Pine Grove

Pine Grove has seen joy, tragedy, and mystery over the course of its long history. It’s a small town with a long past where you’ll find that everyone and everything is connected in some way if you just ask the right questions.

Each round you will explore Pine Grove, its residents, and its history. You’ll need a set of double-six dominoes to play. Draw a tile and in a single sentence describe an aspect of the town based on the higher number shown:

One or six: a person
Two or five: a place
Three or four: an event (either contemporary or historical)

The other players follow, each adding a sentence to the narrative that explores new details and connections. If someone draws a bone with doubles, she creates a secret that reveals some hidden truth about what you’ve been describing—something wondrous or unseemly about life in the small town. For example, the players have been describing the mayor of Pine Grove, focusing on his background, scandals of his administration, and his family. Luis pulls the double five and explains that the mayor molts each spring, leaving the fragile old skins in a locked room in the basement of town hall.

The round ends when a secret has been revealed. The players shuffle the tiles and a new player draws a bone to begin another round. The first player in a round should draw again if she pulls a double.

Special thanks to Silas Marques de Lima for his invaluable advice, and for his work translating the game into Portuguese.

(Pine Grove has served as my default setting for horror, mystery, and contemporary fantasy roleplaying games for quite a while, and bears more than a passing resemblance to my hometown.  The idea for the game started to take shape when I was puttering around with a set of Rory's Story Cubes and ended up telling people about the time-traveling turtles who lived above the dime store and the pyramid of bees hidden behind the high school).