Machine Folly

What is Spindlewheel?

Spindlewheel is an interpretive tarot-like card game RPG by Sasha Reneau and friends.

Some beautiful things about Spindlewheel

Because the main verb of the game is interpreting cards you get that collective unconscious feeling a lot easier. All the randomness comes from your own brain (and card draws) instead of dice.

Experience in Play

I most recently played Spindlewheel in a 2-person (duet) game on a cruise and added the “tidewrack” expansion. I feel like my unconscious kept going to Mad Max Furry Road, our story mirrored that one at least in the beginning. I played with one other person who was fairly new to storytelling games so she was reluctant to contribute at first. I am very indecisive so it can be hard to come up with a story and stick to it for hours. Spindlewheel stories also seem to end up darker than I usually tell. My character was a sort of prince working for a cult leader and using death magic to try and keep the cult leader alive forever. My character got their death power from their future self in the form of a set of mechanical wings. My partner’s character was fairly new to town and my character recruited them for foreign relations. They found a big empty underground area they were planning to start a farm in and combat the blight our empire used to conquer. It was a time of Cold War between our town and a foreign power. A traveler came to our town from the adversary and my partner’s character showed them to her underground area. The traveler revealed the doorway to an old church of our adversary and performed a blood ritual there to keep the area fertile. This put my partner’s character in the crosshair of the cult leader. The drama erupted into a fairly peaceful riot and people just stopped serving the cult leader.

I saw a nice hard copy version of Lumberjills was released www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Lum… I got to play this low-key historical LARP at Pinecon last year and it was a highlight!