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ALT Best Analog Game — Tower Tree Stories by David Harris Tower Tree Stories takes its inspiration from the 1927 yearbook of Greensburg High School in Indiana, a full copy of which is included with the game to serve as the primary material. If you’ve ever looked at an old yearbook, you know what it feels like to flip through its pages: you get a glimpse of so many lives, a snapshot of the faces of staff and students at a single moment in time, tidbits of information about student life and people’s personalities and ambitions…. but all of it is so clearly the tip of a mysterious iceberg. And it’s from that very feeling that this unique roleplaying game emerges. Players step into the shoes of randomly selected students and begin forming relationships with other students, building out a map of their connections and interactions.
ALT This year, David's back with another entry that continues his tradition of creating exceptionally original games that explore the work of a specific visual artist — or in this case, two artists. Dreaming the Cave is a game about the artistic partnership of Czech artists Toyen (born Marie Čermínová) and Jindřich Štyrský, and it plays out using the latter’s 1926 painting Jeskyně (The Cave) as its game board, and a set of cards depicting paintings by both artists as its game pieces. Through the process of mixing and matching these cards on the board, players are prompted to narrate a surreal dream scene that continues the partnership of these artists beyond Styrský’s death in 1942. Like Harris’s past games, it’s quite difficult to describe, because it is creative and unusual and custom-tailored to suit the specific artwork it explores. By using not just one work from one artist but several different ones from across the career of two artists, it takes the award for Best Remix.
