How a well-crafted minigame can bring a whole fantasy world together

rockpapershotgun.com:

One of the things I like best about Die Gute Fabrik's forthcoming Saltsea Chronicles is an optional feature. It's a card game, Spoils, which you can play while sojourning upon the game's islands and searching for clues about your ship's missing captain, Maja. Here's how it works: two teams of two characters take turns to play cards, moving in clockwise around a table. Player must follow the lead player's suit, and the highest-scoring card wins the trick, with four tricks comprising a round. It might sound like a straightforward competition, but different islands offer different house rules, and there are twists that reflect the game's ethic of community, mutual respect and diversity, and help animate the detail of its gently post-apocalyptic oceanic world.

The winning card from each trick is handed to the loser, so victory is, in its way, an act of generosity. Score more than 100 points in a round, meanwhile, and the "Hoarding" rule means you must relinquish those points to the other team. As Die Gute Fabrik's CEO and creative lead Hannah Nicklin observes, this fits the post-capitalist politics and mythology of Saltsea, in which "hoarding is sort of seen as the apocryphal cause of the flood". The Spoils tutorial menus riff on this with a cute but mildly unsettling image of a sinking ship.

I've barely scratched the surface of Saltsea Chronicles, which Katharine has written about in depth. I'll confess, I have yet to play Die Gute Fabrik's previous Mutazione, either, though not for lack of interest. But I'm already in love with Saltsea Chronicles' card game, which feels like that special variety of mini-game that unobtrusively binds the micro and macro of a sumptuous fiction together, its mechanics supporting and