💥 Launching on Tuesday 3rd September, 2024 💥

The Lost & Found Collection is three card-driven story games about objects with a will of their own—Counterpart 🤖, Artefact 🗡️ and Bucket of Bolts 🚀.

What are Lost & Found games?

All three games work the same way—you'll create an object (a robot/automaton, a magical item, or a spaceship) and then tell its complete history over years, decades or centuries.

You'll do this by drawing cards, alternating between the people who use and lose your item (like a scrappy junk collector, a humble folk hero, or a daring pirate captain!) and the fortune that your object experiences with them (perhaps they are sold to pay off debts, stolen by thieves in a dark alley, or exalted as part of a new religion!).

As you play, you'll whittle down the possible final fates that mark the end of your story (perhaps some kind of destruction, becoming obsolete or a dramatic change of form), until you're left with just two remaining. At that point, you'll choose an ending and conclude your history.

You can play all three games in a few different ways, too!

• You can play each of them solo, on your own, telling a story at your pace and recording your object's history in a journal with words and sketches.
• You can play as a group, taking turns to continue your object's story and making a timeline at the table as you go.
• You can play together, but apart—taking turns trading objects with your friends, even if you live in different parts of the world, and being surprised by the direction each of you takes the story in.
• Both together and alone, you can also choose to continue your object's story in another game—for example, you might create the history of a magical sword for your D&D game, the backstory for your crew's 'affordable' hunk of junk in a Star Wars RPG, or your robot character's life of servitude before they became unshackled.

"It combines a little bit of writing and a little bit of drawing with a lot of storytelling to make a game that is one of the most relaxing and mindful experiences I have had this year." - Shut Up & Sit Down (discussing the first edition of Artefact, also featured in their 2020 Holiday Gift Guide)

What's in the Collection?

The three games in the collection share the same rules, but every card is completely unique—each one features original art, prompts and suggestions. Let's talk about them!

1️⃣

Artefact is a game of legendary treasures and the heroes they endure beyond 🗡️

In the classic dungeon crawl, you follow the lives of adventurers as they overcome challenges to gain prestige and, most importantly, magical treasures. But what were those treasures doing before the adventurers came along? How many aeons have passed, in silent darkness, since they were last used?

"This is a great system agnostic supplement that could fit on any gamer’s shelf". — Pulp Culture Museum

"A fun and rewarding game for those who like to create stories and write (...) 4.5/5" — RPG.net

"It was a wonderful game that once I started, I had a hard time putting down. I probably spent 8-9 hours on the game over the course of a quarantined weekend, and ended up with a story that pulled at my own heart-strings." — Play Every Role

2️⃣

Bucket of Bolts is a game of iconic spaceships and the captains they fly beyond 🚀

You can’t have a good space story without an iconic spaceship. Of course, more often than not, the heroes of the story aren’t flying some shiny new cruiser. Those are for the wealthy, the elites—not our lovable scoundrels. No, they fly the bucket of bolts—the outworn, patched-up junker held together with hope, prayers and duct tape.

Best tabletop RPGs you might have missed in 2021 — Dicebreaker

It’s a great storytelling game, but its claim as a worldbuilding and shipbuilding tool for games like Edge of the Empire, Traveller, and Scum & Villainy is also very accurate. — Cannibal Halfling Gaming

3️⃣

Counterpart is a game of thinking machines and the humans they live beyond 🤖

Inspired by robots everywhere across fiction, but in particular the story of Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro and the films Robot & Frank and Robot Dreams, Counterpart lets you tell the story of an independent – but shackled – manufactured person.

They might be an android walking the streets of our near future or a steam-powered automaton from a fantasy story—this game supports all kinds of robots. And while the story of an artificial assistant has the potential to be melancholy, there's also a lot of humour to be found along the way too. Maybe they'll migrate their consciousness into a giant spaceship? Maybe they'll go on an unshackled, murderous rampage? Maybe they'll transcend our rudimentary society and distribute themselves across our networks, our minds and the wind itself? It's your story to tell.

"Counterpart is a brand new game so it doesn't have any reviews yet, but I think it's pretty great 😉" — Jack Harrison

🎨

Production

Here at Mousehole Press we love to make nice things. We just won a silver ENNIE-award for our most recent project, Koriko, for our outstanding production values! This project will be no exception.

The games will come in beautiful two-piece boxes with wrap-around art, and contain jumbo sized cards (6 x 3.8”)—each with a unique illustration!

For this campaign only, we'll also be offering a beautiful slipcase to store the three games in, featuring original artwork (possibly the best thing I've ever commissioned!) from Stacey Thomas (who drew the Mousehole Press mouse).

There's a lot to see, so I really hope you'll check out the campaign!