Despair Dilemma preview — a death game inspired TTRPG

Death sports have seen plenty of representation in videogames and film, but soon Double Summon Games will explore the subgenre via Despair Dilemma. With influences like Squid Game and Zero Escape, Despair Dilemma is a GM-less game in which players participate not as game contestants but as narrative forces like the Detectives or the inevitability of the challenge itself behind the games. I got a look at the demo, freely available and intended for short adventures.

Despair Dilemma runs off of six sided dice and a deck of cards. Each of the 2-4 players receives a separate suit as their own deck. Each character receives a Plot Sheet delineating their roles, goals, abilities, special locations, and characters they will introduce to the game. The demo suggests starting to play with the person who has had the most recent near death experience; I think this idea could easily bring up uncomfortable feelings that said person won’t want to discuss, but they also suggest that you choose randomly.

The demo doesn’t think to give you anything like a basic overview of the game’s mechanics or structure. To understand how the game actually flows, you’ll have to read the 40 page document over, likely more than once. It feels like it’s written in random or reverse order, constantly referencing concepts or game terms that it hasn’t introduced yet. It’s a real challenge to suss out the game’s flow and major mechanics before you’ve done some real work reading this over, jumping forward and backward in the text multiple times. I need to make this point clear to anyone who writes RPG books: people in the west read books from left to right, from the front to the back. You should present information accordingly. That said, this is a preliminary introduction, and I would like to expect the full game to have some more deliberative organization.

Your plots will cause you to answer some framing questions during the prologue, establish characters and locations, and give you some special instructions. Play is broken into Chapters, with distinct mysteries and triggers for the various Plots, as well as two specific Goals for each player. Succeeding at those goals lets you unlock useful abilities for later. At the start of a chapter everyone draws cards and they can be used to affect characters by moving them, changing their Morale, challenging or wounding them, and introducing twists. In turns, each player will narrate a scene from the perspective of a character, use an action from their Plot Sheet, and pass the narrative. Once per game, you can Establish a Character Arc if you’ve maneuvered characters into the right positions, allowing you to set a future path for the character via targeted Beats.

Characters, Locations, and the Death Game itself can gain Truths, defining their secrets and capabilities. These can be Normal Truths which can be modified or changed or Underlined Truths which are set in stone unless someone introduces a Twist. Twists result from specific character abilities, and grant the opportunity to create a new Underlined Truth.

Once each person has been the narrator at least once and either 3 cards have been played or no one has cards remaining, you can choose to end the Chapter. If you achieved any of your goals during the chapter, you unlock new abilities for the future. Following all Chapters, players compare the course of the game and their goals to answer the Epilogue Question and resolve the story.

The demo takes place in the Locke Mansion, a house full of traps which guides its denizens through haunted, deadly mysteries. There’s no real winning or losing, only a push-pull over who decides aspects of the narrative. The full game will have more scenarios, more Plots, more options, and

If you want to learn more, you can check out the demo yourself right now at the official site. The full game launches on Backerkit on March 10, 2025, and you can sign up for updates. The Double Summon Games Discord is active now if you want to interact with the creators and fans directly.

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