Violet Tangerine and The Heist Game

A Designer Retrospective

Split/Party has recently joined CyCo, which has given me the support network required to go back into game design. They have recently released the first game I managed to push design through and overcame my trauma: Violet Tangerine. Now that I am back in game design, I wonder how that may affect my critical analytical abilities; for this article I’m gonna put those aside and try to look at Violet Tangerine as its design and talk a bit about the curious road. It is an interesting exercise in how different one talks about games as a designer versus as a critic.

What is Violet Tangerine?

Violet Tangerine is a heist game about crimes transbians doing crimes. There is a Crew of Rogues taking a limited amount of actions per scenario against the House, who handles all the Threats to the heist. The heist builds up to a climax, where Payout determines what happens.

The Germ

Me and my partner Emily have been trying to work in a heist game for almost three years, what would eventually be Violet Tangerine. The idea started with a claim made about fantasy pop games of the adventurer-conquistador flavor: there was heavy resistance against the idea that those games are about venturing into frontiers filled with camp-forms to rob the non-people within, with violence and their deaths accepted risk. Two popular responses were: a) dungeons are not “real” places, they are mystical otherworlds where you venture and the treasure is some mythological reframing of your life (that just happens to be measured on silver coins for some reason), OR b) dungeons are places where the powerful forces hide their wealth or drag their prisoners, and adventurer-conquistadors are actually rogues doing a heist and/or prison break.

A whole series of articles could be written on how poorly fantasy pop games in general and the adventurer-conquistador genre in particular may not support those claims, or, if we take these at face-value as their declared goals, they do a pretty miserable job at delivering either experience. However, these ideas are, not to mince words, cool as fuck.

If only there were games that actually supported and enabled those.

Viable Heist Model

Many of the early drafts were attempts to make those things that allegedly already exist everywhere, closer to being a real thing that exists and we could play. When studying other games involving mythology and heists, we got quite frustrated with how poorly heists translated to the medium of collaborative cooperative storytelling and TTRPGs. Many of the games assumed to be about heists, are either games where heists happen to have on them, games around a caper or heist but not really about it, prompt exercises that use the aesthetics of heists/capers or Blades in The Dark.

Nothing was really hitting the feel, the beat, the cadence, the tempo, the mood, the anticipation of heists in other artforms. It became clear that if we were to make the Heist Game, it would live or fail depending on how successful we were at capturing this in the core engine of the game.

Of course, heists and capers come in near all forms and genres, with a great variety of ways to tell these stories. The game should be one that one could, with different degrees of effort, into any such stories, but there were some basic beats it should be hitting. Drawing from concepts of cybernetics, we started mapping blocks of the engine that the system of Violet Tangerine should make sure keep being replicated: a viable system model for a heist.

Furthermore, we needed a “check”, a scenario, a story, that we should be able to capture the energy when adapting to another artform. The “minimum” that a heist should be able to do.

For that, we used Italian Job (1969).

The Bit

As many ideas were bounced back and forth, we kept speaking of our drafts by comparing them to other media about heists; talking about how certain beats would be in a TTRPG and how collaborative cooperative storytelling that hits the same notes could be facilitated. There was a recurring joke: what if the Italian Job only ever existed as a TTRPG? This coalesced into an idea that guided the development of Violet Tangerine’s design voice:

This is the second edition of the Italian Job TTRPG; this 2003 game took the 1969 classic and redesigned it the lessons from the 90s and the modern sensitivities of games from the early 00s. Unfortunately, it is lost media — the game was never released because of the OGL. It can be found only in a truncated form as an Appendix in d20 Italian Job.

The House Always Wins

As we keep examining what heists worked or not for us, a common trend became evident: it was not if the crew was always competent, if the schemes were brilliant and/or credible, if a montage was well cut, etc: it was about relationships. A heist that worked was one were as many elements as possible developed, recalled or revealed a relationship between characters. Things had and established a history alongside a story, and that was the most important aspect to get us sold in a given montage, flashback or twist — and whenever it failed, it was because we could not feel anything about the existing relationships.

As such, it became apparent that for it to successful accomplish that energy, the core engine would have to facilitate these relationship dynamics.

Our centering relationship is the one between the Crew and the House. The House is a player with game mastering responsibilities that handles all the opposition and the many things that disrupt the perfect heist the other players had planned. While the mechanics have changed drastically over the course of three years until the latest version, what they have been trying to achieve has been consistent:

Our Rogues are competent at doing crimes and have the initiative, so there is no end to what they can accomplish if they take the time/put more effort/commit more resources; as such, they can keep trying to achieve something over and over again. However, the more they invest in doing a given thing, the more time something takes, there are higher risks: this is represented by giving the House more opportunities to throw unexpected threats and apply pressure.

Different types of pacing mechanics have led to working a nice beat for this back and forth: it is much easier for Rogues to get things done early in the game — and it has great potential, as you also tend to create more useful tools for the heist, — while the House starts barely able to anything. You will need this edge later, so you will have to get these advantages while you can, but if you keep pushing, you may be dealing with the House sooner than you expected.

