Leopards Eat Your Face 📖
'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. – Adrian Bott
Creator: Bläkfisk publishing, Lucas Falk
Publication date: Jan 2025
Price: PWYW ($2.95)
System/Genre: Storytelling, Anti-fascism
It's hard to understand the subtle creep of fascism. Those who regularly vote for their governments to get rid of waste rarely realise that they are the 'waste' the fascists are talking about. Leopards Eat Your Face is a surprisingly empathetic attempt to portray this mindset, even as it denigrates those caught up in it.
At it's heart, this is a fairly standard free-form storytelling game. The players take it in turns to roleplay scenes centred on their characters, only rolling dice when there's a disagreement about how a scene should unfold.
The game comes as a 13-page PDF in red and black colours that evoke a feeling of anarchy and anger. The layout is simple and easy to use. This game assumes a reasonable knowledge of roleplaying games and their culture and is aimed at experienced roleplayers familiar with storytelling styles.
The game splits the players into two 'teams', the Patriot and the Radicals. The Patriot is usually played by the person at the table who is most privileged, setting up a real-world analogy throughout play and immediately exposing the very raw, discomfort that this game intends to evoke.
Throughout play the Patriot is constantly advantaged. While it may seem balanced, it's far easier for the Patriot to get into conflicts and control how the scene goes, adding more laws and restricting the resistance work of the Radicals at the table. The game inevitably tells stories of how 'reasonable' Patriots in democratic societies end up restricting the rights of disadvantaged minorities.
The game intends to confront you with harsh truths and help you understand the broken world-view of those who enable fascists. And is meant to make you feel uncomfortable. Throughout the manual, reference is constantly made to the use of safety tools in this game as it, far more than most, could genuinely lead to distress and anger at the table.
Those looking for an outlet for their anger may enjoy this game, but others might find it infuriating as the evil at the heart of this game is so thoroughly mundane, there's no uplifting story and there are no easy answers.