Critical Play: Competitive Analysis
Game: …and then we died | Creator: Emma Larkins | Platform: Tabletop card game | Target Audience: Casual players, improv enthusiasts, and social storytellers aged 16+, seeking low-barrier, cooperative narrative play
Brief Overview
…and then we died (ATWD) is a cooperative storytelling card game for 2–8 players by Emma Larkins. Players take on the role of ghosts piecing together the story of their shared death using double-sided word fragment cards. There are no winners, no losers, only a story. My argument is that ATWD’s cooperative, low-structure design produces strong Expression and Fellowship aesthetics but sacrifices Challenge and individual agency — a gap that our team’s storytelling concept directly addresses through layered formal elements.
No Stakes Magic Circle
ATWD’s formal elements are deliberately sparse. Its sole objective is collaborative construction: tell a story until the Everyone Dies! card is drawn. There are no individual roles, no scoring, and no character assignments. The rules arrive in a densely formatted folded sheet [Fig. 1] that front-loads procedural text before grounding players in the premise — a usability friction that works against the game’s own stated goal: “anyone can be a storyteller.”
Fig. 1 — ATWD’s instruction sheet unfolds into a multi-column, small-print layout. The format demands patience before play begins, creating an unintended barrier to the accessibility the game promises.
The word fragment cards [Fig. 2] are the game’s primary mechanic. Players overlap cards to form words; each word cues the next storyteller. Under the MDA framework, mechanics produce dynamics, which produce aesthetics. Here, the word-combination mechanic generates a dynamic of narrative interruption — players must contort their story to incorporate a random word fragment. The mechanic’s purpose reads as decorative rather than purposeful.
This became apparent in play. Players repeatedly asked “What did you say again?” as the story lost its thread, and at one point a player stopped to ask, “Wait, I’m confused — are there four of us in this story?” This moment captures a core formal elements problem: with no assigned character roles, players have no shared reference point for who exists in the story, and the magic circle kept breaking as a result.
Fig. 2 — Word fragment cards spread mid-session. Players overlap partial-letter cards to form words, which cue the next narrator. With no character structure anchoring the story, the cards become the only through-line.
MDA Lens
Through the MDA lens, ATWD targets two aesthetics clearly: Expression (co-authoring a story) and Fellowship (shared creative experience). On these terms, it largely succeeds. The fully cooperative player structure, no competition, no judgment, creates a welcoming magic circle. Larkins’ premise (ghosts solving their own deaths) emotionally invests players before a single card is drawn, which is what Tracy Fullerton’s framework identifies as effective use of Premise as a dramatic element.
However, ATWD neglects Challenge entirely. The mechanics generate no meaningful tension: there are no dilemmas, no individual stakes, and no competitive pressure. Every contribution is equally valid, every turn equivalent. The result is that the game drifts toward Submission — the 8th kind of fun, pure escapism with no resistance — rather than the high-engagement Expression it intends. The instruction sheet reinforces this by telling players to “embrace an improv mentality,” which is sound creative advice, but not a substitute for mechanical structure that sustains engagement over time.
Competitive Analysis
Our team’s storytelling game shares ATWD’s narrative DNA but directly addresses its structural gaps. Where ATWD assigns no individual identity, our game assigns each player a designated character role and a set of personal plot points to complete — introducing Agon (Caillois) into an otherwise cooperative storytelling frame. This creates a hybrid player structure that produces a richer MDA sequence: role assignment and plot-point mechanics generate dynamics of strategic narration and social observation, which produce aesthetics of Fellowship, Challenge, and Discovery simultaneously.
The confusion captured in Ananya’s question — “Wait, I’m confused — are there four of us in this story?” — would not occur in our game, because every player enters the magic circle with a defined identity. The 30-second narration window followed by a collaborative prompt-writing round gives the story direction and gives each player personal stakes in where it goes — a built-in Dilemma: do you advance your own plot points, or steer the story toward someone else’s? The final role-guessing phase introduces social deduction, entirely absent from ATWD, and produces genuine Fiero when a character arc is correctly identified.
Compared to genre peers, Once Upon a Time (interruption mechanics, competitive card play) and Fog of Love (role-based romantic narrative conflict), ATWD occupies the most minimal end of the storytelling spectrum. Our concept sits between these poles: more structurally motivated than ATWD, less adversarial than Once Upon a Time, and more replayable than either, because individual role objectives shift with each playthrough. ATWD targets Socializers (Bartle); our game targets Socializers and Achievers simultaneously — a broader player profile without sacrificing narrative warmth.
