Heredity: Book of Swan is a co-operative, narrative game in which you play a family in a post-apocalyptic world in a campaign structured in five chapters, for a total playing time of 12-15 hours. You can take any number of references as your starting point: Mad Max, Last of Us, The Walking Dead, etc. All will be revealed as you play!
The five chapters of the campaign are grouped into five adventure packs including everything you need to play: terrain that forms the game board, characters to interact with, objects, narrative cards, etc. Some cards describe what is seen, found, and met; symbols indicate how each card is used. Depending on your actions and events in the scenario, you can turn over these cards and change the playing field, situation, objects, and characters as you advance through the story in your adventure.
No matter the player count, four player characters are controlled by the players, while Swan, the youngest member of the family, is a non-playable character. Each character has three action tokens, and you collectively decide in which order to use them to make your characters act out the story you're telling. (Some actions may or must be done by multiple characters at once for maximum effect.) By using the tokens on your character's cards (head, torso, legs), you can talk to other characters, look around, move, fight, or get better items. Each card can also be combined with equipment cards, whose location is indicated using a system of matching symbols. Equipment gives you additional actions or helps you do things. You can switch equipment between games or create new items to use. If your character gets hurt, they can't perform certain actions.
A "karma" deck is used during checks and combat and can potentially change the outcome of your actions. During the campaign, this deck transforms to match your choices and will influence your morale, actions, story evolution, and ending of the game.
The game has no fixed order of moves. Instead players follow the "time line" of cards that controls the game's events. The scenarios are written, but your actions lead to cards moving along the timeline as you explore one part of a scenario or another. This makes it possible to create a deeply narrative game without the need for an app.
