According to the internet, everyone will, at some point, go on adventure with Pedro Pascal as he escorts A Special Child Through A Bad World. This concert peaked a few years ago when Pascal was the lead in both The Mandalorian and The Last of Us but it was the first thing I thought about when I read The Last Caravan. Designer Ted. S. Bushman took inspiration from mid-apocalyptic stories including The Stand and Roadside Picnic to put together a game about a family making their way across what used to be the United States. I brought home a review copy from Gen Con after speaking with the author for last year’s Kickstarter. Does the road trip end in success? Let’s play to find out.
The Last Caravan is set in the aftermath of the Two Months War, an alien invasion that suddenly ground to a halt. Rather than the high level heroes seen in films like Independence Day, the characters are a group of survivors making their way cross country to what used to be San Francisco. The city is now the home of The Republic of Saint Francis, the last gasp of the American government. The group hits different regions along the way tracking resources and coming across the different factions on the ground. The big factions are defined in the book and I really liked how there are alien factions in addition to what you might expect from people. I won’t get into spoilers here, but it adds a lot of drama to stories when you discover the aliens aren’t a big faceless enemy. They have a lot of all-too-human motivations like fear and regret.
The game runs on a heavily Forged In The Dark inspired system. It’s a bit simplified but uses the same failure/complication/clean success dice pool as its older sibling. There are playbooks that cover most of the roles in these sorts of stories from the battle weary soldier to the scientist that loves to play with alien tech. Two of the playbooks are unique to this game complete with unique mechanics just for them. The first is the Innocent, who learns hard truths about the world during the journey and eventually grows into one of the other survival roles. The other is the Good Boi, who lets a player take the role of the family dog to protect the humans. These roles seem crucial to telling the story The Last Caravan wants to tell and they change the game when they are part of the table into something more unique. Don’t worry about pet harm though. Any negative effects that could cause harm to a human cause fear to the Good Boi and if they would take enough to die, the dog runs away instead never to return to the story.
The journey is presented through a sandbox narrative campaign where each region tells a different story while allowing players to come up with emergent threads for their personal group. The region has a specific trigger to allow the players to move on but they can choose to stick around at the risk of coming to the attention of one of the big factions. When they do move to a region they trigger a milestone advancement. I really like this clean and simple campaign aspect of the game.
A large segment of the book is dedicated to the details of the world. How the factions came to be, why the aliens attacked and so on. I found it compelling and useful to run the game but I also wanted it to take inspiration from Blades In The Dark. I found myself changing some details that felt more in line with the ambiguous tone of the campaign. The game goes out of their way to make the factions not all good or bad but the details in the history section tip the hand as to who the designer thinks are the real good guys and bad guys. The aliens are a great antagonist but I felt the true stories behind the human protagonists needing a bit more detail at the table.
Bottom Line: If you enjoy Blades-style mechanics and want to tell the story of an alien invasion in progress, The Last Caravan should land on your table.
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