Star Crossed was very deliberately made to be a two-player game. I’ve always tried to sculpt the play experience into a tense but gentle back-and-forth flow. But, of course, it took about two playtests before players started asking: can we play this with three? So: here you go.

First things first: it’s not about love triangles. I usually get frustrated by stories in which two people compete for a third person who must choose between them (because I can always see a very obvious solution). The other thing is that Emily Care Boss already nailed that premise in Shooting the Moon back in 2006. Go play it! I’ve played it. It’s fun.

So, in the Star Crossed spirit (self-indulgence via game design), everybody is into everybody. That doesn’t mean it will be straightforward, safe, or easy.

The major change that makes this possible is adjusting the Lead/Follow dynamic. In a three-person relationship, the game’s role binary doesn’t make sense. The solution is for every character to be a Lead. Ask anyone who’s ever tried to get three people together in real life: it is no time to be coy. Having six instead of eight scenes, with prompts like “An act of desperation,” also help move things along nicely. 

To keep players from over-focusing on one partner over the other, the game still plays out as a series of scenes, but players take their turns in clockwise order rather than back-and-forth. Because turn-taking is so strict in Star Crossed, the triangle emerges organically.One couple can’t really get overly attached before another couple has a chance to bond further. 

These adjustments emerged from playtesting, which started out with a system that was slightly more complex and got pared back to the lightest possible touch on the existing rules. (Many thanks to Jason for essentially taking the Sword of Manjushri to my early drafts.) I hope the three-player rules come naturally to players, and that they resonate with experience well enough to help make authentic and meaningful stories.

<3
Alex