Review: Classified! by Rage Kage Games
The long-promised review of Classified! by Rage Kage Games is now here. I tweeted (X'ed? Posted on Mastodon?) a while ago about how much I was enjoying this game, but had a few other posts in the works that I wanted to finish before writing this review. So, finally, here's my full and official review!
The short version of this review, and the link between this game and my previous review for Quill: I think I just really enjoy solo journaling RPGs.
Classified! is a solo journaling game that was released as part of PocketQuest this year. PocketQuest is a game jam--a chance for designers to complete a game based on a particular theme in a limited amount of time--hosted by DriveThruRPG. This year's theme was heists! And that is exactly what Classified! is: a solo game about conducting heists.
Classified! is available as a PDF or as a print-on-demand title via DriveThruRPG.
Mechanics Overview
Playing Classified! is pretty simple. The system, like Quill and other journalling games I've played, requires a lot of creative input from the player to make it work. This is not a system that is going to give you a detailed story to play through.
For Classified!, you create an outline of your character--answering a few narrative prompts about your personality and motivations. You assign scores to three traits: wits, body, and tech (I replaced tech with magic in the game I was playing, as I wanted to run the game in my homebrew world), and then jump into your heists.
The heists themselves are run through drawing cards and rolling dice. You draw a card to determine how many successes you need to accomplish your goal. The card you draw also determines which die you roll, which determines how many scenes you can play through to achieve those successes before your heist is considered a failure.
For each scene, you draw another card, which gives you a prompt for an event. In the first round that I played, for example, I drew a card that prompted me that I was distracted by a childhood memory during my heist. Then, I picked a stat that felt relevant to the scenario. In this case, I picked Body to recall the memory of climbing trees as a child, in order to strengthen my ability to climb a fence into the compound I was trying to steal documents from. You roll a number of d4s according to your stats, and succeed if you roll at least one 3 or 4 (with a 4 giving you both a success and encouraging you to say how your success set you up well for the future). You have the opportunity to use each stat one time per scene, which is how you can still succeed even if you need 9 successes over 6 scenes for a single heist, but you do not need to. In the first heist I played, I was fortunate to not ever fail a scene thanks to lucky rolls, and I only needed 2 successes over 5 scenes, so I never pushed myself to make multiple skill rolls per scene.
That said, all the story elements beyond the basic prompts are for YOU to develop. The heist's goals and target, the obstacles you encounter beyond the prompts, the narrative structure? That's all on you to figure out. You're definitely still doing most of the creative legwork.
How "Game-y" Is It?
That said, especially when comparing the game to Quill--my other primary journalling game experience--this does feel MORE like a game. There are more chances to fail. There is more prompting about the course of events than just the setup. In fact, Quill only really gives you the setup, and Classified! gives you more of everything other than the setup.
The prompts– at least the ones that I've faced– don't feel obtrusive. Some of them are more tangible obstacles to overcome: "this area is secured with lasers," for example, is the 2 of Diamonds, which obviously poses a more direct thing to confront as you write. But in my first heist, I got "a childhood memory distracts you" and "information you received from your client is incorrect; you may need to make up for lost time," both of which were pretty flexible things to incorporate into my narrative.
Mechanically, rolling d4s and having a 50% chance of success--more if you're rolling a skill you have more than a 1 in--means that the game doesn't feel difficult in my experience. That said, the game does have a loss condition: running out of time. If I had drawn/rolled a more punishing setup--needing more successes and in less time--I'm sure it would feel a whole lot more difficult, as I'd need to succeed multiple times per scene to have a shot at winning. Needing to go 2 for 5... yeah, that was very easy to win.
If, however, you're someone who wants to "win" your RPGs? This is definitely not the game for you. You still get to pick which skill you want to use for any given scenario, so if your goal was simply to win, you could put a 4 in Body and find a way to roll body every scene. Then, you'd only ever truly be challenged if you needed more successes than you had scenes and had to roll a weaker stat. If you enter the game trying to min-max, I don't think you'll have fun; this is a game about the journey and the story you're creating, so it is not intended to be something with any real "crunch" to dig into.
The Good
As I said in my "short version" of this blog: I think I just am finding out that I really enjoy journalling solo RPGs.
