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Deathmatch Island
Congratulations. You have been selected to participate in Deathmatch Island. Winning will mean fame, freedom, and unlimited wealth. You may be experiencing some confusion and memory loss. This is normal following the Selection and Recruitment Process. It is important that you do not panic.
Deathmatch Island is a fast-paced game about a deadly gameshow on a mysterious island chain. The competitors don’t know how they got here. They have been selected and recruited, forced to risk their lives in a deadly series of games for the vague promise of a big reward for the sole survivor.
Deathmatch Island promotes fast, flexible game play with a striking design by Tim Denee, based on the PARAGON system by Sean Nittner (AGON) and John Harper (AGON, Blades In The Dark, Lady Blackbird, Lasers & Feelings).
If you're a fan of Squid Game, Survivor, Lost, Battle Royale, Control, The Hunger Games, corporate dystopia, or messed up Reality TV, you're going to enjoy Deathmatch Island.
Deathmatch Island is a fast-paced game about a deadly gameshow on a mysterious island chain. The competitors don’t know how they got here. They have been selected and recruited, forced to risk their lives in a deadly series of games for the vague promise of a big reward for the sole survivor.
Deathmatch Island promotes fast, flexible game play with a striking design by Tim Denee, based on the PARAGON system by Sean Nittner (AGON) and John Harper (AGON, Blades In The Dark, Lady Blackbird, Lasers & Feelings).
If you're a fan of Squid Game, Survivor, Lost, Battle Royale, Control, The Hunger Games, corporate dystopia, or messed up Reality TV, you're going to enjoy Deathmatch Island.
- GenresRole Playing Games
217 pages, Hardcover
Published May 20, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 1, 2024
This is a fast, easy read - also funny, legit funny, which is a surprise for a rulebook.
More board game with some RPG than TTRPG in my opinion - built to do one thing and do it well (and fast) - game seems super fun, very well written, happy to have it. Well designed art and theme. Clever even.
It really does a good job of conveying the feeling of Squid Game, Fortnite, PUBG, Battle Royale (of course) into a game that works even when the players are forced to murder each other, because you got to have a winner, right? That is until you hit New Game+ - excellent system for starting small (typical chicken dinner scenario) and moving into hideous conspiracy for the exposing.
More board game with some RPG than TTRPG in my opinion - built to do one thing and do it well (and fast) - game seems super fun, very well written, happy to have it. Well designed art and theme. Clever even.
It really does a good job of conveying the feeling of Squid Game, Fortnite, PUBG, Battle Royale (of course) into a game that works even when the players are forced to murder each other, because you got to have a winner, right? That is until you hit New Game+ - excellent system for starting small (typical chicken dinner scenario) and moving into hideous conspiracy for the exposing.
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April 22, 2026Deathmatch Island is an interesting object, one that challenged my expectations around the shape of story games. I've read through the book and have managed to run a one-shot; I'd like to take a crack at running a longer game in the future.
There's a single central dice-rolling mechanic, inherited from AGON, that drives the whole game. Nearly everything else in the book is either procedure around those rolls or pre-written materials: the layout and contents of the islands and the cast of NPCs available to bring into play.
Because of the centrality of the "one big roll" mechanic, it can feel like a challenge to get the plane off the ground. Once it's moving, though, it becomes pretty straightforward to run each challenge according to this simple resolution. The GM advice available is very solid, but I don't think it's emphatic enough about certain key ideas: namely, that the players have primary responsibility for the moment-to-moment action of the story during their narration, and that GMs need to describe relatively little beyond what the book provides when establishing the challenge.
It also bothers me that the part where players narrate their character's actions during a contest (after the roll, when they know what the outcome will be) is called "confessionals". This makes sense for reality TV flavor but you will twist yourself into continuity knots if you try to actually deliver it as a confessional (as in, the editing and filming technique of interviewing the subject of a clip after the fact and having them narrate over it). This is a silly terminology thing, but even a single sentence telling me that "this is not meant to directly emulate the thing it's pointedly named after" would have gone a long way in helping me instruct players on how to narrate their actions.
Overall, though, there's a lot of cool ideas in the broader structure of the game, some great hidden information elements that beautifully walk the line of keeping dramatic secrets and keeping fellow storytellers in the loop, and a neat little meta-mechanic about theory-crafting around they island's mystery box (which I sadly did not get to engage with during the one-shot). I'd love to take a crack at running this game as a 5-6 session campaign in the future.
There's a single central dice-rolling mechanic, inherited from AGON, that drives the whole game. Nearly everything else in the book is either procedure around those rolls or pre-written materials: the layout and contents of the islands and the cast of NPCs available to bring into play.
Because of the centrality of the "one big roll" mechanic, it can feel like a challenge to get the plane off the ground. Once it's moving, though, it becomes pretty straightforward to run each challenge according to this simple resolution. The GM advice available is very solid, but I don't think it's emphatic enough about certain key ideas: namely, that the players have primary responsibility for the moment-to-moment action of the story during their narration, and that GMs need to describe relatively little beyond what the book provides when establishing the challenge.
It also bothers me that the part where players narrate their character's actions during a contest (after the roll, when they know what the outcome will be) is called "confessionals". This makes sense for reality TV flavor but you will twist yourself into continuity knots if you try to actually deliver it as a confessional (as in, the editing and filming technique of interviewing the subject of a clip after the fact and having them narrate over it). This is a silly terminology thing, but even a single sentence telling me that "this is not meant to directly emulate the thing it's pointedly named after" would have gone a long way in helping me instruct players on how to narrate their actions.
Overall, though, there's a lot of cool ideas in the broader structure of the game, some great hidden information elements that beautifully walk the line of keeping dramatic secrets and keeping fellow storytellers in the loop, and a neat little meta-mechanic about theory-crafting around they island's mystery box (which I sadly did not get to engage with during the one-shot). I'd love to take a crack at running this game as a 5-6 session campaign in the future.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews