Today’s review is about a solo dexterity-based game called LAY ON HANDS. You may want to snag a copy to follow along!
The Creator
Class is in session! It doesn’t matter if you’ve been making games for two years or ten, Alfred Valley has something to teach all of us.
Alfred is not just a brilliant game designer, he’s also an extremely generous human being. I have plumbed the depths of the TTRPG community and every single person who has interacted with this man seems to have an anecdote about how Alfred helped them out in one way or another. This soft-spoken font of knowledge is absolutely everywhere, too. Every time I enter a new discord server he’s somehow already there.
Confusing Beauty
Alfred’s games are somehow not just games— they’re very much works of art. I mean that in the most awesome sense of the word. Holding one of Valley’s books in your hands is like walking into a highbrow gallery. At first glance an untrained eye might think it is looking at three black lines slapped on a canvas. Look again. I assure you, nearly everything on the page means something. Haus of Valley’s signature hallmark is intentional and understated design. I mean, just look at this spread:
Listen to me. LISTEN. That is not public domain art with a digital filter slapped over it. There is a lot happening just beneath the surface. In order to show you, I need to bring you on a guided tour through Alfred’s metaphorical gallery. So… I traipsed over to his website and sent the man an e-mail.
… he responded! I did a mini interview with Alfred Valley about his aesthetic. Folks, prepare yourself, because I asked Alfred three questions and his answers absolutely rocked my world.
The Illuminating Interview
Q) What fonts did you use for Lay On Hands? They look consistent with the ones in Tundrabower but not, say, Thousand Empty Light. Do you try to keep systems and their modules visually consistent?
Alfred: Lay On Hands uses two fonts: Chainprinter for titles and Avería for the body text. Avería's an interesting font with a story that speaks to me. Since I used it for Lay On Hands I've realised it sort of encapsulates a theme that I tend to explore a lot — the order of digital versus the disorder of analog.
Lay On Hands is all about imagining society after the end so Avería felt appropriate because it feels familiar and yet fundamentally strange.
Tundrabower uses a font I made called Rovkall for the titles and an old newspaper style font for the body text (whose name I can't recall). That was my first attempt at writing something completely diegetically, so the fonts were chosen to feel 'convincing'. That's something that the fonts in Lay On Hands, Tundrabower and Thousand Empty Light have in common really — they're meant to feel like they belong in the world they're conveying. For Thousand Empty Light (which uses Gilland, Rovkall and SV Basic), the fonts were chosen to emulate the feeling of a 70s synth manual mixed with corporate paperwork.
Q) I see the words “Analog Game Design” on some of your promotional materials. Can you expound on that for me?
Alfred: I use Analog Game Design mostly to mean 'Tabletop Game Design" but I feel it also conveys a bit of my process. I often use actual physical analog methods in my game design. Also I used to do a lot of film photography so I think "analog" is a term that's stuck with me from that.
Q) The illustrations in Lay On Hands are very thematic. There’s texture but very limited visual information, giving impressions of indistinct faces peering out of the darkness. Can you tell me anything about your workflow creating those images, or perhaps why you made those artistic choices?
Alfred: I wanted the artwork in Lay On Hands to feel like it was made by a post-apocalyptic people finding a way to create pictures with the materials they have to hand. The style and process I used was actually the result of a mistake. I tried ordered foam sheets for making very naive relief prints; essentially you use a ballpoint pen to carve grooves in the foam, ink it up and print it on paper. It's the sort of thing you do with young kids. What I got instead was sheets of foam board — rigid stuff with a shiny surface that caves in when you try and carve into it. So I came up with a way to make prints with it.
I used a needle to poke thousands of holes into the foam board which I would then ink up and print onto paper. It was very time-consuming and it left my wrist very sore, but as far I know I invented a new process. I call it stick and poke printing. Here's a video.
What makes this game unique?
Lay On Hands is a “dexterity-based game”. What does that mean?
It means that it uses a unique tool to play the game called an Oracle. It’s really quite clever. The oracle is a double-sided sheet of paper printed with checker-board patterns dotted with information. To use it, a player must fold the edges up to form a tray, then take a coin (any coin, really) and spin it inside this tray. You usually preform a skill test while the coin is STILL SPINNING and stop when it stops. Then, you look to see what part of the checkerboard the coin has come to rest on top of.
Each space on the oracle contains three narrative prompts, a d66 value and a d4 value. This is everything I need to resolve skill tests and come up with a story in one spot without a stack of tables to refer to constantly. This is genius. Talk about compact design!
What does the setup look like?
Alfred’s particular school of game design is simple-man-friendly. The layout goes a long way to help this: the first spread gives me the story pitch, what I need to do and gather before I play, and explains the cycle of play with a tidy little diagram. The last page in the book is even a mini playthrough!