Flexibility
I like the flexibility of the setup with this--Quill did put me in a particular world/context, which did make it less relevant to being able to tell a particular story. (My Quill Quest product, too, does this--you are playing through a narrative framework, even if there's flexibility there). In Classified!, I'm easily able to set this game in my homebrew world (always a plus for me), and I'm enjoying using it to write out the backstory for an NPC from my current campaign; I think the system will work just as well, when I'm done, to create an NPC for my next campaign, without ever feeling repetitive, because I get to create the heists that I'm going on.
Risk of Failure
I like that it feels like a game! There does feel like a real risk of failure even when the game feels "easy". Though I had an easy first heist that I knew I was going to succeed, exploring the prompts still was fun.
The Prompts
I think a lot of the prompts are really fun. They definitely fit the heist genre, and they are open-ended enough to be provocative while not being overly prescriptive. I like that the prompts are broken up by suit--Hearts involve interactions, Diamonds involve the environment, etc.
I also like that certain prompts can impact your narrative's mechanics. Aces lead you to pick up another task to complete while still on your mission, with its own track of successes and scenes, which I think would add a really interesting complexity to try to juggle while playing. Kings give you a chance to mark two successes for a single roll. Jacks make there be two events (cards) for a single scene. This is something I'll come back to as a complaint, however, as I wish there was MORE of this.
The Bad
My main critique of the game is that I wish there was just a little more... impact between rolls. Yes, rolling Body blocks you from using it again in that scene. That's good, and it means having a well-rounded character is useful for those heists where you need more successes than you have scenes.
But rolling a four means "you get what you want—and more" and rolling a one means "you don’t get what you want, and things get a lot worse." I wish that had a mechanical impact, like removing a die for the next roll you make or subtracting a success. Instead, it is all up to the narrative to describe how failing horribly on one roll kicks off things getting a lot worse, and it can be a little jarring to then roll a 4 and have things go well again, all possibly in the same scene so that it doesn't even count against your number of scenes!
Certain cards/events can do this. A jack of hearts means you're spotted by a bystander and have to draw a second event card, which I can imagine complicating a single scene. But the cards are drawn at random and so don't connect to the success/failure mechanics of the dice.
I understand the impetus of not having either a death spiral or a positive cycle that makes it impossible to fail from a game design perspective. But from a genre perspective, I just wish that when there was a narrative death spiral of things getting "a lot worse," that there was a mechanical backing that would, in fact, make it more likely for things to continue being worse. It would also make 3s and 4s FEEL more different mechanically, rather than just relying on you to describe them narratively differently.
Overall
You may be wondering if Classified! is actually worth $7. After all, other journalling games (like Quill) are Pay-What-You-Want. My answer is a definite yes.
The game is not for you if you want a mechanically-hefty game. This is not D&D-the-solo-game. In my experience, it is easier, and it certainly is easier if you play like you're "trying to win." There are fewer mechanics to dig your teeth into, and sometimes I wish that the mechanics had a harder death spiral to support the feeling that things are spiraling out of control, as I'm sometimes encouraged to describe narratively.
But! If you want a really fun creative writing exercise about heists, this game does support that really well. It gives you the flexibility to make this whatever you want--any type of heist, any world (I'm playing in my homebrew, low-tech, and medium-magic fantasy world... certainly not the modern Oceans 11-era heist that I think is the "default" world of the game), any character. The prompts are good: provoking without being laborious to shoehorn into your story. The genre is great, because who doesn't love a heist?
It still is a solo journalling RPG, which means it is more a creative writing prompt generator than a mechanically-intensive tabletop game. But with more narrative support than Quill, I think that this may become my staple journalling game--at least when I want to run a heist.
Be sure to check out Classified! on DriveThruRPG.
Subscribers to the blog can check out my play-through of my first heist, recorded as a Google Doc below, so you can see how this actually looks in practice. This was a pretty simple and easy heist, however, so be sure to play your own game to experience what a more complex heist looks like.
This article includes affiliate links, which allow me to get a small percentage of DriveThru's cut of any sales made if you use the link; the creator of the game is still getting as much as they would without the affiliate link. This has not influenced my review of the game.
