Rise of the Living Bread! bucks a trend by being a memory game you actually want to play – buy it now at Tabletop Scotland
Memory games. They’re the sort of thing you get in kids party bags because they’re easy to theme with pirates, unicorns or popular heroes like Spider-Man, but no serious gamer would play one. And no serious game designer would make one, would they?
Rise of the Living Bread! is a memory game with a difference – that difference being the bonkers way cards can get moved around, creating moments where players confidently guess a card’s, location only to find it moved turns ago. A picnic-related storyline adds the bread-based theme:
“It all begins with what should have been a perfectly ordinary picnic… until the sandwiches decide they’ve had enough and make a run for it,” says Katie from Scottish tabletop indie publisher Terror Toad. “Players search the gingham blanket, trying to round up four runaway sandwiches before anyone else. Of course, the rest of the animated picnic has other ideas. Wasps buzz in, ducks waddle through, ants get involved, and before long you’ll be second-guessing every card you were certain you’d memorised.”
Rise of the Living Bread! is a quick-to-learn, topsy-turvy memory card game. While the premise is a relaxing picnic that’s gone wrong, as your sandwiches develop survival instincts and run away across a gingham blanket, your goal is to search the blanket and be the first player to round up four runaway sandwiches.
However, a number of mechanics see cards moved or swapped, whole rows picked up and shuffled, as dawdling ducks, dizzy wasps and unreasonable ants block your progress. With the cards positions constantly changing, you’re going to have to be sure those sandwiches are where you think they are to win this chaotic, humorous game.
Terror Toad is a small tabletop game business based in Scotland, run by artists Chris and Katie. Their previous games include G.R.I.M. INC. (a comedic party game where players pitch creative ways to send souls to the afterlife) and Imposter Pigeon (a fast-paced social deduction and bluffing game featuring avian antics. Rise of the Living Bread! was developed following some intensive work on a tabletop roleplaying project.
“When our hefty TTRPG project, Whitefroth – coming soon – reached the stage of playtesting and proof-reading, it felt like the right time to put our brains on ice for a bit,” Katie remembers. “A big, thinky project like Whitefroth took a lot of thought, and while it was lovely to finally put down the laptop and pick up the sketchbook… that didn’t mean the game designing stopped. It simply took a different form for a while. We’d spent quite some time typing and editing. Now it was the turn of flipping and shuffling.”
You’ll find Terror Toad at Stand S-08 at Tabletop Scotland.