More Multiverse via Keerthi Sridharan

The game’s gorgeous pixel art isn’t just a backdrop: It’s the ultimate digital playground, an infinite sheet of digital butcher paper that players can use to extend the environs of the B&B. Players can alter the inside of the B&B with tiles, furniture, and a pen tool, with no areas off-limits. One More Multiverse even pulls in spell animations, soundtracks, and additional assets from other systems and settings in its rapidly growing inventory of bespoke digital games, which you can use to modify the B&B as you please. You can also rotate, scale, and dress up your characters. And yes, this means you can play a whole chapter upside down and three times bigger than everyone else — just like I did.

Image: One More Multiverse via Keerthi Sridharan

Image: One More Multiverse via Keerthi Sridharan

My favorite part is the Polaroid feature: Players can take photos of their onscreen shenanigans and drag them into character journals, captioning and doodling over them as they please.

The online platform is also infinitely adaptable, and you can use it to best suit your needs. You can walk your character around the B&B as you narrate their interactions with other residents and guests, but if you’d rather stick to the theater of the mind, you can just use Yazeba’s Online as a map-optional virtual tabletop, keeping track of character progression, checklists, and resources such as coins and tokens using the interface as you play. There’s ample space for doodles and notes in each character’s journal, and chapter rules can be lifted out of the sticker pad and placed directly into a room for easy viewing. For more extensive materials to reference, Yazeba’s Online comes with a PDF of the original book.

Image: One More Multiverse via Keerthi Sridharan

Yazeba’s takes everything you love about games, role-play, and being silly with your friends, and gives it to you on a kitschy, nostalgia-laden platter. Everything about Yazeba’s Online pushes the lesson at the heart of the original game: Home is what you make of it. Use it to play through chapters like a video game, keep all your coins and tokens in one place, or just have it open in the background and let the atmosphere of the bed and breakfast wash over you as you play over voice chat. Yazeba’s is your oyster.