Dialect captures the lifecycle of a language from its creation to its death. I played a session with Liese and Jason last week and found the game to be very much reliant on the players’ dynamic. No GM or dice system is involved, so for someone new to TTRPGs like myself, this was a very smooth and straightforward introduction to the TTRPG genre.
The game offers a unique take on the idea behind a language. Going in, I thought the game would be very much focused on the culture behind a language, watching the language develop and be lost to time as a civilization dies out. I couldn’t be more wrong. The game tests the boundaries of what a language encapsulates outside of just a culture. For example, the scenario Liese, Jason, and I played through was the Thieves’ Cant: You and the other players are a group of thieves operating within a steampunk city set in the 1800s. It is up to you as the player to devise a language that aids in your thieving expeditions. On top of setting up the setting, the game also provides prompts for the players to really create a story for the game. Again, with regards to Dialect, there would be questions like what is your group’s hideout? What kind of jobs do you take? Who provides the jobs? What moral line will you NOT, under ANY circumstance, cross? These prompts all help in creating the players’ characters, but the imagination of the players is not limited to these questions. In our play session, we turned our group of thieves into thieves AND assassins operating in a French opera house with one simple rule: no civilian casualties.
The answers to these prompts aid quite nicely in character creation. The game has a neat system of using “isolations”, a trait within the group that each one of the players’ characters resonates with. For me, my character was someone obsessed with the art of the kill and steal, seeing as how I was an actor in the opera house, my passion for theatre translates to thievery. This is just one example of how these isolations can create such unique characters in each play session.
The isolation and setup for the game really set the stage for the “role-playing” aspect of the game. I felt Dialect excelled in really drawing the players’ imagination out into the game and encouraging them to “role-play” in this game setting. The setup, alongside the actual gameplay, was probably some of the most fun I’ve had with a board game. Creating the environment and coming up with ideas for how our characters would interact with each other was really fun and only added to the anticipation for our actual playtime.
The actual gameplay was one that really depended on the players’ dynamic with each other. Each round of the game requires each player to create a word and the sort of relationship it has with the characters and the setting and premise of that play session. The game provides card prompts with what kind of word you should come up with. The words can be made by using existing words, combining foreign words, onomatopeias – you name it. Once you have the word, the players must then set a scene to use the word in. The scene can reveal something about the group’s dynamic, reveal a sinister (or good) trait of a character, or change the group’s morals – again, literally you name it and it can happen with the right word and the right scene and players. The scene can be taken in a multitude of directions and it is really dependent on how the players act through their characters and what they want to see happen in the game.
Dialect is a very dynamic TTRPG with how each play session provides a unique setting filled with characters that the players can tailor to their liking. Being one of the first TTRPGs I’ve been introduced to (the other being dnd…. hehe), I felt that Dialect captured the essence of role-playing without the complications of a diverse character sheet or dice system. I will definitely play Dialect again in the future and with all the prompts the game offers, I’m anticipating just how far I can take this idea of a language in our play session.
