ZineQuest. The annual event where RPG products get funded in the time it takes to watch a movie. Instead of my usual reviews, these are glamorous, unaccounted-for hype machines with little to no critique — just joy.
Let’s talk about this exciting new development…
The game about teens and malls is getting an expansion.
Mall Kids: More Malls, More Kids is the first major expansion to Mall Kids, including new options for teens and malls, new scenarios, and new modules that change the game rules and objectives. Stay one step ahead of mall security, experience different seasons at the mall, or spend the night in a spooky mall! All of this content can be mixed and matched to create your unique game, and can be combined with all previous Mall Kids content.
Matthew Gravelyn
PDF Backer level: $5
Physical Backer level: $10
About malls…
Malls are filled with everything while being empty of anything. They’re neon tubes that glow with distractions from arcades to smoothie huts to countless Footlockers.
And malls eat only one resource, time and the time you sold for money. In Mall Kids, you play the people with the most of this resource, illustrated in numerous other properties from Mall Rats to Breakfast Club, you play teenagers.
Mall Kids is about growing up and standing out against “the man” while inside these capitalist cathedrals.
Your two stats are corporate and cred. You need corporate in-order to survive but want cred to have a reason to survive at all — too much corporate and you sell-out. Too much cred and you give a big ‘ole finger to the system.
The mall can be any color of neon; the kids can be anyone. This game isn’t about Stranger Things monsters or a love interest, although it might have those things.
This game is about kids, a mall, and the day they changed because of it.
What’s the product?
Mall Kids: More Mall, More Kids, is slated to be a 24-page, A5 (5.5” x 8.5”) booklet printed on 70 lb. uncoated paper. Its visual design is thanks to the artistic talents of Kaitlin Bruder.
Playstyle. It’s a GM-less narrative game played in a single session. If you're ambitious, you could play it in the time it takes to watch The Breakfast Club, but I’d suggest a little more breathing room.
Genre/Setting. The mall can be anything from an ‘80s extravaganza with Duran Duran on repeat, an early 2000s utopia, or it could be a cyberpunk dystopia of cassette tapes and laser-rifle vending machines.
The only constant is the setting. It’s always a mall, and malls are still capitalist strongholds, no matter where it is.
System. This game uses the core engine of Grant Howitt’s Honey Heist.
It’s a system of relatively few but impactful mechanics. Characters are always see-sawing between two separate themes embodied in their two stats. These act as both their competence and progress towards a thematic ending.
About the kids…
So we know what the core game is about and its contents. The question is: what does this expansion do to that concept? Does it build onto it, reinvent it, or use the prior success as marketing for a new idea?
Other expansions might have moved onto the setting’s aesthetic, adulthood, or a singular theme for the mall, but More Malls, More Kids skates past that trend to deliver a wider net of new rules, character options, malls, and scenarios.
The result is possibly the game’s greatest strength, by knowing what is sacred (the dichotomy between mall and kids), and not being sacred to anything else, Matthew invites greater diversity.
Diversity of character, perspective, and story. The mall and kids are a genre, but the collaborators and alternate rules are about warping, re-examining, and inviting the new possibilities those two elements bring to life.
Games don’t live separately from their process. Mall Kids’ method has been one of inclusion, a table-exchange of different creators, each wringing the game for something new.
Because of that process, I think Mall Kids might be more illuminating than others. The mall is familiar. Because capitalism wants to be familiar, it wants to insinuate itself into people's lives, regardless of the individual. For that reason, the mall is always the players’ baseline. Even if it’s an apocalypse, abandoned, or after-hours—the mall conforms to our expectations.
But the kids are anything but ordinary. They’re non-conformist, half-baked, and unique. They’re the fingerprint of every creator Michael has collaborated with.
That’s why backing this zine is as much about supporting a process as it is supporting a product. Because when players sit down to play Mall Kids, they might be getting represented for the first time. Backing this game is supporting that moment.
And for those of us who are privileged enough to have always been represented, we might get to grow just like the kids whose shoes we inhabit.
The original Mall Kid’s foreword.
Just an example of what the first product’s pages looked like. I love the appearance of the “S” everyone wrote on their trapper-keepers back in the early 2000s.
Who should back?
You should back if:
The teenage mall genre is your jam in other mediums from Mall Rats to Stranger Things.
Rules-light games like Honey Heist and one-page RPGs are your preferred playstyle.
You’re looking for sharp emotional conflict without traditional tropes like combat.
You own Mall Kids and want even more character options, malls, and modules to enjoy.
Your table is diverse and underrepresented in tabletop games. The representation in this game from gender pronouns on character sheets to types of stories is something they might have not experienced but deserve to have in their play experience.
You shouldn’t back if:
Rules-heavy or “crunchy” rules systems are your preferred playstyle. This expansion will include additional rules, but it’s unlikely to reach anything close to the scale of D&D, Shadowrun, or the Burning Wheel family of games.
It costs less than a trip to the food court.