Description

The life simulation game 6-Minute Princess uses incremental deck and stat manipulation to represent the progression of each player’s adopted daughter from age 10 to age 18.

In 6-Minute Princess, each player works to raise his child to succeed in a career of her choosing. By working at various trades, each player’s daughter can focus her physical attributes and open the door for the apprenticeships that will lay the foundation for her later career; money she earns by working those trades can help pay tuition for schooling that will align her skills with her ultimate goal.

By overseeing his daughter’s training, leisure activities, and diet, each player may choose to steer his daughter’s progress toward any among the number of careers available exclusively to her in a particular game. However, his ultimate success will depend not on the relative prestige of the career his daughter chooses but rather on her effectiveness in that career: a beekeeper who knows her trade inside out can expect to do better in life than a paladin who falters in her questing.

Players construct their daughters’ character decks gradually all year long, building toward the planting and harvest festivals, in which each girl can compete against other contestants in a variety of contests to win fame, prizes, and the favor of the powerful. During the festival, players enter any contests or activities of their choosing by drawing hands of cards from their daughters’ character decks, then playing out those hands of cards against the other entrants. Any contestant who acquits herself well can expect to encounter rivals and, by overcoming them, reach new heights of skill—and perhaps even romance.

Players who feel confident in their daughters’ training can send them adventuring outside the confines of the capital city and its environs in hopes of finding help unavailable through normal means, whether from new acquaintances, after defeating enemies, through fairy meetings, or in undiscovered troves. Daughters who apply themselves to their schooling may even earn the hard-won blessing of their patron deity, giving them advantages when they work and adventure. As they do, all will seek their place in the capital’s social life by cultivating helpful relationships with those who live in the palace—and can eventually aspire to a position among the kingdom’s nobility, perhaps even its royalty.

But raising a daughter isn’t easy. Keeping her healthy means feeding her well, and both food and education cost money. Yet the work she does to help earn that money can increase her resentment if she feels as if too much is being required of her—if she works or studies too long without time to herself, if she wears herself out adventuring without spending time vacationing to renew her energy. And if her resentment grows, she may fall into delinquency, may even run away from home without considering the consequences of abandoning her schooling or missing the chance to compete at a festival.

So it’s up to you to do what you can to shepherd your daughter through the difficulties of growing up, teaching her how to work and how to learn and giving her skills for the life she eventually chooses to live. She may not be grateful at the time, but as you teach her to be moral and industrious, to work hard at getting ahead, she will come, in the end, to be thankful for the discipline you have helped her maintain during her formative years.

If she does not, however, then you will have a sorrow shared more deeply only by your daughter’s patron deity: that of knowing that your daughter, entrusted to you by the heavens, took a different path in life—one that carried her down roads separating her from her destiny forever. Whether she ends as a matador or a witch, a chimneysweep or a bandit queen, you will no longer have the power to direct her course.

Because when your daughter turns 18, your job is over: she is of age, free to follow her own path in life. You can only hope that she will feel kindly toward you for the role you played in her upbringing, for the tools you have helped her equip herself with. Because whatever part she chooses to play in the kingdom, it is you who gave her the chance to choose that path—and you who prepared her to succeed in it. Your parenting skills will be reflected in her success.

A full game of 6-Minute Princess is played in 8 sessions of approximately 1 to 3 hours apiece, depending on the number of players.