Eyes on the Prize
A downloadable game
In Eyes on the Prize, you are troublemakers. Maybe you don't think you are -- maybe, to you, your most unfortunate and ludicrous circumstances are no fault of your own, and it is only an additional misfortune that you've been driven to such lengths -- but the fact of the matter is that, when all is said and done, you need your situation upended so badly that you've ended up fake-married about it. So it goes!
Unfortunately for you, there's nothing more appealing to the rumor-mongers and scandal-hobbyists of court society than an unusual marriage. If the two of you want a chance to meet your goals, you'll have to play your parts, and you'll have to play them immaculately.
Get your shit done, don't get caught, and absolutely, positively do not fall in love for real. That would be so fucking embarrassing.
Eyes on the Prize is a court intrigue game for 2 or 4 players (1 or 2 pairs) in which you dream up a fake-married couple, then attempt to wield their fraudulent union to achieve their shared goals. Perform badly, and nobody will buy it, tripping up your attempts to advance your plots; perform too well, and you might start fooling even yourselves.
You can play it funny, you can play it sexy, you can play it fast, you can take your time -- the only real expectations are mischief and self-indulgence.
To play, you'll need:
- An eight-sided die for each player
- A deck of standard playing cards
- Many small tokens (coins, buttons, tiny seashells)
- A stopwatch/timer
- Paper and something to write with
- 1-3 hours of time
The game package includes:
- Game rules (standard, print-friendly, and collated booklet versions)
- Printable playsheets and challenge cards
- Playsheet .png, for virtual play
- Chinese translation .docx, courtesy of coffee ghost!
Print Instructions:
The "booklet" files are collated so you can print and fold them into a neat little book. For best results when printing these files, please do not reorder the pages, and make sure you have the following print settings active:
PAGES PER SHEET: 2
SCALE: FIT TO PAPER
PRINT ON BOTH SIDES
FLIP ON SHORT EDGE
Note that the page counts in the booklet versions are slightly different than the normal PDFs, due to extra pages added to make sure everything lines up!
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $7 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Exclusive content
Support this game at or above a special price point to receive something exclusive.
Community Copies
For every copy of Eyes on the Prize sold, I'll add community copies to be claimed free of cost. If the price of the game is an obstacle for you, please feel free to claim a community copy!
Development log
- modding EotP for polyam playApr 27, 2022
Comments
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This is SUCH a fun two player game! The prompts are wonderfully juicy, the token mechanics really emphasize the tricky balance of the whole charade, and the premise? Chef kiss. Beautiful, 10/10, would recommend. My friend and I played a goblin assassin and a goth elf princess and we blew up the palace and ran away to be sheep farmers. It ruled. Highly recommend this game!!!
Great game.
I've played this with my partner on numerous occasions and each and every time we've had an amazing time. We still find ourselves coming back to it time and time again.
Easy to understand whilst also having some interesting mechanics and prompts!
My friends really like this game.
We've played it at least once a day for almost a month now (As of writing this it has been 21 days straight). We're a little obsessed.
Played this with a TTRPG friend through Google docs & Miro (for tracking our tokens) - we used a virtual card dealer and virtual dice roller as well - and it was THE BEST TIME. the prompts are really delightful and the random order introduced by the card-drawing mechanic leads to some unexpected twists and turns for your characters. We reached the boiling point quickly (since we were gunning for those affection tokens with each other) and just kept playing even though we rolled doubles because we loved our couple so much by that point. Wonderfully written game; can't recommend it highly enough.
this might be a stupid question by why doesn't each face card have its own assigned marital trial? it seems like that would just be easier or am i missing something?
