Kingpink is a GM-less, story-focused game where players build the world and their characters through in-game conflict resolution. Every scene is procedurally generated and improvised as the themes you curate at the beginning of the campaign are drawn and played. The larger direction of the campaign will come into focus as the scenes progress and the story develops around new and recurring conflicts.
- Playing Cards
- No Dice
- GM-less Story Game
- And More!
Kingpink focuses on improvisation and interpretation over carefully planned narrative beats. Loose genre cues help you face down trolls, fight off tyrants, or flee from titans, but players are free to build any world they desire. You can even play an entire, dramatic campaign without any combat if you want. Tensions within the crew of characters can be as dangerous as battles and heists, and no crew is safe from cracking at the seams. Kingpink uses ordinary playing cards with no dice needed.
Kingpink: Daytime
We have released Kingpink in two different formats. The first, Kingpink: Daytime, evokes a cute world of Saturday Morning cartoons and furry pals with its art and layout. Daytime includes the full rules for the game and suits itself to one-off storytelling nights, on-and-off play without moving towards a singular ending, and .
The PDF is bright, colorful, imaginative, and straightforward. It’s 28 pages of everything you need to play. Just add a deck of playing cards and friends.
Kingpink: Darkness
While we put “darkness” in the name of the game, it is still totally up to your group how much horror, wickedness, or combat you want in your campaign. The rules have been designed to invite open improvisation and to heighten dramatic twists, but these elements need not come from murder or mayhem alone. If anything, the game so easily devolves into silliness that our tone here is meant more to prove serious play is possible than it is to cramp your non-horror style!
- 1-3 Sessions per Campaign
- EIGHT variant play styles
- Solo-play Character Generator for other RPGs
- Group World Building for other RPGs
The most substantial divergence Kingpink takes from many popular story games is in the way it constrains the players’ agency in controlling their narrative. In most story games, the fun comes from players deciding what they want to happen next for their characters or for the plot as a whole. In Kingpink, the fun comes from riffing on the Themes in play to figure out what happens next, relying on interpretation and improvisation more than whole-cloth fabrication.
The potential for strategy arises when you select which cards of your hand to play and when to play them. Everyone plays cards face-down at once to mark which Conflicts they want to tackle or develop. With players all deciding what to play based on what they think others might play, Kingpink has faint echoes of popular trick-taking card games, though the gameplay never strays from the story.