Is this RPG designer fixated on writing roleplaying games about mid-20th century teenage amateur sleuths or do they just write a lot of tabletop RPGs? That’s the main question I had when I saw that a Nancy Drew RPG was up on Kickstarter and that its creator had already released a game about The Hardy Boys.
Sixpence Games, the creator of this Nancy Drew game, looks to be about as indie as indie designers get, one of those creators where you just never know what they’ll do next. It has a motley assortment of projects to its name, and not just board, card and tabletop games either – it’s also made an experimental horror film and a translation of an ancient Greek text.
The Kickstarter, which launched on January 6 and has quickly doubled its meagre goal of $500, describes the Nancy Drew RPG as “a cozy solo mystery/puzzle game” and uses a domino based system to represent following a chain of clues. You can find an example of the gameplay here.
I was initially surprised Sixpence thought a separate rules system was needed for Nancy. Could this not just have been a variant of The Hardy Boys RPG it made in 2024? Fortunately the Kickstarter page explains the difference quite clearly.
“Nancy Drew stories aren’t “whodunnit” stories like the Hardy Boys, where you know what the crime was and need to find out who the perpetrator is – they’re “howdunnit” stories where you start out knowing who the victim is and who the villain is, and need to figure out what exactly the villain did, prove it, catch them, and solve the problems they caused.”
The RPG is based on the original four Nancy Drew stories from the 1930s. It’s a very different version of the character from the slightly sanitized form she took later. For one thing, she’s got a gun!
Come talk about everything tabletop on the Wargamer Discord.