Feast • 2017 rpg finalist

Sharang Biswas • https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/

PREPARATION
Five Players.
 
Everyone: Choose one basic taste: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami.  Prepare food or drink representing it. Each taste must be chosen.
 
Make enough of each food for one bite-sized morsel for every player. Place morsels in the center of the play area.
 
PLAY
1) You are all entities consuming a different individual’s personality. For example: alien parasites, sentient fungi, demons, ghosts.
 
2) Use one food item to inspire your host’s identity.
 
3) Each round, in turns, eat one morsel and recount a memory or thought you consume from your host, related to the flavor you eat.
 
-Sweet: friendship or love
-Salty: personal triumph
-Bitter: regret for one’s own actions
-Sour: sadness about an event or circumstance
-Umami: a contribution to an individual or the world
 
4) Each round, relate your host’s memory or thought…
 
Round 1: …the moment they were infected
Round 2: …they haven’t touched in a while
Round 3: …they shared with someone close to them
Round 4: …they return to repeatedly
Round 5: …they revisit right before their personality is extinguished
 
5) Do not eat the same food more than once. When all morsels are eaten, you have subsumed your host’s consciousness.

Author Comments

This game was inspired by Felix Gonzales-Torres’ “Untitled” (Portrait Of Ross In L.A.), and the discussions I had about it in grad school with my professor Georgia Krantz.

This game is great for picnics, potluck parties and the like! Here are some food suggestions: Sweet: brownie bites, milk chocolate, protiferoles, fruit juice Salty: salty potato chips, salted nuts, buttered toast squares sprinkled with salt and pepper, salted edemame, cheese and crackers Sour: pickles, lemon bars, sour cherry juice, sour candies Bitter: coffee, red wine, dark chocolate, beer, grapefruit slices Umami: dried salami, shiitake mushrooms, ripe cherry tomatoes

Feel free to find me on Twitter: @SharangBiswas

Judge Comments

By far one of the most powerful games I saw, Feast is having an intense conversation about appropriation, control, and the erasure of culture by colonialism and invasion. Food as a mechanic points out the consumption by the powerful of the remnants of the powerless, and allows for a unique experience while playing. The game demonstrates clearly how powerful colonial cultures consume and appropriate other cultures, and then spit it back out (by talking about it) with their own twists and views on it. The questions provide food for thought on being infected, and how many times conquered cultures begin to assimilate the culture of the conquerors. - Kate Bullock

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