Ribbon Drive
I’m going somewhere, and I want you to join me. I’m going to a place that always seems just past our reach. It’s a mixture of myth and hard, biting reality. This place, it smells like familiarity, and yet it beats the heart like first times do. It’s wedged between a mix tape, a throw-away comment and a shifter. It’s going to take a lot of open road to get to.
But open road’s all we’ve ever really got, anyways.
“So… Ribbon Drive. The most emotionally touching con gaming experience I’ve ever had.”
Christian Griffen, author of Beast Hunters
In Ribbon Drive, we collectively create a story about a road trip. We do this in the comfort of a living room, over the course of 3-5 hours. We each create a character, one of the people going on this road trip. These characters are our individual jobs; each of us will roleplay one character’s decisions and actions. We’ll share the responsibility of narrating the obstacles and scenery that comes up all around us. Ribbon Drive creates stories about letting go on the open road, and we all work to both further and complicate this agenda during the game. It draws inspirations from road movies like Wristcutters, Everything Is Illuminated, y tu Mama Tambien, Little Miss Sunshine, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things and Thelma & Louise (and, to a lesser extent, Two Lane Blacktop, The Doom Generation and Wild At Heart). Our ultimate goal is to create a thought-provoking, meaningful experience. We let the music guide us. We let the road throw us curves. As our characters, we rethink our attachment to the future.
“Ribbon Drive inverts the tradition of a soundtrack for a story. Instead, it creates a storytrack for music. Effortless innovative, intensely captivating, and a little bit profound. It’s a brilliant game.”
Ben Lehman, author of Polaris and Bliss Stage
The game is hugely influenced by mix tapes that players bring to sessions of play. As such, Ribbon Drive is sold with a compilation CD featuring lots of cool artists and demonstrating the kind of themed mixes that the game works well with. It includes music from xox, Ghost Mice, Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, You Say Party! We Say Die!, The Butcher’s Bag, Tuck, June Madrona, Maria in the Shower, Van Gogh’s Severed Ear and Chris Clavin (formerly Captain Chaos; also a member of Ghost Mice). That’s a mix of local and non-local, many of which you haven’t heard before, all of which are really cool. The book itself is 30 pages, beautifully laid out in full colour by Kevin Allen Jr, and it’s packaged with the CD in a DVD-sized case.
“If you like music or driving, trees or memories, small towns or long silences, people’s faces, or summer roads that stretch on more endlessly and elegantly than language can give credit for — this is the game for you.” Daniel Wood
AP Reports: Death Of An Artist, Somewhere In Kansas… (pt. 1-4).
Reviews at: The Gamer Traveller (Daniel M. Perez), Claw/Claw/Peck (Bryant Durrell), Robin D. Laws – Gencon Day 3, mentioned on This Just In… From Gencon (podcast, episode: Sunday 11am), Yaruki Zero (podcast, episode #10).
Ribbon Drive is currently sold out.
It will be made available again in the near future, in an updated book form.