April marks the 5th anniversary of The Wretched and Wretched & Alone as a system. It’s fair to say that the success of that game changed my life, and I’m still astonished that it’s endured so well in a landscape that more often than not sees games disappear into obscurity within a few days of publication (which happens to my own releases just as often as anybody else’s).

A huge part of the reason for the continuing success of Wretched & Alone is attributable to the incredible community that’s grown around these games. People continue to write and release them to this day, and every time I see a new one come out it makes my day.

To celebrate the anniversary I’m writing a new Wretched & Alone game, my first since 2021 (that was One Endless Night), which comes to Backerkit in a couple of weeks. But I also want to spotlight some of the incredible games that people have made over the past 5 years. So, over the next month, I’m going to be playing through a bunch of Wretched & Alone games here on the blog.

I’m starting with The Wretched, because it seems like the obvious place to start and I haven’t actually played it since I was first playtesting it. Then I’m going to move on to games by other people. I’m going to play a mixture of games that I already know and games that are new to me, so if you have any recommendations please feel free to suggest them in the comments!

The Wretched

The Wretched puts you in the role of the last surviving crew member of the intergalactic salvage ship The Wretched. Adrift between stars after an engine failure, your ship was attacked by a hostile alien lifeform. The crew are dead. You are alone. You journal your attempts to get the ship going again, or to repair the distress beacon and hope that somebody hears you. While you’re doing this you have to contend with the wreckage of the attack, the ship crumbling around you, and the creature that did the damage trying its best to force its way back on board the ship to finish the job.

You can fail in a multitude of ways.

The Suits

Each round (or Day, in game) you draw cards. The suits represent specific types of prompts. In The Wretched they are as follows:

Hearts: The ship’s systems Diamonds: The ship’s physical structures Clubs: The crew Spades: The creature

The Block Tower

The game as written makes use of a tumbling block tower, as do the majority of other Wretched & Alone games. These days I don’t have space to set up a tower, so I’m going to make use of a new variant I’ve been working on for Blood In The Margins that replaces the tower. This will allow me to thoroughly playtest it ahead of releasing that game, so it may change over the course of this blog series. As it stands, this is how the mechanism currently works:

Draw a 6×5 grid. Label the top row with the numbers 1-6. Each time you are told to “pull from the tower”, roll 1d6 and make a mark in the first empty space in that column. When you roll a number and are unable to make a mark because the column is full, the game is over.

Begin

Set up the tumbling block tower as you normally would for games of that nature. Roll your die, and complete that many pulls from the tower by removing a block and replacing it on the top row. The tower represents the state of your ship.

I rolled a 6 to begin with. This may be a short game. It seems the alien did a terrible amount of damage to my ship. My grid looks like this:

The deck is shuffled. It’s time to begin the game.

Day 1

Day 1, salvage ship The Wretched. Flight Engineer Taylor Windsor[^1] reporting. The other members of the crew are dead and the engines remain non-operational, though ship integrity remains good and life support systems are still active. I successfully jettisoned the intruder from the airlock, but it remains alive and continues to try to access the ship. With a little luck I can repair the distress beacon and somebody will pick me up. This is Taylor Windsor, the last survivor of The Wretched, signing off.

Day 2

Cards: 2 of Hearts

Day 2, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Taylor Windsor reporting. I’ve had a strange taste in my mouth all day that I’ve been unable to pinpoint. I thought that maybe the food was beginning to spoil – or, worse (is it worse? I think it’s worse) that I’ve developed some sort of dental problem. That’s the last thing I need. Or maybe the second to last thing that I need. As I was getting ready for bed tonight I realised that the water smells faintly of ammonia, which means that the purification system isn’t working as it should. I don’t know whether I should try to fix it or whether poking around with something I don’t understand is going to make things worse. Maybe I should just leave it and hope for the best. Maybe it’s just a glitch and it’ll sort itself out. Maybe.

Day 3

Cards: 10 of Clubs

Day 3, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Taylor Windsor reporting. The water still tasted like ammonia this morning. I can’t tell if it’s actually got worse or if I’m just more aware of it now that I’ve noticed it. I’m trying to stay hydrated, but every mouthful makes me gag. I can’t help but think that I’m just drinking my own piss over and over again. Who knows how long it’ll be before that becomes a real problem?