The worldbuilding phase is important but simple. I begin by making a Weird World for my character to struggle through. I flip a coin and follow a short flow chart to generate a mantra, which is a narrative device that gives me some ideas about apocalypse survivor-culture. I ask myself a series of questions about what kinds of horrible things brought on the apocalypse and what consequences still linger, what blight threatens the survivors, and how my powers work.
Then, I dive deeper into my character. There are different kinds of stats. For character creation, the important ones are Faculty and Skill. Faculty describes three overarching categories (grit, slip and wits), each of which encompasses a family of more granular skills like opening a tight jar.
I don’t roll/flip/spin for stats, possessions or special features. Instead, I pick a pregenerated archetype. If you’re not into pregens, the game contains some simple rules for making your own archetype.
I also need to assign myself yet another series of stats, which are the same for every character: Spirit, Spur, and Stamina. This series of stats are more like wells of resources my character can draw upon to improve my odds of success, to progress, and to survive, respectively. That’s a bit of a generalization but I’m summarizing quite a bit of information, here.
Finally, I need to give myself two character motivations: a Pride and a Pitfall. Leaning into these traits can affect my Spirit stat and generally give my character a lot of personality.
ALL OF THESE STATS draw heavily on theme and narrative. On every page, Alfred invites the player to lean in and fully embrace the fantastic, to draw from the iconic narrative prompts offered by the oracle, and to explore symbolism. I love that so much.
The complicated bit: taking action
There are four “moves” in Laying On Hands. Pretty much anything your character wants to do fits into one of the following categories: Progress, Contend, Defy and Clash. If you want to use a move, you have to perform a test. Tests put your stats at risk.
Progress is for… working towards a goal in relative safety, risking Spirit
Contend is for…. overcoming obstruction in relative safety, risking Spur
Defy is for… overcoming obstruction in potentially dangerous situations, risking Stamina
Clash is for… engaging in physical combat, risking Stamina.
The progress move test works differently from the rest: you simply have to use the oracle to generate a random d4 value.
All other move tests are performed as follows:
STEP ONE: Figure out what score you need to succeed. Decide which faculty the action falls under, and if you have a relevant skill, subtract it’s value from the faculty.
… wait, what?!
This part tripped me up, but Alfred has a little note in the sidebar to clarify this part on the first character creation page:
(… this may seem counter-intuitive):
High Faculty = bad
High Skill = good
STEP TWO: Assign or randomize a reasonable challenge rating to the action, ranging from inconvenient (1) to epic (4). Add the challenge rating to the faculty score total. Now you have what Alfred calls a Tally.
STEP THREE: Find the relevant skill on THE SKILL TEST MAZE PAGE.
This is a code I cannot parse without referring to the the explanation page every time I take action.
Basically, the hatch-mark boxes are for GRIT actions. The challenge is, you have to mostly-fully shade in the hatched section of the box with your pen.
The bold white squares are for SLIP actions. The challenge is, you must draw a line starting from the edge of one slip-square to the arrow-head on the edge of the next slip-square, ignoring any hatched boxes you encounter along the way. (Don’t draw lines through the slip-action boxes.)
The black circles with tiny white dice-pips are for WITS actions. The challenge is, you have to count up and write down the total of the pips of both WITS-circles in the white box they are flanking, converting double-digits to single digits as in the following example: if the pips total 12, you break that number into two (1 + 2 = 3). 12 becomes 3, 11 becomes 2, 10 becomes 1.
Ahem. Needless to say, if you’re dexterous but dim-witted like me, you’re gonna wanna pick a character archetype with low WITS…
STEP 4: Spin your coin inside your oracle box. Do this carefully, and on a level surface. You want the coin to spin as long as possible without stopping.
STEP 5: Following the maze, complete as many relevant tests as you can before…
STEP 6: … the coin stops, so you stop.
STEP 7: Check to see if you passed or failed. There are exceptions, but generally if the number of relevant sections completed equals or exceeds the Tally, you succeed.
You should also check to see if the coin lands heads-up or tails-up.
STEP 8: Flip to the Action Chart (the second-to-last spread in the book) to interpret the results of your tests. The severity of the success/failure is determined by the way the coin landed. Heads is more positive, tails is more negative.
NOW I KNOW HOW TO PLAY LAY ON HANDS.
I’m out of excuses. Here’s some fanart art I drew to celebrate my playthrough of the game
Physical Copies
A PDF of Lay On Hands can be easily acquired on itch, but games like this scream to be appreciated in physical format. There’s something about the texture of uncoated paper paired with typewriter fonts that just makes me happy.
I bought my copy from Peregrine Coast Press but they’re currently sold out. Actually, a lot of retailers are sold out. Worry not, I’ve done some legwork for you. As I publish this, the following retailers still have copies in stock:
… and of course you can buy from the creator directly at the Haus of Valley.
Thank-you, Alfred, you make incredible games and I always enjoy flipping through them, even if it takes me a whole blog-post deconstruction to figure them out.
That’s all for now. See you in two weeks!
Regards,
Justin Vandermeer