Beautiful, easy and fun game! We played a couple of times (one with 4 players and one with 2) and we absolutely loved it! Perfect game to spend a night with friends who like roleplay, intrigue, romance and the fake marriage trope! ♥
this was SUCH a fun TTRPG oh my goodness!!! the prompts are super well-written, SO easily tweaked to fit whatever backstory/setting you’ve got going on, and I just love how some prompts don’t have assigned points to it, it’s just to get the story going (and maybe one of those affection points if you’ve already started simping for the other player’s character at that point lol)
I played this with my partner using 2 established OC that we’ve previously done literary roleplays with, plus a plot twist just for the game. we had SO MUCH FUN, got to a beautiful ending and two new children OC out of it. a huge win for us all I think
we’re already planning to play the game again with another pair of established OC - this time modified for an arranged marriage on a steampunk noir setting; and we’re going to do it in written form. I’m so hyped and once again THANK YOU, i feel like we got a lot closer both to our characters and to each other after playing the game!!
Some of the most fun I've had with a TTRPG :) The mechanics are light but the prompts are so story-rich it was very easy to get going and become excited about the story!! Can't wait to play again- feels like living a romance novel. A chaotic one
Hi Ira! I am an university student planning Queer programming for my school's LGBTQ center and I was wondering if you would be okay with us buying a copy of this game for our center that would be free for student usage.
hi -- i'm so sorry i'm replying to this so late, i'm pretty terrible at keeping up with my itchio notifications!! i would absolutely be okay with that, but i would also be happy to just provide you guys a free copy! feel free to hit me up at [email protected] for a pdf, or you can snag one of the community copies that have just been refreshed!
A lot of fun to play! We tried it in 4 last night and it had been such a great game that left us craving for more! Very thought out, funny prompts that play with every trope of the genre and easy but very functional mechanics. It's a game that leaves you enough space for improvisation, but gives you enough rules to guide you towards the end. Highly recommend ♡
Amazing game! My partner and I have already re-played and we absolutely will do so again very soon. Very fun and interesting prompts that encourage plenty of creativity and amusing hijinks. We had an absolute blast and I've already recommended it to some friends.
Excellent game! I've played a few times and we had a blast every single time. Great art, easy to follow the rule flow, all around congrats on this.
absolutely loved this--cannot wait to play it again!
Hi !
I played two games of EOTP with different settings (one in a very victorian set-up and a futuristic, camp alien reception) and both were amazing. The prompts are very well-made and we had a lot of both very romantic, awww-inducing moments and absolutely stupid demented hijinks.
It's very easy to build up the plot and character relationships, and the marriage trials add some tension to the whole thing. I can't wait to play it again !
I'm used to longform games with GMs, so I really wasn't expecting this to run as smoothly as it did--but the writing prompts and especially the marriage trials gave us a lot to work with, not to mention the dice. We got two really serendipitous doubles, one where we realized we both had the same ex (my character's motivation involved getting away from his pushy ex, so that really added some spice, especially because the ex had a Meltdown about it), and another when we hit our affection boiling point for the first time.
I think I said 'this is such a cute game' about 20 times while playing it, which is huge because I normally couldn't care less about the fake dating trope. Just great work all around.
Wow! I've had my eye on this prize for a couple months and finally decided to buy it and I read it all in one sitting! A lovely lovely storygame with gorgeous layout and design and art and amazing writing! A treat and pleasure to read, and I look forward to playing this with my partner marshaling another couple to play it with!
Due to economical issues with my buddy champ pal (Door if you see this, I will divorce you bet on that) and I got a community copy for us to play online instead, we are still gathering what we need each and trying to figure out how to do it but I will get back to this once we played and got our opinions on it!
This game is so cute and wonderful! My partner and I were constantly surprised at how great the prompts were at guiding play while staying open enough to get real creative. Tiktok really pulled through with this recommendation (I wish I could recall who on tiktok suggested it!)
People, grab this game if you haven’t already!
Hi, Ira :) I'm a fan from Brazil and (thanks to our previous fascist president lol) the BRL is valued at 1 fifth of a USD :c So it'd be very expensive for me to buy the game in the close future. I was wondering if you could provide me with a Community Copy, or if I could pay a different price. Love love love your work. XO, Carmilla
hi carmilla!! thanks so much for asking — that's totally my bad, community copy quantities have to be refreshed manually and i've been forgetting to do it!! fixed now, so you can go ahead and grab a copy :) i hope you enjoy!!!