So I went to try and fix it, but I never got there. As I got down to the maintenance deck I stumbled on Anton – or what’s left of him, anyway. And I mean literally stumbled on him. The lights are out down there and I didn’t see him until my foot was in his rib cage. I had to use some of the piss water to clean up the mess I threw up next to him. Into him. I’m really glad I couldn’t see much of it, frankly.

He died holding a teddy bear. I remember him telling us his daughter had given it to him, that despite our weight allowances being really tight he couldn’t bear to leave it behind. Pun not intended. I wish I could remember what the bear was called. I took it, anyway. It might sound silly but I feel like keeping it with me will help me feel not quite so alone.

This is Taylor Windsor, last survivor of The Wretched, signing off.

Day 4

Cards: 5 of Diamonds, 4 of Hearts, 2 of Diamonds, 7 of Diamonds, 4 of Clubs
Tower pulls: 3

Day 4, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Taylor Windsor reporting. I woke up from a nightmare. Or a memory, I guess. For a second I thought I was still stuffed inside my storage locker, my hand clasped over my mouth as that thing tore through the crew. I was soaked in sweat when I woke up, my heart nearly beating out of my chest. My mouth was like sandpaper and I had to force down some of the ammonia water.

That situation is definitely getting worse and I know I need to fix it, but even getting down to maintenance is proving to be difficult. I got past where Anton is today, but the creature – whatever it is – really ripped through this area. There’s a huge amount of structural damage, both internal and external.

How did it even get on board in the first place? I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to know, frankly. I thought maybe it had got in through the hatches where the lander modules are, so I went to check. And on the way there I thought shit, what if I can just take one of the modules and go? Just bounce, get out of here, hope somebody picks me up.

No such luck. They’re absolutely trashed. There was obviously some sort of external impact that I didn’t know about, something bad enough that I found an atmos leak while I was down there. The hull has been shredded. Really I’m lucky that I found it when it did, before it either got worse or that thing found it and pried the hole open like a tin can. I patched it up as best I could, and while I was there I jettisoned the lander modules. Maybe that thing will think I’m escaping on them and go after them.

While I was doing that I heard a burst of static over the comms, some garbled chatter from a ship out there somewhere. It went quiet before I could get a signal out, but it’s given me some sort of hope. I’m going to try and signal as often as possible. And if there’s traffic out there, then maybe if I can get the beacon up and running there will be someone close enough to pick up on it.

Not a good day, but not a terrible day either. But I still need to fix the water problem.

Day 5

Cards: 9 of Clubs, 3 of Hearts, 7 of Spades, 7 of Clubs
Tower pulls: 2

Day 5. Salvage ship The Wretched. Flight Engineer Windsor reporting. In the event of a horrible alien monstrosity getting aboard your ship, these are the five best hiding places for a man of medium height and slender build.

The inside of a storage locker. Cons include flimsy metal walls that clang when you bang into them and a door with slits in it that can easily be seen though. Under the flooring in the maintenance corridor. The panels come up easily, and the cables are insulated. It’s a tight fit but you can just lie there and hope for the best. In an EVA suit, on the outside of the ship. You’ve got to be quick to make this one work. In bed with the covers pulled up. If you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Back on earth, twenty years ago, doing that Creative Writing degree I always wished I’d done instead of going into fucking aviation.

I got woken up by the alarms blaring and the ship being flooded with CO2. Thankfully my training kicked in and I got my respirator on, which thankfully was still working. It took hours for the air scrubbers to re-oxygenise the ship enough for me to breathe.

The fire was down in the maintenance deck, my constant nemesis. My repairs yesterday were good but not good enough, and the fuse board that controls the ship lighting decided to short out. I’ve isolated it, and I’m not even going to try and repair it properly. I’m on emergency lighting now and that will have to be fine. It’s dimmer, which means I can’t see as much of the carnage. That might be a good thing.

You’d think that being woken up on the verge of asphyxiation would be enough for one day but no. I went to send my broadcast – remember I was going to do that every day? Yeah, fuck that. I started to get a signal and for a second I thought I’d contacted someone, but what I heard was just… I don’t even know how to explain it. Hissing, and spitting, and some sort of horrible animal noise that almost sounded like words but wasn’t. I think it was the thing on the outside of the ship, whispering to me. I never want to hear it again, so I’ve disconnected external comms. I don’t know how long I’ll last before I start to lose hope and need to connect them again, but I can’t be hearing that every day.

