Although analog roleplaying games are best known for massive, commercially successful, corporately-owned properties such as Dungeons and Dragons, the explosion of low-cost digital self-publishing over the course of the last twenty years has led to a dramatic increase in the public availability of niche, artistic, and experimental games. Released online, in limited print runs, or in the case of a lucky few through a small publishing house, these games rarely receive the public attention paid to large franchises like the Hasbro owned and published Dungeons and Dragons. They nevertheless constitute a growing portion of the games landscape. Game designers read, revise, and respond to each others work just as they would in any other artistic medium, and breakout hits — like Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, and Lancer — develop public followings and fanbases in their own right.
Niche among this already niche industry are a small but growing number of explicitly Jewish roleplaying games with titles such as Doikayt, Jews in Space, Ma Nishtana, Doughnuts and Dreidels, Matza Matzah, and Dream Apart. These games cover a diverse spectrum of tones, scales, and mechanics. Some, like Max Fefer’s Hanukkah Goblins, are light-hearted adventures full of silliness and sufganiyot. Others, like Yonah Sienna’s In Every Generation, are serious meditations on violence and generational trauma. Some can be printed on a single sheet of paper while others come in professionally bound rulebooks more than a hundred pages long. Some are designed to be played alone, some with an intimate partner, and others a large gathering of friends. Yet they all share two things: an investment in Jewish tradition and an interest in exploring those traditions via physical play.
In this paper, I will focus on three such games, each of which maintains a unique relationship to history, culture, and an embodied ritual practice to offer a queer retelling of a traditionally Jewish scene:
Ma Nishtana (Rabinowitz and Bisogno 2021) and is a game structured as a Passover seder, complete with saltwater and horseradish, which invites players to reenact the story of the Exodus. Only this time, perhaps Miriam is a man, Aaron a woman, Zipporah a lion, and Moses an astronaut. Or perhaps Miriam is a bird, Aaron a factory worker, Pharaoh a mountain, Moses a giraffe. As players retell a familiar story in unfamiliar circumstances, they find that it is the ritual sensations—of sound and taste—which remain the same. These sensorial elements are so important that Ma Nishtana includes an entire set of alternate rituals to simulate them in the event you are playing the game online.
Matza Matzah (JubbyGestalt 2021) is a two-player game of homoerotic Torah study, in which a pair of partners must debate increasingly fraught texts as they grow increasingly physically intimate. The game’s primary mechanic is the breaking of a single piece of matzah at the end of each scene. The player left holding the larger piece will take a position of physical control during the next debate: first holding their partner’s hand, then holding their partner’s thigh, and finally interrupting their partner’s argument (if they so desire) with a kiss. The players are not permitted to acknowledge this mounting intimacy until the final sequence of the game, when the embodied desire overcomes the rational interpretation of texts, reducing the player’s arguments to nonsense. The game additionally uses masculine pronouns to refer to both partners, although it acknowledges that these might be changed based on who should play.
Dream Apart (Rosenbaum 2018) is a “Jewish fantasy of the shtetl” and by far the most commercially successful of the games discussed in this paper. A historical fantasy of “demons and wedding jesters; betrothals and pogroms; mystical ascensions and accusations of murder,” Dream Apart was developed in close conversation with, and released alongside, another game, Dream Askew, which tells a science-fiction story of a queer commune after an apocalypse.These two games have much in common textually and mechanically, and draw, through their parallelism, a comparison between Queer and Jewish enclaves. Beyond this imagination, though, both Dreams remind their players to remember the needs of their physical bodies in play sessions which could last up to four hours. Each game includes a recommended dinner recipe. Dream Askew suggests a hardy, community garden-grown meal of fried kale and potatoes. Dream Apart gives a brief overview of dietary law and a traditional recipe for rosl borscht.
Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s study of communal affects and on scholars such as Joseph Laycock who have noted the similarity between roleplay and religious practice, I argue that the emphasis these three games place on gathered bodies, physical sensations, and traditional food constitute a restatement of what is essential to Judaism. To queer these scenes through the medium of the analog roleplaying game is to invite players into a physical, tactile space in which they playfully reimagine Jewish tradition via their own bodies. To make explicit space for non-Jewish players to participate (as all three games do) is to suggest that these games are a site at which one might encounter Judaism for the first time. It is the effects and sensations which come first, and provide a framework for later—perhaps even incidental—historical and textual learning. On some level, the possibility space provided by game playing means that historical and textual details don’t matter at all. It is, rather, in their embodied and affective alignments that these games continue to transmit a distinct, contemporary reworking of what it feels like to be Jewish.
Analog roleplaying games such as Ma Nishtana, Matza Matzah, and Dream Apart draw on the embodied and sensorial to transmit a continuity with Jewish traditions, even as the content of their games invites a queer reworking of historically significant Jewish narratives. Through the medium of play, they create new texts and contexts -- but by preserving ritual structure and specific sensations of touch and taste, they also remain in clear conversation with Jewish culture. This is especially notable given the way the games make space for non-Jewish players and those without any prior knowledge of the traditions they engage. To encounter Judaism through these games is to learn via affect: first by touch and by feel, and only later by text and history.