Alice Is Missing expansion deepens the stillness of tabletop roleplaying

When screenwriter and tabletop game designer Spenser Starke suddenly lost his mother in 2016, he immediately shouldered the emotional burden of his father, grandmother, and maternal aunt. Crouching like this, he told Polygon in an interview, left no emotional oxygen for his own grief.

That came later when Starke was designing Alice is missing, a collaborative storytelling RPG set in an imaginary Pacific Northwest town where a group of friends are searching for their missing friend. Told through cards and set on a bespoke playlist of moody indie tunes, the mystery twists the familiar by limiting players to nonverbal, indirect communication: no speaking, no sounds, no body gestures, just text on a cell phone.

Now Starke is preparing for crowdfunding Alice is Missing: Silent Falls, an additional collection of cards – clues, locations, suspects and more – that almost doubles the original number and makes finding Alice more difficult. Players can add as many or as few of these cards to the main deck as they like. Nothing is mandatory, and each supplement has been designed to fit seamlessly into the little box that became a surprise hit when it was launched in 2020.

Many of these new ideas were floating around from the start and were shaved off by the original production of Alice is missing to develop what Starke called an MVP, or “most viable product” for Kickstarter.

“I’ve been tweaking the maps in the expansion literally since the game’s launch to give people the ability to tell new stories with the game and provide an extra layer of narrative challenge,” Starke said. “It was a game I never thought people would play because it’s just weird and emotional and Type 2 fun. But it comes from a very real place.”

Alice is missing follows the disappearance of Alice Briarwood, a Northern California high school student with a group of friends – created and embodied by the players – who are desperate to find out what happened. Over the course of a single session of approximately three hours, players engage in one-on-one text conversations to discuss what they think happened, while more clues are uncovered and likely culprits emerge. Guided by card prompts and a constantly ticking timer, the group will discover how one person’s absence can tear apart a community, revealing uncomfortable truths in the process.

“[The game] was originally born out of a desire to make a game that would capture the emotional landscape I was traversing during that time, which is why you won’t be solving it on your own,” Starke said. “The game has to work. You’re not going to bring this thing to Sherlock Holmes. That is expedient.”

Starke said he’s always been drawn to “emotional indie video games” such as life is strange, Ox free, and fire clockand Alice is missing deliberately uses the “cozy but also fucked up” vibes to construct its atmosphere of the familiar made alien, a cracked mirror through which you could see your own past. Less a carpet pulling than a mechanism for vulnerability, Alice is missing‘s tendency to evoke surprisingly strong reactions while sitting dead still in a darkened room deserves it quite a reputation within the tabletop community.

the silent cases The expansion is intended for groups who can tackle it after a few sessions with the base game. He disagrees that this return should be called the Director’s Cut or the Definitive Edition. He generally dislikes touching his creative works once they have been released into the world and into the hands of an audience. But this project feels different, Starke said. The timing felt right.

Players will find three new suspects that could be linked to Alice’s disappearance, and each throws up a wrench as experienced players understand the social fabric of Silent Falls. The first is Officer Prescott, the town sheriff, whose importance means players are unlikely to be able to contact the police for help. Another, Alice’s estranged father, John Harwood, raises the specter of domestic troubles and lazy family dynamics. The last is a new student who quickly befriended Alice and blended in with the group, raising the spirits and forcing everyone to contemplate their own connection to the now-missing girl.

Starke is obviously interested in questioning power structures about Silent Falls’ small-town simulations. What does it mean when the people you supposedly trust could use their authority to cover up a heinous crime? How can traditional family roles congeal a relationship over long years of resentment? What do we assume about the people close to us, and what are they afraid to reveal lest we judge them?

Hopefully, revisiting Silent Falls should feel like rekindling a fire in players, Starke said. Even after all the playtesting, feedback, and iterations, he admits he was more nervous than ever when designing the original experience. It’s an electrical energy he craves for in the creative process.

“The things that scare me are the things I look forward to the most. If not, then I haven’t done my job. I didn’t push myself,” Starke said. “It’s going to be really exciting for me to see how people use the prompts I’ve given them to tell me stories. I love having this opportunity again.”

Alice is Missing: Silent Falls starts on kickstarters from February 14th and is hosted by the publisher hunter entertainmentthe responsible company children on bicycles, Altered Carbon The RPGand Breakout: Undead.

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