It Is All About The Crimes

Very satisfied with the core, as we kept fiddling with it, we went back to the questions of relationships. This is a thing I often struggled a lot; “relationships” or “bonds” or whatever, really are not a thing I find satisfying in the ways they are commonly portrayed in the systems of TTRPGs. They are either things noted down in a character sheet, passive elements of a game, or part of some resource system that you get to spend to do things. For other ideas about games, I been trying to work alongside that capturing a relationship in cooperative collaborative storytelling would require a good way to do debt — and then being mutually indebted and wanting to continue to be indebted and never pay off. While such idea would not be compatible with heists and Violet Tangerine, thinking of relationships that way was useful.

Crimes and Threats are the relationships between Rogues and the heist, tools, other criminals, plans, the setting, etc. Rogues cannot accomplish anything “on their own”: if you want to progress in a heist, you need to get Crimes. Instead, Rogues’ competency and expertise as criminal masterminds is their ability to do Crimes. Rogues create Crime after Crime, calling on them later or immediately to overcome challenges. Their interactions with the House in the process of creating Crimes tickles down to the House’s ability to create Threats — the opposite of Crimes. Threats can hamper your ability to do heists by denying you the benefit of your Crimes, throw additional challenges and actually take down Rogues.

As Rogues create more and more Crimes, they get more tangled with the heist. More people depend on them, more stuff can be traced to them, etc. These relationships are more and more powerful, but as they get them, their own power and potential diminishes. This eventually setting in the diminishing dice pull: Rogues start with the possibility to create a lot of powerful Crimes that let them do anything, but as the heist proceeds, they have more and more concrete Crimes to use that albeit powerful are committed to a given plan.

And finally, to escape with the Payout from a heist, a Rogue must end all those relationships and move on to new adventures; once the bank coffer is blown, it is a race to go through your own Crimes as fast as possible.

Montages, Flashbacks and Twists

You may have noticed that until this point I have mentioned none of those; and they are what most people associate with heists AND something we expressed a great desire to have on TTRPGs in a more artform-specific and satisfying way.

There were countless attempts, but the breakthrough only came after we figured how Crimes work. Once we established that Rogues “pour more of themselves” into the game board of the heist as the game goes on, that was also tied to character creations and you were able to use your character abilities in the process of diminishing yourself in potential to have powerful concrete tools to use.

This made the pacing really hard to get right: characters do get less versatile and able to make new Crimes as the heist goes on, yes, but because they can always get the dice rolls they want in order to feed the House, they can still succeed. But feeding the House both escalates and slows pace; this precarious balance of making characters badass criminals up to the climax and beyond could easily fall apart.

The answer came from the rules to scenario design. Every step of a heist has goals that need specific Crimes to accomplish AND you have a limited number of actions you can use to generate Crimes; fail that and the heist is a failure. This puts pressure to make powerful Crimes and a ticking clock of needing to protect them from Threats until the key moment where those Crimes play dividends.

This is where those iconic heist moments come into play: Flashes. At any moment, including the middle of a Rogue or House’s turn, you can Flash. If rolling dice and actions represent time and effort, Flash represents all actions “Out-of-time”: revealing a twist, cutting to a montage to what is happening at different points, flashing back to reveal previous preparations. This gives the Rogues the edge they need and gives them the control to fine-tune pacing so that it is always satisfying.

I mentioned character creation before because character creation became associated with Flashes and the iconic moments they represent — those are when the personality of your Rogue and what type of criminal they are shine through. When you start a heist, you “equip” five traits — three from your Rogue and two specific to the scenario you are playing. Each is tied to a number of dice: whenever you Flash, you reduce your number of dice for the rest of Heist but activate both the very powerful Flash BUT also an unique rule-breaking trait ability.

Let A Thousand Heists Bloom

The core at this point seemed diamond solid. We tested it and found it could do Italian Job-style heists pretty well? But what about other heists.? How well can it do other scenarios?

We tried to make a spy thriller heist. We found the core engine of Violet Tangerine very easy to adapt and get to do what we wanted it to do. Our initial test scenarios were very cooperative even with traitor-role Rogues; by changing what Crimes represent and how the Payout of the scenario is awarded, the game immediately became both more cutthroat and secretive. With some little nudges and custom rules, changing the way Threats work during the scenario, and with different guidelines to what the House should do, the feeling of the game was radically different while maintaining the same solid core to fall back on at every gear shift.

What about something completely out there? We tried a vampire heist, where the Rogues are as powerful as the house, and we needed to capture what is like being a vampire and how beings like those would approach a heist, with a hint of hammer horror and camp. We had to add so many rules that it could be its own game rather than a single scenario, but the core remains the same — as do the principles. If you know how to play Violet Tangerine, you can easily become a messy vampire elder.

Playing with the concept of Crimes and what Crimes can be, we are currently designing and testing a mecha heist: where you are cyberpunk criminals that create Crimes that are mecha-parts: making your pile of Crimes be your giant robot which you use to pull the heist.

A Violet The Size Of A Tangerine

In summation, Violet Tangerine is an outstanding heist game that I am proud I was able to carry to the finishing line. With the cooperation and support offered by CyCo, I hope to see many people play it and keep messing around with what different scenarios and games this approach to cooperative storytelling capers can facilitate. Currently, you can get Violet Tangerine with the classical-style heist scenario Leaded Gasoline from the CyCo patreon. We have also written some other scenario-games using Violet Tangerine: Eve&Lilith, our spy thriller in the ruins of a collapsing super-power; Crimson Vows, awful vampire transbians crashing a vampire wedding.

Looking forward to hear about your games and for those willing to share in the stewardship of this way to do heists.