Mall Kids

I picked this up because of MonarchsFactory's recent video and it looks really cool! (I hope I can interest some friends in playing a session)

Also, I love that one of the sample malls actually brings up the origin of the shopping mall! Too cool!

We had such a great time with this game. Easy to run, easy to pick up, and encouraging imaginative roleplay over mechanics, it's a wonderful game to play out with your friends. Absolutely recommend! It's a joy to play a game where the stakes aren't world-ending or monster-defeating, but instead the daily lives of teens.

We've published a full review of the game here: https://www.rollplusheart.co.uk/blog/mall-kids

And if you want to hear the game being run, you can check out our actual play starting here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7fUQE8GCiQtD9a05cUGaAS?si=aa42796c03964d4b

Love this game so much. You can check out a quick preview I made about the game a while ago if you want a closer look!

Mall Kids is a 24 page rpg about teens surviving in the stark commercial wasteland that is retail work in a mall. It's a group game and it uses d6s, and the GM role rotates between players.

Plotwise the game's setup is mostly grounded in the real-world, circa 2020, and might feel a little mundane. For almost the entire PDF, there's no intrusive magic realism, no Stranger-Things-esque subterranean conspiracy, it's just teens dealing with, honestly, the kinds of problems that teens mostly just keep their heads down and avoid.

The game's mechanics are simple and sort of like Honey Heist. Your stats are split between Corporate and Cred and focusing on one raises it and lowers the other. Raise either stat too high, and you lose.

Mall Kids does provide a lot of useful resources, including safety guidelines, GMing advice, and sample malls. It also gives an outline for the structure of the workday, with some advice built around spots where the characters can do things other than work.

I dig the concept of a really mundane work-a-retail-job rpg, however the game setting the PCs up as folks who work at different stores can make it a little hard for their paths to intersect. Not all PCs have to be in every scene, and ideally the game wants someone to be out so they can GM, but this sort of promotes plots made of dozens of little beats that maybe interconnect sometimes. If you want something that feels like an overarching adventure, you'll have to do some work up front to create a scenario that promotes that.

Alternately, you could run Mega-Sol One.

The very last example mall in the game, Mega throws in sci-fi elements, velociraptors, strange spaces, and stuff that feels like adventure. I would play a Mega-Sol One game in a heartbeat, and it's bristling with hooks.

Overall, I think Mall Kids is a solid game for both folks who wants a heavily realistic-tone retail mall slice-of-life or drama, but it's also totally runnable for folks who want to some Visigoths vs. Mall Goths style surrealism. For groups that are looking for an interesting one-shot or just want to try something different, I would recommend giving this a shot.