Jas is still slumped in his seat next to the comms console and I can’t bring myself to move him. I’m trying not to look at the fact that his head is on the wrong way around. The lower lighting is helping with that. I keep thinking about the last time we spoke, about the stupid snippy little argument we had about his music, of all things. He’d brought this old school ipod up with him filled with his mum and dad’s music, stuff from the early 21st century. He kept telling me I needed to listen to something – I don’t even remember what it was, now – and I told him I don’t like oldies. We had this stupid blowout about my lack of taste (his words) and his nostalgia boner for an era he never lived through (my words), and we went to bed mad. Then the creature came.

I think he’s still wearing his earbuds, but there’s no way I can bring myself to get them. But now I really want to listen to that song.

Day 6

Cards: King of Clubs, King of Hearts

I’m panicking and I don’t know what to do. I was down near the officer’s mess and I saw something move. I was deliberately trying not to look in there – it’s carnage, a real charnel pit, and I don’t want to deal with it. But something definitely moved. And later I heard it in the vents.

I’m trying to tell myself to be calm. It can’t be the creature, it’s too small, it’s probably just a rat. Ships are full of rats, right? They always have been, since we started sailing. It’s the way of the world. Where there are people and food there are rats. It has to be a rat.

I’m glad the lights are low.

I’m sleeping with that bear tonight.

Day 7

Cards: Queen of Hearts
Tower pulls: 1

I broke protocol yesterday but I was scared, okay? This is day 7. Salvage ship The Wretched. Flight Engineer Windsor reporting. More things are starting to break on the ship, though thankfully nothing else has caught fire. The water still tastes like piss. And this afternoon the doors on the the bridge failed and I couldn’t get them to open. Even the emergency failsafes failed. The magnets locked tight and wouldn’t release.

I had to break through the glass and climb through to get out. It took hours. That glass is thick, designed to keep atmos in if the ship depressurises. And I think I might have fractured my forearm trying to beat my way through it. I don’t know, maybe it’s not broken, but it really hurts.

Anyway. If I want to get onto the bridge now I need to force my way through that window. So that’s fun.

Day 8

Cards: 3 of Spades, 6 of Hearts
Tower pulls: 1

Day 8, I think. Salvage ship Somebody Please Help Me. Flight Engineer I Promise I’m Not Panicking reporting.

Since it’s so much effort to get onto the bridge I’m trying to make sure that I make full use of my time there, so today I got the scanners working again. And I immediately wished that I hadn’t. The second they came alive they started showing something big that kept disappearing from the read-out. It came back every couple of hours, and it’s really, really close. But when I opened up the comms there’s nothing out there but static. I really hope it’s a glitch, because it sure as shit isn’t a rescue mission.

Is it the creature? I don’t know. It’s definitely out there. I keep seeing its bulk going across the portholes. They’re too small and it’s too big for me to make out any real details, and it seems to know when I’m not looking directly. But it’s out there, scuttling around. I hate it and I wish it would die.

How does it survive out there? I don’t think I want to know the answer to that question.

Day 9

Cards: 10 of Diamonds, Jack of Hearts, 9 of Diamonds
Tower pulls: 3

I woke up hot and sweating. Today’s breakage: climate control. What fun!

When I went to get breakfast I found mould in some of the protein slurry we call food. There’s… nothing, really nothing I can do about that. I just sealed it up and I’m hoping it doesn’t spread, and that I can fix the climate problem before the rest of the food gets contaminated.

The water still tastes like piss, too.

I keep being diverted from my task of getting down to the maintenance deck and actually fixing some of this broken shit. I wonder if I’m deliberately putting it off, if the thought that I might fix everything is giving me hope that would be dashed if I were to get down there and find that I can’t fix everything? But if I don’t get down there then I can’t figure out what’s wrong with the distress beacon. And if I don’t do that then I can’t get the distress beacon working. Do you see my dilemma?

So today, instead of going down to maintenance, I decided to go and crawl around in the engines instead. Most of the creature’s damage seems to have been localised to the maintenance deck and I don’t think it actually got to the engine bay. And if it didn’t destroy the engines then why aren’t they running? Why isn’t this damn ship moving? I spent a full day down there trying to figure out what’s wrong but I simply have no idea. I fixed anything that looked broken but the engines honestly seem fine. I can’t see any reason why we’re dead in the water.

But we are. And I think I may have broken something while I was “fixing” things, because at some point the gravity drive failed. And so then I had to fix that, and when I did I was stupidly not mounted to anything, and so I fell and landed on my already-sore arm. Which still may or may not be broken, I have no idea.

I don’t know how much longer I can do this.

