Empanel
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🏳️🌈 Why it’s here
What we found
- Queer storyline central to play
According to the game’s own description
“Empanel is a two-player narrative roleplaying game based around telegrams and queer yearning” - Queer themes
According to the creator’s own tags on itch.io - Tagged queer by its creator
According to the creator’s own tags on itch.io
🤝 Inclusive design ⓘInclusive design is separate from a game’s queer labels. It marks games whose design is deliberately inclusive even when not queer-themed: romance or marriage mechanics with no gender constraint, character creation without a forced gender binary, gender-neutral rules language, or table safety tools. Each marker shows where we found it.
- Character creation free of a gender binary
According to the game’s rulebook
“Stories of any gender, sexuality, and premise are supported and welcome within the game and we encourage you to create a story that speaks to you personally.”
Description
The year is 1915 - you sit inside a dreary office, working as a telegraph operator for the North American rail system. The dots and dashes of the telegraph machine spell out a dreary, unfulfilling existence. Until one day, a new kind of message appears. Empanel is a two-player narrative roleplaying game based around telegrams and queer yearning. Completely diceless, Empanel's messaging-based gameplay is designed for long-distance play between you and a partner. Empanel provides a new spin on two-player conversational roleplaying. Step into the shoes of a middle-aged telegraph operator (or anyone, we're not your boss) and explore the feelings of reconnecting with a love long past. Send and receive messages in Morse code while building the storyTry to infer your partner's hidden desires while furthering your ownCreate a shared narrative of pining and desire between estranged ex-loversUse our online translator to encode and decode messages Downloading Empanel gets you the following: A 7-page PDF with all the rules for running a game of Empanel"I would love to chat dear but it is 1915 and we are 3000 miles away", an original music track.