Thank you very much 😭😭 so excited to play
i'm in the same situation, also sending love from brazil <3 just discovered the game and really wish i could play it! will there be any more community copies to download in the future?
hi, so sorry for the delayed response -- i just refreshed the community copies again!
awwwww tysm <33
My friend and I just had the TIME OF OUR LIVES roleplaying a fantasy version of that viral Craiglist post about the felon offering to be someone's fake boyfriend at Thanksgiving dinner. I cannot overstate how much fun this was. We're going to try and get some more friends together and play the doubles version soon!
Fantastic game-- I was worried the game itself wouldn't live up to how wonderful the concept seemed (I am a sucker for a fake married trope) and how wrong I was to fret; this game is everything you want it to be if you love the rompy drama of a fake married plotline. A gorgeous blend of hijinks, yearning, and goofs. A great framework through which to tell stories with your friends. I've done two play-throughs so far and am looking forward to more.
oh, what a wonderful comment, thank you so much!! i'm so happy you're enjoying it, thank you so much :')
edit: i said thank you so much twice in a row but i meant it both times so it's fine. such is the excitement this comment evoked in me
my pal and i played a game of this and we were craving pokémon verse content so that's what we did—obviously it involved a lot of tweaking (dancing was swapped out for battling lmao) but we had fun with it!!! my friend was unity, a gym trainer for a romance-themed gym who was vying for the soon-opening title of gym leader and of COURSE needed a partner for it; i was tetsu (who went by amethyst), a c-list social media influencer trying to edge in on the double battling scene and of COURSE you need a cool gimmick for that if you wanna make it!!! unity was a full on herbo, amethyst was an emotionally constipated it-girl. they had a nidorino and a nidorina, respectively, who fell in actual love meeting at a park and gave us the idea for our fake marriage. we ended up getting a LOT of affection VERY QUICKLY and rolled doubles at our first boiling point—amethyst was in the middle of doing unity's makeup for a video and their faces were SO CLOSE and they SMOOCHED c:<
this was a delight of a game, thanks so much for sharing it!!!
oh i LOVE the setting tweak -- tbh one of the things i waffled on a lot when i was first designing EotP was "will the setting feel limiting??" but i quickly realized you just gotta trust that players will do whatever they want, so i LOVE to hear it when ppl do!! >:D also i'm obsessed with the.... what's the gender neutral plural of nidorino/a. nidorinae.... nidorin@s.... WHATEVER i love that subplot AND i love makeup vid kiss. what a fantastic session to hear about, thank you for sharing as well!
Playing this with a friend and we are having a blast. We do have one question since we were a little unclear: Are the Aff/Plot/Sus trackers shared, or do we each have our own tracker? I interpreted it as the first, and they thought the second - we've gone with their interpretation and it's still very fun, but also hitting multiple boiling points seems less likely. Could you clarify please?
hi! i'm so happy you guys are having fun! the trackers are shared :)
Thanks so much for this game, I love it!
One question about the pools: do they cap at 10, as in once you go above 10, you don't add any more? For example, if a prompt would increase the amount in the pool to 12, and the boiling point asks you to reduce by the difference, do you subtract the difference from 12 or from 10?
you're so welcome, i'm glad you enjoy it! i have played both ways, and it doesn't matter too much -- usually i go over 10 and subtract from the over-10 number, but that's mostly just because it's fun to load on tokens haha.
SUPER fun, and I don't think I'll get tired of playing it. My friend and I were high rollers in our first session and the boiling point decided multiple times to bring our campaign to a close, but the story EOTP helped us build was way too fun to stop there. We rolled until we got an option that'd keep it going and played on! The scenarios are so enjoyable that I honestly wish we rolled lower—nothing seems like a loss, especially in good company. And, for what it's worth, congrats to the author on the not-fake marriage!
