Xenolanguage

Earlier this year Dan over at Throne of Salt and I got the chance to play Xenolanguage together. He’s posted his thoughts here. It didn’t work for him, and it didn’t for me either. Lets get into it.

Xenolanguage is Arrival the rpg. An alien ship has recently landed, and you are the group tasked to communicate. You do this by choosing archetypes, creating connections between players, and then going round robin drawing from a deck and using a modified Ouiji board when prompted to see what the aliens are saying.

Character creation went pretty well. You choose from a set of archetypes with prompts, and then create relationships with the people sitting next to you. They’re broad enough to give some flexibility in who you want to be, but evocative enough to help you get there. No one struggled with character creation and there was a lot of energy at the table. We had ideas, we had some interesting interpersonal tension, and we were ready to go.

The deck itself is deterministic. The order is, some optional rules aside, always the same. The game says its not just Arrival. Its Contact too! And Close Encounters of the Third Kind! And… But thats not how its framed. The prompts want to be broad enough to give freedom, but they’re structured to mirror the story beats from Arrival.

So first card prompt asked to describe the approach. Second card asked for more detailed info on approach that had already been answered from the first prompt. The deck didn’t give enough room to avoid collisions. But once we got past the opening it got very open ended, and very repetitive. Everyone eventually answered the same exact prompts, over and over and over. The game wants everyone to have an initial interpretation phase, a chance to flashback. A one on one with another player. And for the same prompt to work with every player archetype and setting equally, they are entirely open ended. An example.

After seeing the alien message, you get a Report card. “Based on your initial findings, you’re asked to provide a preliminary report of the message. SHOW US YOUR REPORT: Given what you observed, what do you believe they are trying to say? Is the message positive? Negative? Something else entirely?”

Or the followup card, Dissent. “You feel differently about the message. SHOW US ANOTHER VIEW: What is a different way to interpret what was said?”

No variance or substance but for what the players bring to the table. And I get why. Different archetypes and character relationships plus changes in context from seeing new alien messages are supposed to provide variety. But unlike character creation with some prompts and pick lists theres absolutely no support. And unlike Arrival itself, there was no outside tension from political pressures. There was only the tension of the diminishing deck. And for us that just wasn’t enough.

I think Xenolanguage still could have worked for us even with the lack of supports if it was shorter. Momentum from character creation lasted about 2 hours. The problem was it was a 4 hour game. And that… that was rough. You could see the excitement go out of players eyes as the hope of literally anything new went away. The game tried so hard to be open for different approaches and interpretations it left nothing concrete for us to bounce off of or work with.

The end itself is interpretive and open ended. Dan got the last card and gave his answer to what happened and what it all meant. It was a decent answer. But by that point it felt, as he put it, hollow. There were no stakes but what we brought, no meaning but what we gave it and took from it. And by the end that meant very little at all.