Over 20 years ago, a much younger version of me got to know a Scottish game designer called Malcolm Craig. I did an interview when he released A|State and we ended up chatting on Forums and email as was the way back then. A few years after that we were both doing Indie game design and after a trip to GenCon in 2006 a bunch of us had the mad idea of creating a UK Games Collective archive to promote indie games at UK conventions, hothouse some games ideas and maybe sell some games as well.

That year Malcolm wrote one of my favourite RPG designs, Cold City. A game of intense suspicion set against the backdrop of a paranoid post-war Berlin. With the characters, all of different nationalities, thrown together to investigate monsters and weird technology, but torn by conflicting agendas and must build trust carefully. He followed it up in 2008 with Hot War, a game that looked at the London in the aftermath of a 1960s world war 3 that never was.

Last year Handiwork games kickstarted a new edition. Malcolm is now an academic teaching and researching cold war history. The new editions bring a new depth and some revised game design tweaks from 20 years of play (I like the way the GM uses "The Cold" as a resource to manage the game's antagonism). They are both now on DriveThru and I recommend you take a look if you like games with a satisfying level of character tension that drives story. Some affiliate links if this sounds your kind of thing: Hotwar 2nd Edition and Cold City 2nd edition.