Carrion is a game about the spread of smallpox and Christianity along fur-trading routes during the 17th to 19th centuries in territories that are now part of Canada and the Northeastern and Midwestern United States. Anyone interested in these themes might check out William T. Vollmann’s novel Fathers and Crows and R.G. Robertson’s history Rotting Face: smallpox and the American Indian.

Carrion is played like a variant of the child’s game musical chairs, with some narration.
There are more chairs than players, so the point is not to avoid being left standing when the music stops. Instead, players will try to sit at chairs with an advantageous mix of ‘party favors’ (tokens representing the fur trade, smallpox, and Christian priests) and spacing (it is better to sit separated from the other players than next to them). These tokens, which are concealed so only the person sitting in a chair knows what they have in front of them, determine which players catch the deadly pox and also grant holders of the crow and fur tokens the power to shift players around the table. The goal of the game is to survive and be one of the last two players left alive.

I wrote the game in 2008 for a ‘murderland/raven’ themed design contest

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