Opening my overview copy of Triangle Company: Regular Briefcase felt like dwelling out the top of Pulp Fiction — a glance inside one thing that wasn’t meant for human eyes. Inside this field set, offered as a briefcase with company stickers and deep claw gashes, is a treasure of a recreation not like another I’ve ever learn. Suppose Management meets Severance meets The Workplace, with a contact of Home of Leaves thrown in for good measure. Greater than anything, the bodily factor of studying this guide created an expertise that compelled me to bounce across the guide. Transferring by way of its mechanics and fiction felt like a choose-your-own-adventure recreation hidden within the guise of a satirical company handbook with a highly-spoilable secret.
Triangle Company by Haunted Desk Video games is a tabletop role-playing recreation which asks gamers to develop into staff on the extremely secretive company of the identical identify, which operates clandestinely to seize or neutralize supernatural anomalies within the eponymous Regular Briefcase. Besides you, expensive Agent, are literally an anomaly, compelled to evolve to the whims of the Company, lest you develop into a hazard to your self — and extra importantly, the corporate. However there’s a twist. The sport positions itself because the true actuality; the tabletop RPG is without doubt one of the firm’s latest initiatives. These enjoying the sport are literally hallucinating a totally totally different life to deal with the eldritch horrors of company synergy.
Not all the things is offered to entry stage Brokers, after all. There are “Playwalled” sections, hidden from view till extra of the sport is performed or learn. Studying forward within the guide is each inspired and punished by the in-fiction authors, with mechanical disadvantages utilized to readers who aren’t the group’s Common Supervisor. The GM, although simply one other Agent with extra duties, is rewarded for his or her efforts by the evolution of the books’ voice… or possibly extra precisely, its descent into insanity. I not often discover myself writing within the margins of tabletop video games, however I couldn’t assist however have a dialog with this textual content, marking all of the intelligent satirical strains and cuts of the faux-friendly company handbook. Quickly sufficient, it began speaking again.
Possibly most significantly, Triangle Company is humorous. The punchline-per-page ratio is astronomical. Woven into each paragraph is a few comedic dissection of the methods firms ask their staff to sacrifice their lives for the nice of the corporate. Barely hidden behind a hole smile and an insistence on work-life stability is the underlying understanding that Brokers are expendable property to be managed. Division and company hierarchy is the secret and employee unity is the most important anomaly of all.
At each alternative the bodily textual content of Triangle Company works to evoke the absurd horror of working below late-stage capitalism, whereas by no means letting its lofty idea run away with its playability. This recreation is as pleasant and simple to leap into as it’s to learn. Whereas a digital version of Triangle Company would nonetheless be crammed with equally sensible language, mechanics, and artwork course, holding the bodily guide in your palms and flipping forwards and backwards from the early sections to the playwalled paperwork, is as a lot part of the expertise as sitting down on the desk along with your fellow brokers and rolling cube.
Triangle Company: Regular Briefcase, which incorporates the corebook, The Vault enlargement (which incorporates 12 missions), a spiral character organizer, six d4, and 5 secret cube; is offered now for $90. The standalone Triangle Company guide can be accessible for $60. A digital version is offered for $30.