Best Friends

A Role-Playing Game About Girlfriends and All Their Petty Hatreds
(First Edition)
Modern (social)
Self Published
2005
Complexity: 1

Best Friends is a game about friendships between women, or rather the type of catty jealousy-riddled friendships between women that you may see in Archie comics or other pop-culture references of which I am unaware. But can you really base an entire game around the concept of petty jealousy? I guess you’ll have to read on to find out.
(yes, excellent teaser, 5/5)


Character Creation: 2/5
The character creation system in Best Friends is if nothing else, novel. Characters have five attributes: Pretty, Cool, Smart, Tough, and Rich. Players begin by naming their characters and then filling the other characters’ names into several ‘hatreds’ in the form of  “I hate _____ because she is prettier/cooler/etc. than me.” Players then reveal their hatreds, and however many people listed a character for each specific hatred becomes their score for that attribute. Players then fill in their character’s remaining details—all non-mechanical—based on the sores they’ve received. It is a very interesting idea, requiring that a character’s attributes be generated semi-randomly by the other players and then having to define a character based on whatever you get. It is stated that players can request that they’d like to play a smart, pretty, etc. character, but overall they are still at the mercy of the other players.And while they do make sure that points will be evenly distributed to all players, there is a bit of an issue in that scores are assumed to range from 0–3. This is an issue because scores can actually be as high as 5, and while the rules describe such values as “a cherry on top,” scores of 4 or 5 really have no mechanical function other than losing points from your other scores.

Mechanics: 3/5
The basic system is fairly simple and elegant, essentially characters can do anything within the limits of their attributes, and to do something outside those limits they must ‘Push.” Pushing just requires giving a ‘friend-chip’ to another player, specifically the player whose character you listed as hating for being superior to you in that specific attribute. Aside from the resource-management aspect of this it seems like a good way to reinforce a character’s hatreds and keep them in the player’s minds—i.e. “Ugh, every time I wanna do something cool I have to give Becky a friend-chip since she’s so much cooler than me.”

Writing: 3/5 [•]
The rules are all clearly and ‘funly’ written, but it’s not like there’s a lot of information to cover there. My only issue is the repeated references to—and apologies for—the lack of play-testing and overall polish due to being a 24-hour game. Here’s the thing, apologizing for the quality of your work—especially in said work—does nothing but tell the reader that you think it’s bad, and they should probably think it’s bad to.

Presentation: 2/5
Aside from a particularly offensive—but appropriate—display typeface, there isn’t much here that’s too bad. The art is a bit crude—just stick figures—but suits the feeling of the game oddly well—also, I appreciate the effort of stick figures over the non-effort of nothing. There isn’t a single section that breaks across a page—y’all know how I feel about bad page breaks—but unfortunately the method for achieving this seems to have been arbitrarily switching between one and two-column layout. There’s also some weird spacing, and basically it feels like specific layout decisions were made without considering the aesthetics of the final product as a whole.

Final Remarks
Best Friends has some interesting ideas, but like all 24-hour RPGs shows the signs of its tight creation window. This is normally the part of the review where I say that I’d like to see what could be made of the concepts here given more time and effort, but this time they actually already did that. So there is a  full version of Best Friends, which I may very well be taking a look at in the future.

Base Points: 7
Character Creation: 2/5, Mechanics: 3/5, Presentation: 2/5
Adjustments: +0
Setting: N/A, Writing: +0, Content: N/A

Overall Score: 47% (7/15 Points)
Becky thinks she’s so cool with her sunglasses and leather jacket and windswept hair and soft pouty lips and beautiful blue eyes… wait, what?