Pickets & Blinds

Designer blurb:

Pickets & Blinds is a game for 3-5 players taking as long to play as watching a feature-length film. Each player improvises scenes from a story -- a story about how normal people in normal American towns end up killing each other.

Every player tells his or her own story. Each story is a separate and unique tale of a murder in the suburbs. Every time your turn comes up, you tell a little more of your main character's story, trying to keep everyone else at the table entertained.

You'll also need a deck of playing cards. These are used to help inspire your tales by suggesting over 500 story leads you can freely incorporate into your narration. You'll try to include particularly exciting moments (called Triggers). Once you work a Trigger into your story, you get to play a simple, Memory-style card game, the goal of which is to capture pairs. As pairs are made, they are removed from play. Collecting these pairs earns you points, and when the cards run out, the player with the most points wins.

Successfully collecting pairs lets you mess with the other players' stories, making things trickier for their characters, and generally heightening the tension. And one card in the deck can't be paired up. If at any time you're able to guess what card is without its match, you greatly increase your chances of winning. Guess wrong, and you'll lose the game. There's a reason that odd card is called "The Downfall."