Day 10

Cards: 2 of Spades
Tower pulls: 1

I said this yesterday and I’m going to say it again. I don’t know how much longer I can do this.

Day 11

Cards: Jack of Spades, Ace of Clubs, 7 of Diamonds, Queen of Clubs, 5 of Clubs, 6 of Spades
Tower pulls: 3 (+1 negated by Ace of Clubs)

Day 10. It’s been a week and a half. I’m still alive, somehow.

I was rummaging through the crew quarters, trying to ignore the fact that I’m rifling through the belongings of my dead friends, and I found a box of new water filters in one of the lockers. Which means I can fix the water filtration system and stop drinking my own piss. That feels like a win. A small win, but I’ll take it.

I’ve been thinking about the creature. I’m trying not to but… well, how can I avoid it? It’s still moving on the outside of the ship and I’m still trying to figure out how it survives out there. Because it does. It can live in the freezing, pressureless, airless void of space. How is that possible?

And then I started to wonder. If it can live out there, does it think that space is its territory? Are we in its home? Did it attack us because it’s defending itself? The thought makes me cold despite the heat.

I don’t have time to get philosophical, though. Whether I like it or not I’m on the clock, and I need to keep busy if I want to keep sane. The emergency lighting has been really impacting my mood, so I climbed up into the crawlspace and got the main lights working again. It was a long, cramped job, but I actually didn’t hate it. I felt safer up here, out of sight among the cables, pressed up against the hull of the ship. I almost didn’t want to come down.

When I came down I felt exposed and vulnerable in the open spaces of the ship. Which is weird, because I distinctly remember feeling like this place was very cramped when I first came aboard. But I decided that I wanted to make myself a little bolthole, somewhere cramped and small and out of the way that I can sleep in. And maybe hide in, if that thing gets on board.

There’s a storage closet not far from the steps down to the maintenance deck that people used to go and smoke in. All of those closets have got extractor fans in them and fire suppression systems, because they’re all packed full of… well, things being stored, that might catch fire at any point. This one has never been used, though, so it’s a good place to light up without being caught. And I figured that might be a good place to make my nest.

Unfortunately it seems like a few people were on a smoke break when the thing attacked. And I guess it found them, because they were in bits. So I won’t be using that closet as my bolt hole, but I cleared them out and gave them a sky burial anyway. Which I should have done for Anton, but didn’t. One of them even had a rifle, which I’m now carrying around with me. I thought maybe it would make me feel safer but it actually just makes me feel ridiculous.

I need to get the emergency beacon up and running. Get help. It’s all I can think about. Dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. Beam that out into space and hope someone hears.

Dot dot dot.

Dash dash dash.

Dot dot dot.

Dot dot dot.

Day 11

Cards: 8 of Clubs, 2 of Clubs

When the thing first got on board, we only knew about it because Irena was right there when it happened. She managed to send a ship-wide emergency call, let us know we had an intruder. And then we all heard her die.

I don’t know how much time she bought us. Some, I guess. And I don’t even know where she was, because I still haven’t found her body. But I suppose I’m only alive as a result of her. So thanks, Irena. If I find you I’ll take care of you, I promise.

I’ve found her journal. Well, I say found. It was in her bunk, because where else would it be? I shouldn’t have read any of it but I just wanted to feel some sort of human connection, you know? Her last few entries were about how much she missed home, how much she wanted to see her kittens again. Which will be full grown cats now, I guess, since we’ve been out here so long.

I miss everyone.

Day 12

Cards: Queen of Diamonds[^2], 8 of Spades
Tower pulls: 3. Final pull was death.

Once again I find myself obsessed with the engine. Why isn’t it running? There’s nothing wrong with it. It hasn’t suffered any damage.

I took it all apart. Piece by greasy piece, hour by hour, I disassembled the entire damn thing and put it back together again. I’m fairly sure it all went back the way it was meant to. And it still doesn’t run.

Maybe I’ve done some damage that I don’t know about. But it wasn’t running to begin with, so what does that matter?

I didn’t see the creature properly. I have no idea what it actually is. I only know that I heard it, scuttling and slathering and hissing in that weird, multi-tonal shriek that make me want to peel my skin off.

I’ve been hearing that in my sleep. Like I heard it over the comms.

Tomorrow maybe I’ll finally go back down to the maintenance deck and actually try to fix that beacon. We’ll see. It’s nearly been two weeks. Something has to give.

This is Taylor Windsor, last survivor of The Wretched, signing off.

END TRANSMISSION.