Only One Leaves

I conducted the first playtest of Two Hamsters Enter at a game night with some friends last night. The party was initially just an opportunity to get away from it all after a rough week at work, but I found myself discussing the one-page RPG with two friends in the kitchen over appetizers. Throughout the night, I kept thinking about how this was the perfect atmosphere for the game, and eventually I took the leap.

We were playing a game called Kill Doctor Lucky, which my friends described as “reverse Clue.” It was really interesting and fun, but with nine players and the occasional skipped turn, a number of us had nothing to do for large stretches of time. During one such span, I turned to my friend Becky and asked her if she wanted to be the first person to playtest my game. She said, “Sure.”

The hardest part of playtesting was deciding which “social media hellsite” we would use as our medium. Nobody at the table was active on Twitter—take that, Elon!—and those who were even remotely familiar with Mastodon were utterly confused by its details. My friend Matt conflated the federated social media site with accused sex criminal and seditionist Donald Trump’s Truth Social, but, don’t worry, I cleared it up. Becky and I ended up playing the first game of Two Hamsters Enter on Facebook.

I grabbed two rainbow-themed paper plates and the sharpie marker Becky had brought out so people could label their clear plastic cups. The first rule of Two Hamsters Enter is “Pictures or it Didn’t Happen,” after all. We each drew a picture of a hamster in a mech suit and posted our pictures to Facebook with the hashtag #TwoHamstersEnter. Here are our submissions:

Becky’s post got two more likes than mine, so her hamster had a higher Cute attribute, which meant she had more hit points and got to go first. What Becky wasn’t prepared for was the fact that an excess of luck can beat out any amount of social media hellsite clout. My Special attribute was only 1, which meant that I had to roll exactly a 1 on a D100 to get a special attack, and roll a 1 I did. I unleashed a classic Street Fighter hadouen and hit her with 10D6 damage for a one hit defeat.

Two Hamsters Enter is weird—that much was clear from the first playtest—but it kind of creeps up on you. I found myself really pleased with a coworker commenting on my Facebook post, “Only one leaves,” and despite a really unfun way for the game to end, Becky seemed pretty jazzed too. “What if this game gets really big?” she asked, which was something I hadn’t prepared for. I picked up both of our drawings—limited, first edition Two Hamsters Enter collectible keepsakes that they were—and implored Becky to store them under lock and key.

Conclusion: Two Hamsters Enter strikes me as the kind of game you can play while waiting in queue for Diablo IV, or even while doom scrolling. We organized this game in person, but could have just as easily set it up online. It cuts through the awkwardness of asking, “What social media hellsites are you active on?” if you’re already using a social media hellsite to set up your game. At the end of the day, I felt really excited to tell people about my experience, and pretty enthusiastic about setting up my next match.