Viva la QueerBar
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The Game
Viva la QueerBar is a slice-of-life story game about a queer bar (or queer café) and the team who runs it. It's a game about the pleasures and struggles of being part of a queer community.
Whether as a fantasy medieval tavern, a cyberpunk underground club, a real-world gay bar in a historical setting, an intergalactic queer bar on a spaceship, or anything else you can think of – the QueerBar lives wherever you want it to.
All you need to play is this zine, a regular deck of playing cards (52 cards), and 1-5 people to play with you. No preparation necessary – just start playing!
Viva la QueerBar is great for complete newbies to role-playing games and fun for experienced TTRPG players alike. It welcomes players of all genders and orientations who are willing to take on the perspective of a queer character for the duration of the game. Since this is a story game more than a role-playing game, however, you will spend more time describing your character's thoughts, feelings, and actions than you will acting as your character.
The Rules
Viva la QueerBar is a stand-alone role-playing game (RPG) for 2-6 players (no GM), conveniently packaged as a handy zine and perfect for no-prep one-shots of about 2-4 hours play time. The rules of this Descended from the Queen story game are very simple: At first you read the short instructions out loud together. The text has our recommended consent and safety tools already built-in. During that introduction, you also choose the rough setting of your QueerBar.
Then the core game starts: You take turns drawing a playing card and looking up the question associated with it in the random tables. Over the course of the game, your individual QueerBar, your main characters, some side characters, and details about the surroundings of the QueerBar develop through your answers to the questions. In the end, all main characters answer: What is your most important wish for the future of the QueerBar?
Due to the random selection and order of the questions (you'll typically use around half of them during a 3-hour game) and the huge variability of possible settings, you can play Viva la QueerBar again and again and have a different experience each time.
The Zine
Format:
- 32 pages
- A5 format (148 x 210 mm / 5.8 x 8.3 inches)
- Full-color
- Zine: Staple-bound
- PDF: Screenreader-ready with image descriptions (alt-text), PDF Tags, internal references and external links
Contents:
- Complete instructions for play (consent and safety tools included)
- 4 random tables with questions (13 options for each of the 4 suits = 52 different questions)
- Essay about real-world queer bars (plus 23 mini portraits of famous queer bars and cafés)
- Interior illustrations based on real queer bar flyersof the 1920s-2000s
Bonus material (available for free at plotbunnygames.com under Downloads):
- 20 premade queer bars/cafés and 20 premade queer characters for inspiration
- Template for playingcards.io with a card deck ready to import and use
Credits
- Game Design: Sandra Dahlhoff and Andrea Rick
- Essay: Andrea Rick
- Proofreading: Camilla Kutzner (German), Noella Handley (English)
- Cover illustration: Hannah van den Höövel
- Art Direction and Layout: Andrea Rick
- Interior illustrations: Andrea Rick
- Crowdfunding consulting: Jasmin Neitzel
In 2023, Viva la QueerBar won a "Kristallener Stephan" (rank 4-10) in the German TTRPG award "Publikumspreis für Eskapismus, Nerdkultur & Phantastik (PENP23)" (Public Choice Award for Escapism, Nerd Culture & Fantasy), also known als "Goldener Stephan".