Surreal Estate
A downloadable game
Surreal Estate is a storytelling role-playing game about generating and exploring weird houses, in the style of a House Hunters-like reality TV show. Players will create wishful buyers and an antagonistic realtor, collaboratively build a sequence of strange houses, and develop their latent PSYCHIC POWERS as they explore the weird and the supernatural. Will you emerge from your house hunting experiences with the perfect house and stronger bonds than ever? Or will the machinations of the devious realtor leave their mark on the home of your dreams?
A game for 3-4 players, to be played in roughly 4 hours.
Feedback, questions, fun stories? Hell yeah, let me know! Find me on Twitter at @asweeterpotato or send an email to asweeterpotato (at) gmail (dot) com.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $4 CAD. You will get access to the following files:
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Community Copies
If you'd like to check out the game but are unable to at the listed price, feel free to grab a community copy! I'll add more as people buy the game--if you're interested in the game but there are no community copies left, send an email or a DM on Twitter and I'll get you one.
Comments
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Played this earlier today, great cooperative journey familiar to anyone who's seen house hunting tv shows. We made each room slightly odd or supernatural, and found reasons to like or dislike each thing to debate which house we wanted to buy. Enjoyable low stakes interactive game, would happily play again. Good for less experienced gamers too.
A beautiful game capable of producing transcendently nightmarish house designs. Easily matches Delver as a game for producing surreal situations that nevertheless remain perfectly legible, and as such I'd call it one of the truly great procedural map generation games. Absolutely play this; the Zener card mechanics in particular are inspired.
Surreal Estate is a oneshot-friendly rpg where you take on the roles of house buyers contending with a supernatural threat.
It definitely tends towards a wacky comedy tone, but depending on how you run it, it can be either HGTV meets Control, or HGTV meets Hill House.
Surreal Estate is 13 pages, with a clean layout and only a few graphics, and it uses Zenner cards (those ESP symbol cards) for its core resolution mechanic. Basically, your opponent picks a card, you try to guess it, and your number of guesses is determined by your statline.
That said, everything in the book is very clearly explained, and the game itself is easy to pick up without feeling too simple.
Gameplay-wise, Surreal Estate has a bit of an odd feel. It definitely cleaves close to the HGTV format, but it also has the GM play as the Realtor---who is covertly the PCs' enemy. This can cause some weirdness with the tone (i.e. the Realtor shows the PCs a house, commands it to eat them, and then when that fails the Realtor offers to show them another house.) However, if you lean into the wackiness (or simply make the Realtor not be the villain) this resolves itself pretty easily.
There's also some fairly soft adversarial mechanics in the game, with the players facing off against each other at the end to get *their* choice for the perfect home. There aren't canon winners and losers though, the game's just mirroring the format of the source material, but this might be a thing your group wants to play up or play down.
Overall, if you like shorter comedy games and you're familiar with HGTV, you should absolutely get this. If you haven't seen House Hunters or the like and aren't familiar with the format, this can still be a lot of fun, although it benefits a lot from the group being comfortable improvising story elements on the fly.