Mission Impawsible 💡🎨✨👪

Contributors: T-Rex Games (Written and Designed by Stephen Hans, Illustrated by Tuna Ceti V)
Publication date: April 1st, 2024
Price: $3.95

My initial takeaway from this game was just how funny and committed to the bit it was. It goes all out and even sprinkles in some interesting facts such as what different packs of animals are called. A pack of raccoons is a “Gaze” and that is what your party is referred to, with the person running the game being “The Gaze Master” or GM. The premise of the game, is that you’re all playing a top secret agent who also happens to be three (or more) raccoons in a trench coat. Your job is to complete missions and save the day whilst also not revealing this fact. It’s a funny, rules lite system designed to be picked up and played with anyone, anywhere and the games mechanics do a lot to get you in that state of mind.

For the players creating their raccoons, you get a classic heist identity card (such as the muscle, thief, wild card etc) but then you’re encouraged to draw their face and pick their favourite snack before picking a piece of gear (that you can also pick later at a key moment!) Then you collaboratively pick your relationship to each other and what position you’re each taking in the trench coat. Character creation is quick, easy and gets everyone excited for the silly shenanigans the game encourages. The core mechanic is very easy, even for those with no experience with role-playing games. You explain what your racoon is doing, what ‘Leverage’ you have to achieve those goals and the GM will tell you your Risk / Reward; what you will achieve if you succeed with your current leverage and what consequences you’ll face if you fail. Then you flip a coin. Heads, you succeed, tails you fail.You can then choose to push the roll, flipping again and taking both results. This can turn success into super success or add further consequences or it can turn failures into absolute disasters. It’s a simple mechanic with a lot of scope for players to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the most hilarious ways.

The main two resources players are managing are stress and suspicion. As the raccoons get more stressed, they may Flip out and if the whole gaze flips out it’s curtains for that mission. Stress can be reduced in the classic fashion of hunting for snacks and eating. Suspicion is raised as you interact with humans and if it gets too high, your cover is blown. You need to allay suspicion by doing “regular human things”, whatever that means. All this culminates in a hilarious game play loop in which the players must solve objectives whilst also eating rubbish and pantomiming as humans. The thing I most appreciate about this is how these mechanics fully force the players to commit to the core bit of ‘being raccoons in a trench coat’ without feeling contrived in a manner that some of these games sometimes do. 

The rest of the book is filled with guidance and tables for the GM to craft the missions the players will be sent on and comes with a hilarious core principle: There must always be a villain and that villain must ALSO be a group of animals pretending to be a human, a principle that had me laughing out loud. There are 7 pages worth of tables to roll on for quick, mid session inspiration and some very useful advice about building the tension quickly and keeping the players on their toes. Finally, I’d like to especially note that the book looks great. Tuna Ceti V’s art perfectly captures the Saturday morning cartoon vibe the game encapsulates and the layout is clean and easy to parse, though it could have stood to use a slightly more legible font as the spacing in the PDF did make it a little difficult to read.

I haven’t run this game yet but I’m very eager to. I likely wouldn’t run a campaign of Impawsible at home, but it’s perfectly set up to bring to events and conventions and I’d likely even encourage people who played with me at multiple events to play the same raccoons and tell their new Gaze how they got their hands on the silly bits gear they bring along with them.