The hordes are descending. A storm is brewing outside. Resources are scarce, and won’t last the night. Your allies would sell you out in a second to get their odds in their favor. With the situation grim, and getting more desperate by the hour...
Can you survive a day with your family?
The Reunion is a storytelling card game where up to four players try to endure a family gathering on the fast track from bad to worse. Every encounter piles on more stress: a firing line of awkward questions from guilt-tripping parents, monstrous cousins, and snobby in-laws.
Meanwhile the kitchen’s on fire, dinner’s ruined, the house is a wreck—and is that a funnel cloud forming overhead? You can’t even get a moment to yourself without loudmouth toddlers, creepy twins, or angsty teens bursting in on you. In this maelstrom of guilt, grudges, and recrimination, it’s only a matter of time till everybody’s deepest, most uproarious secrets come spilling out.
Leo Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The Reunion is the game that proves him right.
Despite your better judgment, you’ve shown up at the reunion bright and early. You’re nobody’s fool: you’ve learned over the years how to cope with your family. This time, you think, this time, maybe it’ll be different.
It won’t be.
Right away you’re getting grilled about your politics, your relationship, your job prospects, and every other sore point that your family is so good at exploiting. Each turn presents its own Trauma, while only some turns provide Coping Mechanisms to soften the blow.
Meanwhile, your family is mercilessly targeting your unique Characteristics. Depending on what personality traits you've been dealt, the wrong question at the wrong time could utterly destroy you. Relationship troubles? ("When are you going to find someone and settle down?") Job loss? ("Why don't you ask your sister, I'm sure she can find something for you at her company.") Secret lifestyle? ("What on earth is a fur con?") The only limits to the torment are the vagaries of fate and the depths of your imagination!
And as if that's not bad enough, even the Status of the environment around you can change at a moments notice, forcing you to change your plans to try to adapt your Coping strategy to keep up.
As the reunion progresses, your blood pressure rises steadily, your strategies for coping wear thin, and it's not even time for dinner yet—and, as you know from long experience, that’s when the stress really starts to pile up.
In The Reunion, a game that balances both luck and resource management, players try to moderate their blood pressure on individual 'Stress-o-Meters' by shielding themselves from Trauma cards with a dwindling supply of Coping Mechanism cards. It’s impossible to avoid stress entirely, but you can survive the day if you play your cards right—unless cruel fate rips them out of your hand.
And you and your friends will be there to narrate each hilariously awful event right up to the most horrific of all: trying to escape at the end of the night. The culmination of the game will find you all either in a group therapy session, or so deep into the humor of the game, you might just cry till you laugh.
Last one to psychic annihilation wins!
The different cards that make up a game of The Reunion. Assorted Characteristics, a sparse but invaluable assemblage of Coping Mechanisms, and a looming tower of Traumas to overcome. Also pictured: a variety of ways for nature and infrastructure to screw you over.
Your Characteristics (left): these make you especially vulnerable to certain Traumas. One of them you know right away. The other is an unpleasant surprise waiting to happen.
Traumas and Coping Mechanisms: The Traumas are unavoidable – each turn presents a fresh new hell to deal with. But Coping Mechanisms are few and precious, and how you use them can mean the difference between narrow survival and total breakdown.
An early look at a game in action, five turns in. One exposed Characteristic and another waiting to make your life harder. Five Traumas, only three of them successfully avoided by Coping Mechanisms (and now the power’s out, so it’s a good thing you already chose to spend that “Hiding”!). And a steadily climbing Stress-O-Meter that threatens your early demise.
The Reunion gives you the chance to make the story into your own personal hell, telling the players around you exactly what it is that you can't stand about that Cousin you just drew, what's so awkward about the Guilt Trip they just laid on you, or how that Characteristic might actually hit just a little close to home.
Whether you want to dredge deep and dig out your own family history, or spin a (probably pretty believable) tale of your own twisted imagination, The Reunion offers every player the chance to suffer (and cathartically work through) the horrors of the family experience, telling a new and collective story each time.
You and your friends will be there to narrate each hilariously awful event right up to the most horrific of all: trying to escape at the end of the night. The culmination of the game will find you all either in a group therapy session, or so deep into the humor of the game, you might just cry till you laugh.
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