Player-led TTRPGs are always so much fun and these game mechanics are awesomely designed just for that. The art is gorgeous, the possibilities are endless, and I can't wait to see what other stories EOTP will help us tell.
(i hope necroing comments isn't an annoying faux pas on itchio lol i'm just finally getting around to some of these...!) anyway YAY thank u so much for sharing, i love hearing abt ppl's sessions -- in my own playthroughs we almost always brute force my way past the first (few...) ending point(s...) too lmao! so i'm super happy to hear other ppl have that much fun playing too. thank you again so much for playing!
Played this as an anniversary date with my partner and had a really fun time adding affection regularly because we're such an affectionate couple to begin with LOL. very fun game we definitely plan on playing again in the future and developing better stories with as we play :)
aaaa wonderful i'm so happy to hear it!! i love the affection rule myself too, sometimes it ends up feeling like a kind of meta minigame lmao (trying to make ur ocs do extra cute stuff to goad ur partner into triggering another token......)
thank u for playing and for sharing!
I also got a community copy and Im def gonna make my friends play this with me! Thank you so so much for this!
you're so welcome, thank u for grabbing my game!! i hope in the time between u posting this and me fiiiiinally catching up on replies (oops lol) u've had an opportunity for a session or two -- or if not that you've had fun daydreaming about a bunch of potential characters haha. ty ty!
i got a community copy, and i'm so excited to play! been dming my friends to see if anyone's up for it. here's to hoping someone's interested!! (thank you to those buying! and to of course, the creator!)
thank u so much for grabbing it!! i hope that when u play u have an absolute blast (or that u have, if you've had a session or two!)
This looks so fun! I can't wait to play with some friends of mine, I think they'll really enjoy it. Thank you so much for making this!
it was my pleasure! thank YOU for checking it out, i hope u have a great time with it!
I've started just one (1) game with a friend of mine, and we haven't even finished it yet, but it's been incredibly fun. I have just a little question about the rules, since it crossed my mind while reading the book over: when one of the three stats reaches 10, it becomes a "boiling point", but what happens in the possibility of two stats reaching 10 at the same time?
oh man, that’s a good question! i never came across that scenario in playtests but i suppose it’s totally possible. (i HAVE had playtests where the token change from surviving one boiling point pushes us straight into a different one, which is always really fun to rp!) if it happened in a game i was playing, i think i would probably roll for both — either choosing which one to do first on a whim and then if we survive that rolling the second immediately, or if you have enough d8s why not roll all four and decide how to mesh the results into one big event, even if that means fudging the actual outcome! (i.e. if you roll a game end on one, but a continue on the other, you can just decide that the success was enough to salvage the whole situation if you want to keep playing.)
Honestly, upon a first read, this is probably my favorite TTRPG of the year so far. I find the narrative prompts to be well written and evocative, the marital trials are incredible, and the token economy is well thought out. The most important rule is also possibly my favorite, just from the sheer narrative energy of it all.
I really look forward to playing this with my partner and will definitely be interested in whatever you put out next!
wow, thank you so much! this means a ton to me, especially since it’s my first game. i’m really excited to make more! i hope you and your partner have loads of fun playing :)
My friends have played this 3 times in two days. It's very good.
yay, this is the best thing to hear! thank you so much!
Honestly this might be silly but the d8 is my favorite shape of the polyhedral dice set and I'm incredibly hyped to see it used vs the more typical d6 or d10. Haven't had a chance to play it yet, but I'm excited to have a go at it soon with my partners!
not silly at all imo!! i also really like d8s and it's fun to be able to use dice that don't come up as often :D thank u so much, i really hope u and ur partners have fun with it!
hi! page 18 is meant to be positioned before 17 in the print order of the booklet version, because of the way the pages line up when the papers are all stacked and folded. i just did a test print to check and they look okay on my end! is it possible a page got flipped around before you folded stapled?
I see that now