🚗 Panic! at the Tesco

Navigate complex interpersonal drama in a tight-knit friend group while the necessities of carpooling preclude your first instinct to Just Get Everybody in a Big Circle and Talk About Your Feelings Until It's All Better Somehow.

• ✅ Zero pre-game prep, just sign-up and show up!

• 💺 Shuffling seats and socially maneuvering!

• 📦 Simply put all the players in a big box and shake it!

Long Description

a.k.a. Carpool Calamity:

You Are on a Road Trip to Las Vegas and the Homies Have Complex Interpersonal Drama

TLDR: Navigate challenging relationship dynamics in a tight-knit friend group while on your way to the Big Convention.

• Zero-prior-prep character generation - choose two archetypes and an initial social situation, then complete the resulting 12-question template by circling provided options (or use them as inspiration to write your own!)

• Shuffle seats and socially maneuver - puzzle through romantic, individual, and logistical goals alongside your friends (rivals? frenemies?) Carpools may rearrange at rest-stops; jockey for position to sit near whoever you need to talk with next!

• Weather a chaotic weekend on the road - tuck those elbows and squeeze into a beat-up sedan. Call shotgun and be lord of the stereo system. Try to maintain focus on the road while your friends have a messy emotional meltdown all around you!

• Intentional Game Design - you just know if you could Get Everybody in a Big Circle and Talk About Your Feelings, somehow they'd understand! (But that would be way too easy, wouldn't it?)

"We can fit about four people per vehicle.. five if we really squeeze in. Three cars then?"

"Should someone offer to ride with those two? Might be awkward after what happened last week.."

"Hey can we stop off at the next station? I really need to find a bathroom..."

It is summer of 2008 and you are sticking to the pleather back row of a beat-up old four-door. You're seated behind the driver (who is vibrating with the unadulterated power of their second "Radline Xtreme Energy" in as many hours), and the stereo is blasting "Nine in the Afternoon" at max volume. Someone is belting out amateur karaoke. Someone is scowling at smeared MapQuest printouts. Someone is clutching their head and gently weeping.

• Prompts are just to get you started. Pre-written materials and mechanics are provided to inspire creativity, but player agency determines how these structures are precipitated into gameplay. The "starting situation" of each character (for example) aims to be entirely opt-in and its specific content (romantic, platonic, some secret third thing?) is built collaboratively by those players involved.

• Physical challenges are immersive but optional. We invite you to literally squeeze up to 5 people into a space the size of a midsize sedan interior. Sure there's five seats, but the three in back are closer together than you'd like. (If you're not about this it isn't a required part of the gameplay.)

• This is a fast moving and chaotic experience by design, not recommended for the faint of heart. It is intended for goal-oriented busybodies who (perhaps counter-intuitively) are alright with having some goals which might prove impossible to complete.

The open road, the smell of petrol, and so much burnt gas station coffee. Where the sky is so big and the feelings are too. Everything seems more important out here, chasing that endless horizon. It's the kind of adventure nostalgia was made for. Someday, decades from now.. we'll look back on these few short days and reminisce. So are you getting in this car or what?