Best Friends

Best Friends is a diceless RPG from Box Ninja. The theme is centered around a group of high school female friends, but it can be adapted to other themes and settings as well. ShoshieB1 and I recently played a session with a couple of our friends.

The game begins with character creation, and character creation by each player is pretty easy. Your first task is to create a name for your character. Each character has 5 stats for Pretty, Smart, Tough, Rich, and Cool. Rather than determine your own score in each thing though, each player secretly writes down which other character their character hates for being better than them in that stat. For example, if Jane and Jenni both write down that they hate Melissa for being prettier than them, Melissa has a Pretty of 2. If no one hates you for being prettier than them, then you just aren't pretty with a score of zero. Once all your stats are determined, you can draw a stick figure depiction of your character plus make up some details about her before beginning play.

The story is very collaborative with whatever the GM and players can decide. We decided that we were a group of high school female friends who were trying to win the school elections. We hatched a plot to make the other girl candidates look bad so that we would be more likely to win the election. In order to accomplish this, we had to deal with some conflicts. We stole some student records from the counselor's office, we spread rumors about the other girls, and we supported each other to make our own weaknesses better.

Conflicts in Best Friends are pretty simple. If you want to do something Cool but the GM says you just aren't quite Cool enough, you can push a Friend token to the character you have on your sheet for being Cooler than you. Pushing effectively gives you one step higher in your score and lets you do things you can't normally do. If you are going up directly against another player, they can push back as well to push themselves higher. Once the conflict is resolved, everyone involved in the pushing exchange describes the story effects of what actually happened. It is really a very fast resolution system.

We made characters, plotted our plans, and reached the end of our story in about an 60 to 90 minutes. It was pretty amusing as everyone got into it. If you have seen the movie Mean Girls, you can get a sense of the typical theme in a Best Friends game. At the same time though, you can use the same mechanics for other groups of friends - a group of boys in grade school, a group of business partners, or even some fantasy adventurers.

Overall, it was a fun game to play with a very easy character creation method and playing system.