Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast

A slice-of-life legacy tabletop role-playing game about a found family and their magical home.

Created by Mercedes Acosta, Jay Dragon, M Veselak, and Lillie Harris with Possum Creek Games, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast was funded on Indiegogo with over $420,000 pledged. You can download a free Playkit here while you wait for the book to be published!

The Set Up

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is a legacy RPG with 48 chapters that reveal new worlds, new secrets, and new character depth that can be played in any order with any friends at any time! This is the flexible and fun game that is perfect for the busy nerd who has a hard time coordinating schedules with everyone on a regular basis (*raises hand*).

When the final edition is released, the book will serve as your personal version of the magical B&B, to be written in, covered in stickers, and opened slowly. As the owner of the book, you are the Concierge (think DM, but with way less responsibility). You need to be familiar with the cast as well as the flow of play, but all players can basically start with zero knowledge and jump into the game easily.

Let’s see what works and what doesn’t in Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast!

Highlights

• The chapters. Each chapter of the book serves as a traditional RPG session and generally lasts around 1-2 hours. The chapters each focus on specific characters while leaving room for others to join as desired, and there are bespoke mechanics for each chapter that are rules-lite and easy to catch on to.
• The characters. There is a cast of 7 core residents and up to 50 guests that can participate in a session, and they range from robots to witches to sentient bunny warren. Players choose a character for one session, but are encouraged to switch often, with the lovely note that in this way, different players can reveal different aspects of a character’s personality. Each character balances uniqueness with archetypes, and it is easy to find yourself in everyone.

• The character sheets. When you begin the game, some chapters and characters are inaccessible; you unlock them by completing characters’ growth journeys, each of which is specific to the character. I especially love Amelie’s sheet; as a robot, you can rewrite her code as she progresses, and when every line has changed, you unlock “Glitch in the System.”
• The inclusion. As with Wanderhome, my favorite game from Possum Creek Games, queer themes abound in Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast. Aside from creating trans characters to play with and focusing on stories about hurting people finding loving community, I think this is also expressed in the soft, inviting language throughout the book and its emphasis on player health and enjoyment over gameplay. For instance, players are explicitly encouraged to use take-backsies if you have a better idea later or don’t like what someone says.
• The easy access. The book is designed to open up slowly, which means you don’t have to read the whole thing and memorize loads of rules before starting the game. You could very easily sit down with your friends, open it for the first time, and get through the intro and one session in a comfortable evening.

Challenges

• Mark up the book. I’m torn on this one, and I won’t fully know until I use the actual book. I love the idea of marking up character sheets and filling in bookcases with stickers to mark achievements, but also…what if I make a mistake and it is immortalized forever!? I will be strongly tempted to try to print off pages so that the book remains pristine, which absolutely defeats its purpose. Time will tell what path I choose…
• Less character creativity. This is an RPG with established characters rather than one in which you can create your own. There is a lot of good to this (see above), but some people are going to miss the freedom to play their own creation.

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My friends Jessy, Rachel, and Allonté played “Chapter 5: Another Rainy Day” and “Chapter 10: Wash Cycle” with me to help with this review. Find out what they thought about Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast below!

Jessy (he/him) says…

“I had a great time playing Yazeba’s. It was a constant delight! The unique rules that each chapter introduces help to underpin the mood and feel for those chapters, both that we played mostly included elements of slapstick chaos as we attempted to keep Hey Kid entertained so they wouldn’t explode or attempted to rush through a mountain of laundry so Sal could get to his show on time. The chapters we played also tied multiple characters into the game, making sure that every chapter has characters that are invested in events. And what characters they are! On top of the central 7 characters who live or work at the B&B, there are 50 additional guests who you can also play. These characters include a group of rabbits who wear outfits, a sentient glob of grim, or, my personal favourite, the evil skeleton who wants to end the world but is rather ineffectual. All the characters have traits called Bingos and Whoopsies that are used for differing effect in each chapter but always reinforce a characters personality and reward the player for embracing those traits. It’s an elegant way to keep aspects of each character consistent even between different players while also giving players room to make each character their own while they play them. I love that the game encourages players to switch between characters for different chapters, giving everyone a chance to play their favourites.

