High School Hearts

High School Hearts is a fun, light tabletop role-playing game of high schoolers dealing with love, rivalry, and the rest of the emotional roller-coaster of adolescence.

It's easy to play, makes fun of high school, and uses standard playing cards.

This release includes PDF, Mobi, ePub, and azw3 releases for all major eReaders, and a PDF of print-and-play tokens (not required, but useful).

Here are the basics of the game:

Characters don't have stats, as such. Instead, characters are made up of two words (like “clumsy cheerleader” or “shy valedictorian”) and have relationships, represented by tokens. More tokens on an NPC = a stronger relationship. Each NPC also has a separate maturity score, represented by tokens. Players also start with 5 Drama tokens, which they can spend to change relationships.

During the game, one PC is the “spotlight” of the scene. That player chooses a crisis for the scene, the character at the center of the crisis, and the physical location where the episode's set. The player then spends his or her Drama tokens to draw playing cards, which are used to determine if the relationship in the scene changes and/or any of the characters add maturity.

Hearts increase relationship intensity while diamonds decrease it. Spades increase maturity while clubs decrease it.

The value of all cards drawn are totalled and divided by 4 to determine how many Drama tokens the player gets back. This will give players even more Drama over time.

The rules include a sample of play with a handful of characters.