If you were a Slavic water witch, would you grant wishes? Do you give these gifts freely, or does your tragic past incline you towards deception and cursed consequences?

Rusałka, the excellent GMless storygame by Nick Wedig, offers you this power. It is a game about “tragic fairy tales, self discovery, and wishes gone wrong”, where you play as both the powerful Rusałka and the desperate mortals who seek their help.

I learned about Rusałka from a game recommendation thread over on r/gmless, and Jason Morningstar sold me with this punchy recommendation:

Rusałka is terrific. Just a tight banger of a game that really delivers. Deceptively simple on the surface (you see what I did there) but routinely delivers delicious monkey's paw situations that are extremely satisfying. I just love it.

And with that, I downloaded the game, printed out the cards, and took it to Indie RPG Night ¹ in Toronto in search of friends to play with. And yes, Jason was right, it’s terrific!

So what makes Rusałka tick? Let’s pull apart the design and reflect on how it brought me joy during play.

Theme

There are heavy themes of death, grief, and loss in Rusałka, both from the cursed women and mortal petitioners themselves. The petitioners' requests explore belief, fate, control, and fear, whereas the Rusałka’s responses (and the flashbacks that drive them) also explore power, vengeance, mercy, or empathy.

But I would summarize the core thematic statements of Rusałka as:

How does our past inform the decisions we make today?

and

Be careful what you wish for.

I’ll echo a word that Jason used in his recommendation: the game is “tight”: both the gameplay loop and playing cards reinforced these themes in very efficient and satisfying ways.

Gameplay Loop

Caroline Hobbs recently advocated for simple and clear gameplay loops to improve player experience:

As game designers, one of the most helpful things we can do is try to keep invoked rules, loops, and subloops simple and clear. We can have as few invoked rules as are necessary for the purpose of the game. We can try to reinforce them through the loops so we aren’t info-dumping on players at the beginning of the game or giving them a big menu of things to read when they really want to be focusing on fiction.

I think this is great advice, and Rusałka does this exceptionally well. Let’s explore the gameplay loop:

The introduction is simple and fast. Players quickly create the map with a few theme-related prompts, and character creation is focused on names and appearance (backstory comes during play). It took 10 minutes to kickstart our story, provide some hooks for later, and move into the core gameplay loop.

The core gameplay consists of a larger petitioner loop with a smaller offer subloop nested inside it. The petitioner loop encapsulates the petitioner's request, the Rusałka’s offers, the petitioner’s decision, and the consequences that follow. The offer subloop encapsulates each Rusałka’s answer to the request and a flashback hinting at why the Rusałka made that specific offer.

Not only are these simple and clear loops, but their design creates a rewarding play experience:

• The petitioner role is shifted to a new player after each petitioner loop, offering asymmetric play at a reasonable interval.
• As we advance through the petitioner loop, scenes fluctuate between “solo/descriptive” and “interactive” before finally ending with a collaborative discussion. I found this variation to be really engaging.
• Every second petitioner loop adds a “time progression” step. This introduces variation and change, and I found earlier hooks and consequences were often re-woven into the story at this point.

The offer subloop was my favourite part during play. I not only made witchy offers to needy mortals, I got to frame it within a backstory that hints at the potential cost to the petitioner. This distilled the thematic statements of Rusałka into an efficient, engaging, and repeatable loop that, for me, was the heart of the game.

The game ends with a short epilogue that is simple, fast, and flexible. Just as the introduction zooms into the story, the epilogue lets us zoom back out, satisfyingly bookending our game and experience.

Number Crunching

Number crunching? In my storygame? It’s more likely than you think.

Let’s take a look at the quantitative aspect of the design and see what we can learn.

Game Length

The game is advertised at 2-4 hours in length. Our 4 player game was 3.5 hours including some breaks. I felt like we were average in our “roleplaying verbosity”; not super fast, but not overly tedious.

• The introduction probably took 10 minutes, and the epilogue 5 or so minutes.
• There are 7 petitioner loops in a game. Our petitioner loops averaged 20-25 minutes.
• Our offer subloops probably lasted 3-5 minutes.

The pacing felt really good in a 4 player game. Bumping up to 6 players lengthens every petitioner loop, so less verbose roleplay may be needed to keep it within 4 hours.

Cards

Rusałka is powered by playing cards which you must currently print and assemble yourself.

• I created 124 cards: 1 title card, 11 instruction cards, and 112 “theme deck” cards. I left the “example gameplay” cards out.
• There are 8 theme decks, each with 14 cards.
• Each theme deck includes 8 answer cards, all of which will be drawn but only 7 will be played each game.
• There is a 66% chance each petitioner from your deck will be played in a 3 player game, or 33% in a 6 player game. For Act 4 petitioners, it’s 33% / 16.6%.

Ignoring the creative variation of different play groups, replayability seems decent: you won’t see all theme decks in a single game, you won’t personally play all answer cards, and petitioners will likely be different from game to game.

124 cards is a lot though, both for print-and-play and considering normal playing card/tarot deck sizes. This is something to consider from a product perspective.

Map

Following the instructions, you only draw on the map a handful of times:

• Once to outline the Rusałka’s pool (1 drawing)
• Each player adds their unique feature to the map (3-6 drawings)
• At the beginning of each new act (2,3,4), mark the passage of time (3 drawings)

That’s not a lot, and I personally drew on the map only once to mark my unique feature. We didn't do much ad-hoc drawing in our game either.

This isn’t a criticism; our map was still awesome, extremely important to our story, and an excellent focus for the table. But it is much less directed drawing than some other mapmaking games.

Wisdom from the Rusałka

Here I stand, a mere mortal asking the powerful Rusałka to teach me her wisdom. Perhaps she was in a merciful mood today, because I come away with gifts:

• A simple gameplay loop that tightly delivers an appealing theme is rewarding.
• Rhythmically varying between “solo/descriptive”, “interactive”, and “collaborative” scenes is engaging.
• Linked prompts that intertwine both current story and backstory are fun.
• Cards are an excellent game engine, but deck size and accessibility need to be considered when thinking of the game as a product.

At least, I hope these are gifts… What monkey’s paw am I missing here? Did Rusałka bestow different wisdom to you after your games?

And if you haven’t yet, go play Rusałka! It’s free, but you should pay Nick Wedig because it's also great.