Today we have a guest review by Thomas Novosel for #33in28 about Lay On Hands, which is currently on Kickstarter! Check out the review and Kickstarter for a dexterity based good time – only so much time to go!

The General Idea

Genre Tags: solo, lonely, journaling, post-apocalyptic, coins, drawing, art
Replayable? Yes!
Actual Play Available? None yet available
Length: Short to Medium, (Journaling Optional)

Right now on Kickstarter for #ZineQuest3, there is a solo dexterity based role-playing game funding called LAY ON HANDS. It doesn’t have many days left to go, but I was fortunate enough to get a copy of an early draft to preview on Thoughty. This game is smart and looks great already; the idea of having to draw in a maze as a way to test your character’s skills and trying to rack up as many points as possible until the coin stops spinning is just something that I have never seen before.

Lay On Hands describes itself on their Kickstarter page as being a piece of Ironsworn, Troika, and Fallout all combined. The Troika inspiration is very clear as character creation is short and sweet: players only need to mark their character sheet for a few things and then pick an archetype, which determines what skills and scores they have for their attributes (here, they are called Faculties).

The Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

The setting for Lay On Hands has the player taking on the role of an unnaturally gifted healer who is roaming through the wasteland of an unspecified era. The rules of this world, and what you know of it, are brief: The Fall occurred and that was the apocalypse, the survivors are afflicted with The Blight, and you – as a healer of your Order – hold a philosophy for healing close to your heart.

Beyond this, the scope of the world and the description of its peoples is up to the player. The games rules emphasize that the more time spent developing the world early on by answering the many questions posed in the rules, the more rewarding the play experience will be.

The BIG Mechanic

The big draw for me for Lay On Hands is the dexterity drawing mechanic used in the game. The mechanic involves making use of The Oracle (which looks like a drop dice table but is actually used for spinning a coin onto to replace dice rolls), getting inspiration through each cell (each box on the grid of the Oracle), and finding one word prompts to use for your journaling in the game. This table is also where the player will spin their coins when they are performing a test. The result that it settles on doesn’t determine success though, drawing on the maze map does. It does so by following through the line to see how many points you accrue as fast as possible while also completing little mini-games.

These mini-games come in three types, one for each of the Faculties that a player’s character has:

• Grit involves filling in completely sections of maze corridor while also not filling in any bubbles that are in that corridor. This makes you feel like you are just pushing through with scribbling to get over your obstacle.
• Slips involve drawing a line between two circles but without breaking or going through any circles found in an indicated section. Kind of like the line you are drawing is just slipping past an obstacle.
• Wits based sections have you quickly adding up the pips on the indicated dice touching a space to write in. So, you are adding up numbers quickly in order to find the digital root of the number to complete the test (for an 11, that is 1+1 = 2).

Essentially, when presented with a difficult task, you determine the difficulty and then race to complete challenges based on the Faculty that is being tested. There is more to it of course, with additional rules that allow you to lower the difficulty of a test before having to do the test. But even if the game didn’t have that, and was just the coin spinning mechanic and the drawing in a maze mechanic, it would be worth the price of admission.

Lay On Hands is Promising!

I was told by the designer of Lay On Hands that the draft that I received is an early draft and was only getting bigger and better as they were working on it. But I can say with confidence that what I read and saw was more than enough to convince me that this game deserves your attention. Even if you don’t intend to play it (you should), when reading it as someone who is interested in game design, Lay On Hands is a seed of smarts that will make you reconsider what a dexterity game looks like and involves.

While it is still on Kickstarter (for a few more days), I think you have to check out Lay On Hands. You can be certain that as soon as this game is released, I will be playing it and coming up with apocalypse stories as I’m spinning coins all over the place!

Thanks Thomas for the review, and I hope you all check out Lay On Hands today!