The Soldiers Have Fallen

The Soldiers Have Fallen is a game about witnessing history. You play as members of a covert cell documenting a war that is not going in your favor. Any number of people can play, and you get to decide why you’re documenting things. Are you spies, journalists, or merely survivors?

Each turn, players write letters about their experiences, as represented by one-word prompts. These letters can be written collectively or individually, and in any format you like. One player might write a poem, and another might write a code to be deciphered. You might work together as a group to make a collage. You can even mail letters to each other in the real world, if you want to.

The game can also be played alone as a world-building game. What war is significant in your world’s history? Who witnessed it? How did what they witness shape the next period of your world’s development? You can use your answers to these questions to create new conflicts, ideologies, or even characters.

CONTENT WARNING: The Soldiers Have Fallen includes open-source photographs from both World Wars to help you brainstorm ideas. However, there are no graphic images, no images of victims of the Holocaust, and no images of the atomic bombings, as putting those in a tabletop game felt vulgar.

That being said, some images do show victims of the war in non-graphic situations, like a child sitting at his house that has been bombed. In case this makes anyone at your table uncomfortable, the download includes a clean, printer-friendly version with no photos.