Cadences: The Story of a Distance and Its Pair, the first game launch by Soft Chaos Workers cooperative, is currently funding on Indiegogo
Looking for an emotionally intimate game experience for two? Cadences is a Storytelling Game about measuring the distance between two people in a changing relationship. Designed to be played across any distance, this game allows you to connect with someone— no matter how far.
All around you right now are incalculable distances, measured in years, measured in heartbeats, measured in steps between, or miles to a destination. Other distances elude our best efforts to quantify them, and cannot be weighed or assigned a number, even if we feel the weight of them settle in our bodies. Distance is a queer thing. No matter how close two people get, the very molecules of their being push them apart, resisting ideas of perfect alignment, making sure that there is always some level of separation maintained. Language is an imperfect tool, too, for communicating just what another person means to us, just how close we wish we could bring them, or how far apart we need them to stay.
But perfection was never the goal. This is the story — your story — of a Distance and its Pair.
What is Cadences?
Cadences: The Story of a Distance and Its Pair is an epistolatory game designed, played by two people asynchronously through letters, voice mails, and text messages. Together, players create the story of a relationship’s life, from the moment of its conception until the moment it ends. Maybe your Pair will be a cashier and a customer, a parent, and child, two members of a five-person polycule, best friends, or even mortal enemies.
People play as The Distance and The Pair. The Distance is ever-shifting and mysterious. Playing The Distance means seeking to find words and metaphors to describe something abstract and mutable. The Pair is human and flawed. Playing The Pair means playing a grounding, concrete role in contrast to the metaphorical and amorphous nature of the Distance.
The physical pieces of Cadences include a small deck of oracle cards as well as two booklets that serve as a sort of friendship necklace— standing alone as beautiful objects but decidedly in conversation with each other.
Features
Two 6 x 6 booklets with original art
A 15 Card Oracle Deck
20 minutes of original guided audio
Higher tier backers can get other perks: gold foil prints of original work, custom-created audio meditations, play sessions with the designers, or other unique experiences.
Soft Chaos
Soft Chaos is a worker-owned game design cooperative (one of the first in Canada!) that creates critically-engaged, intimate, vulnerable, and unique interactive experiences. Our work includes experimental videogames, tabletop games, larps, art installations, and interactive performances. Cadences is our first major launch after founding.