Game Jam Winner Spotlight: A Pocketful Of Peril!
It’s time for the second in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered Best Remix winner Accoutrements, and now it’s time for a closer look at the winner of the Best Deep Cut category: A Pocketful of Peril! by Perrin Ellis
Perrin Ellis is our second returning winner, having won the Best Adaptation category in 2023 and 2022. This year, their entry A Pocketful of Peril! was also a strong candidate in that category, but it stood out even more when we were looking for the best deep cut. That’s because the game’s source material is arguably the deepest kind of cut possible: lost media.
Pocketful is a group storytelling game for 2-4 players based on some adventure film serials from 1929: stories told in twenty-minute increments and shown before the feature film at cinemas, a precursor to serial TV shows. Many such film serials survive today, but the four specific old serials the game uses as its core inspiration are lost, and nothing remains but some still images, the series titles, and the titles of their chapters. And what evocative titles they are: The Diamond Master, The Black Book, The Fire Detective, and Queen of the Northwoods. The game has players using dice and a deck of cards to mix and match these titles, and the chapter titles, and the common tropes of the genre, to tell a story that fills the void these lost works have left.
The end result is a game that adapts a film that doesn’t exist anymore, which is a fascinating feat in and of itself. The mechanics are well crafted to capitalize on the elements that are most useful and inspiring for storytelling (curiosity-piquing titles, and the basic genre tropes that provide scaffolding for a story) while leaving the creativity up to the players’ imagination. When these serials were first made, they were part of a deluge of similar works, and at the time there was nothing too special about them; now that they are lost, they have become a tantalizing historical mystery, and any game that celebrates that is a fitting winner of Best Deep Cut.
Congratulations to Perrin Ellis for the win! You can get everything you need to play A Pocketful of Peril! from its page on Itch. We’ll be back next week with the next in our series of winner spotlights, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1930.