Warm Then Hot
A downloadable game
Warm then Hot is a game to be played in real life with your friends. It asks for intimacy; maybe a radical type, of openness, of warmth, of being supported by the people who love you and who you love. It's an experience about tenderness, about finding the words for the things that hurt you, and finding a common ground with the people who you share space and community with.
All you need to play is some friends, a fire source that's safe to use, paper and pencils, and some marshmallows -- or any other roastable treat.
As someone who is aromantic, Warm Then Hot is an aspirational game; a game where we can delve into our pain freely with our friends, and eschew traditional relationship roles where we only burden those we are romantically involved in, and for that reason it's also my submission to Fraudulent Gays Jam 2020.
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I absolutely love everything about this concept and presentation, I'm looking forward to playing it!
Warm Then Hot is a fireside RPG about comfort and healing. You play using a fire, marshmallows, and burnable pieces of paper as mechanics, and just from that I'm sold.
It's also 4 pages, with a nice cozy layout and a cool, thematic piece of art, so it's pretty quick to pick up and play.
You do probably want to play this with close friends with good boundaries, though, as the game wants you to write down different hurts that are close to your thoughts---and while you don't explicitly reveal those hurts to the group, you do hint at them before you throw the pieces of paper containing them into the fire.
I think a possible variant of the game would simply be to write shared memories on the pieces of paper, as this would allow people to interact with and talk about good feelings too. Another option might be to make the game a bit more of a ritual banishing, and treat it as a way to ward people against those hurts.
Overall, though, this is still a really cool concept for a game, and I'd love to see more stuff done with campfire mechanics. If you want to support a really neat design, or if you want to grab a game that's still really interesting to read even if you're on the fence about playing it, Warm Then Hot is extremely worth your time.
Ahh, thank you so much for the kind comments! I appreciate the review :)
The variant on shared memories is nice too, though this game was inspired by a writing exercise I did to get over some emotional difficulties I was having. The idea of having those things burn away in front of people that loved you and supported you even in tender and terrifying intimacy.
I'd love to write up a variant that involves good, shared memories, though! I'd want to tweak the mechanics a little, and create some sort of failsafe so that if someone is new to the group, they aren't automatically excluded, since that would kind of suck.