One Paperclip

The year is 1985. You are an agent working for an intergovernmental peace organisation, sworn to protect the innocent and handle threats too big or too strange for anyone else. Agents of the Wyvern Foundation are dispatched in teams all around the world to solve problems and save lives. Wyvern Agents go into dangerous places with nothing but their skills, their quick minds, and their extensive knowledge of science, engineering, mathematics, history, geography, literature, paper folding, ice cream, coffin manufacture, tap dancing, skunk physiology, book-binding and East Asian flute music.

Welcome to the Foundation.

One Paperclip is a two-page tabletop RPG for 3 or more players in which you act out all your 1980s action TV fantasies. Players go up against terrorists, businessmen, cultists and more as a team of science-savvy secret agents. Use six-sided dice and your impressive brainpower to think up the most ridiculous mechanical solutions and save the day. Wear sunglasses inside. Turn a cardboard tube and a calculator into a heat-seeking missile.

This game is an attempt to bring my half-remembered, nostalgia-poisoned memories of 80s television to the gaming table, specifically a near-obsessive love for MacGuyver. Remember that one time he escaped in a boat that was hidden inside a coffin?

It's super easy to learn, and impossible to lose. You just need some dice, a few pens, and some scraps of paper. Play one episode in about an hour, or carry your agents over for a whole series.

If you play it, tell me about the show you made! Good luck, agents.