Due to the nature of the test play kit there are some aspects of the game I’m still a bit muddy on, mostly pertaining to its legacy nature. Each character has a track that gets filled up at the end of chapters but we didn’t have much opportunity to see what effects that can have due to the limited nature of our play test. There are also some aspects like collectables that I’m a bit unclear on. My hope is that these mechanics will be a lot of fun, but currently I find them a bit unclear. However, I expect once I have the opportunity to play more chapters and experience more of the legacy mechanics I will enjoy them.

Overall, the game is really great! I had a load of fun playing with my friends and look forward to the full released.”

Rachel (she/her) says…

I had a really great time playing Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast. Being given a character with just enough guidance in the form of Bingos and Whoopsies was a new experience but very easy to get into.

For the first game, I played Gertrude trying in vain to keep Hey Kid occupied on a rainy day with the help of a weird skeleton and a bored desk clerk. Gertrude is not the kind of character I gravitate towards normally, so I relied on the guidance of the character sheet and soon got the hang of it. I came out feeling like I knew Gertrude a little better by the end.

The second session I played The Bunnies in the Garden Who Wear Little Outfits; yes, that is their full name. They were super fun to play, making a new warren in the over-flowing laundry room that the other players were trying to tidy up. They are the vessel for any voice/accent you have wanted to try out as they have so many voices, and for me at least one or two of the bunnies stood out as favorites. The sheet for these guys has a little less on it but that lends to so much room for creativity, I love them.

Allonté (he/they) says…

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast (YBB) is another great creation from Possum Creek Games. Not only does it have a great cast of diverse characters, it also offers plenty of (re)playability in its almost choose-your-own-adventure style of scenes. YBB is super easy to begin and requires very little prep. It feels like the perfect game to play when everyone wants to relax, has limited time, wants to play something that is DMless, or wants to see the character’s story blossom like a novel but through play. In Wanderhome, the creation I know Possum Creek Games from, the creativity is front-loaded in the place you make at the table, but here in YBB that is more focused to one’s interpretation of the character’s Bingos, Whoopsies, and goal track.

I had the pleasure of playing Sal and Monday. I think I had the most fun with the goal tracks – it is the thing that can carry over from game-to-game and is easily affected by the choice made at the table. Another unique thing this game offers is seeing how other folk interpret characters that have already been played. It was very cool to see how my Sal and Tricia’s Sal felt different and the same; that there is a degree of headcanon that keeps the story of the scenes feel so unique. While Sal feels like some odd multiverse version of my soul, Monday was a lot of fun to play. If you want to play something that is some amalgam of fairy-god-person and/or crossroads demon, give Monday a try!

You may enjoy this game if you are the type of player who:

• Needs more structure
• Likes to embody a character outline
• Likes minimal mechanics
• Is an (aspiring) actor
• Is secretly a demon child who will literally explode if the inn goes less than 40 mph…or something to that effect.

You may NOT enjoy this if you are the type of player who:

• Needs loose structure of goals
• Does not enjoy being a character that is somewhat pre-made
• Needs conflict that is outside the group/party
• Is an (aspiring) director
• Is a slime princess turned into a tall humanoid by a pact made with a glittering entity all in the name of the quest to do the umpteenth load of laundry so that they won’t get cursed, kicked out, be forced to walk the long winding road to some weird under-colony of Too Many Rabbits where they must make a new life as a side-show alien…or something to that effect.

If you want to try Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast,
you can download the Ashcan PDF here.

Their Indigogo campaign raised over $420,000 in March 2022.

Follow Possum Creek Games to stay up to date on the game’s official release!

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Want more creative TTRPGs?
Check out Common Sense and Sensibility,
a game designed by
Rachel and Tricia of Roar Cat Reads!

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