Clear Eyes / Full Hearts

I played a session of this with my friends tonight! There's four of us, and we played through character creation/setup and four "episodes." It ended up taking just about four hours. 

We played with some homebrew additions to the Archetypes, Teen Complications, and Conflicts, to add some options more suited to our tastes (such as "someone dies" as a Conflict, which did happen).

It's fun, and the structure helps keep things moving at a nice pace as well as helping provide a lot of direction! The vibe is great and perfectly set us up for a breezy fun episodic teen drama vibe.

My main quibble is that we found incorporating our Archetypes into the Plays was pretty easy and so winning felt too easy. We're going to tweak some things to see if we can make losing feel more likely.

Setup was quick and easy and felt very collaborative and natural. I enjoyed having a different Main Character for every episode, and our Can't Lose bonus questions have been great for adding moments of character drama and setting up character beats for others to follow up on in later episodes!

Our group is not familiar with football basically at all, so the Plays have been a bit of a struggle, but now that we've done a session I feel like I've got a better grip of how I want them to work. It definitely does work just fine if you aren't familiar with football! I think I'd recommend picking a sport you have a bit of familiarity with though just because it can feel a little awkward trying to come up with things for your character to be actually doing otherwise, which slows the pace of the game down some, haha.

Would definitely recommend playing this!! Especially if you like teen TV dramas. It's easy to get into, fun to play, and uses the Teen TV Drama structure super well I think. Having everybody have a turn as Main Character and everybody encouraged to play NPCs felt like a great way to make sure everybody was playing as much as they were happy with without anyone stepping on each others' toes. Good stuff!!

I haven't played it yet but we will, I will force everybody to play this game with me. I have yet to discover the works of Eric Silver and cannot wait. However if this Mischa Stanton is the one I think they are, this game will be a real treat. Thank you both so much for your hard work!!

Clear Eyes Full Hearts is a GMless trpg about the epic highs and lows of high school football.

The PDF is 9 pages, with a solid, consistent aesthetic and an easy to read layout.

Despite being GMless, there is a bit of mechanical crunch here, and it has a Lasers & Feelings-y vibe to it. You have two stats, Clear Eyes and Full Heart, and one's for planning while the other's for rushing in. That said, you can't min-max them. After using one you have to use the other, ensuring you can't just stay in your comfort zone and crush rolls.

Gameplay is built around the structure of a teen sports drama, and split up into phases. You play through off the field drama, then the next match, then the fallout from the match.

There's a built in narrative spotlight system, where one player is the Main Character for each episode, and the focus is on how they engage with the episode's problem. There's also a season-long narrative arc and branching paths depending on whether your team makes it to the playoffs.

The writing throughout is stellar, and the game has a very good sense of atmosphere. As long as there's at least one person in your group that's enthusiastic about the subject, I think it'll be hard not to be pulled into caring about the narrative.

Overall, if you even sort of like the themes of desperation and struggle and high drama and emotional conflict that make up the teen sports drama---or if you maybe want to get a little wackier and have a werewolf on the team?---you should check this out. It's easy to learn, easier to like, and it effortlessly captures the spark that makes the genre appealing.