Carry and Never Going Home both have unusual systems—especially for games set in the midst of a war. There is no detailed tactical combat, though each has specialized rules for fighting. Never Going Home takes a more traditional approach, offering skills, attributes, even spells. (The latter are evocatively named Whispers, which is nice and creepy and suits the game’s foreboding portrayal of magic.) Still, it allows for a pip-shifting D6 pool that is meant, I think, to weigh training and expertise against decision-making that is necessarily urgent and impulsive.
The game also makes use of playing cards in a way that bridge the distance between selfless soldiering and personaI contemplation. Cards can be used for basic mechanical boosts, but they also feed and are drawn from a separate part of the game that is called The Journey. Through them, we can learn about a soldier’s life before the war or about his inner life. It’s really fascinating and pushes the game close toward moments that play almost like a story game. These moments can make the chaos of battle all the more meaningful for your players.
If Never Going Home approaches story game territory, Carry steps deliberately into it. Here is a game that is all about framing scenes, in the dramatic sense. It is a game about interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts during a war, and some of the most brutal experiences will probably play out between American soldiers. (Civilians and enemy combatants remain elliptical.) Each PC is featured in specific moments, as the game tracks individual story arcs, just as it tracks complex knotting that comes from interaction, especially in conflict.
I do not mean to say that battle plays no part in this game. On the contrary, when it comes up, it blots out everything else, though, even here, conflicts within a squad are just as dangerous as enemy gunfire. In fact, they may actualize enemy gunfire, by putting more dice into the hands of the GM or those of the player who controls the ranking officer. What’s important here is not so much whether the PCs follow the orders that are given by the ranking officer, but whether they agree with these orders. In the end, the GM benefits from dissent to a potentially lethal extent.
As with Never Going Home, Carry also creates opportunities to learn the personal lives of individual PCs. As they confront their personal burdens, (the things they carry as Tim O’Brien would say,) they change mechanically—including, potentially, what die types they are rolling. Action and contemplation become linked, as they are in Never Going Home.
While I’m just offering impressions—not conclusions (sorry)—I guess the above says something about why I enjoyed bringing Carry and Never Going Home to my gaming table. Both games made me think. Their mechanics are unusual, and open up narrative approaches to what it means to be an individual stuck in a relentlessly conformist setting—one in which you are surrounded by death and inhumanity—and in which you are doing whatever you can to avoid both. I will say again that neither game is going to appeal to every player, but if you give them a chance, they may lead you to fulfilling experiences, albeit uneasy ones. But then, after all, they are games about war and humanity. Uneasiness, at least, should go with the territory.