The construction of public works is a great way to track the passage of time. Seeing a building or road go from a patch of plain Earth to a fully functional facility really reminds you how quickly time is passing. It also makes you consider the numerous people for whom that work has been both a major undertaking and a defining part of their lives. And the people whose lives will be transformed by the construction. The Long Span taps into this, using the construction of a bridge as the basis for a thought-provoking TTRPG about the passage of time.
The Long Span is a solo-journaling TTRPG that draws inspiration from Gehen, a dwarf found in Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, who has spent many long, hard years slowly building a bridge. In this game, you step into the shoes of someone who is trying to build a bridge across a chasm. However, as they are mostly working alone, this is a long, slow process one that will take many years to complete.
A TTRPG About Building A Bridge
The game is split into seasons, each with slightly different rules, designed to reflect how the changing weather affects your builder’s progress. During the working seasons (dubbed GreenWake and HarvestTide), your builder will work on the bridge. At the start of the game, you’ll roll a single six-sided die for each season and use the result to find out how the season plays out.
High rolls let you fill out squares on the progress tracker and let you roll on the progress table, which explains why your builder made good progress, covering everything from discovering perfect resources to simply having enough pep in your step to get through the work in double time.
After this comes FrostWane, a cold season where the weather makes it impossible for your builder to work, forcing them to hole up somewhere and sit with their thoughts until the snow thaws. During this period, you reflect and write in your journal about what happened and what you think could go better.
If, during the working seasons, you ticked off one of the marked boxes on the progress tracker, someone hears about your bridge and comes to help you, building a place to live near the site as they do. Every person you have in your settlement adds a d6 to your dice pool. This means the more people you have, the better your chance of having successful building seasons.
Capturing The Pain Of Hard Work
The Long Span does a great job of capturing the pleasure and the pain of working on a long project. One element I really like is the game’s decision to not have events that destroy your bridge and undo your progress. While some may feel that this undermines the game’s moment-to-moment drama, I feel it enhances the overall mood of the game and hits one of the hardest things about long-term projects: the moments where work doesn’t get done as fast as you hope, forcing you to watch as the completion date stretches into infinity.
I also love the games prompt tables. Each prompt consists of two sets of two words, with each set separated by an “or” (e.g. “Solitary or Quiet” and “Hunter or Fisher”). Thanks to the designers’ evocative word choice, these prompts, while short, do an amazing job of sparking the imagination. Plus, the use of “or” statements means the player can create loads of unique situations or characters, even if they get the same prompt several times.
However, even with my earlier comments about liking the game’s lack of hard failures in mind, I do wish the game had a mechanic where settlers leave. Not because it would make the game harder (by reducing your dice pools), but because having people come and go would work well with the game’s focus on the passage of time and changing of the seasons, allowing your character to reflect on how the settlement around their bridge has altered their process and grown with the bridge.
My only major issue with this game is the text’s color. While I adore the look (and think it really suits the game), it is hard to read for those with less-than-perfect eyesight and does not print well. So, I would adore a black-and-white version in the future so I can take this game and play it near an actual unfinished bridge.
Another minor nitpick I have is that the game doesn’t explicitly explain how to use its paired prompt tables. While it isn’t hard to work out (especially if you play a lot of solo games), the game is otherwise a perfect introduction game for those wanting to dip their toes into the world of solo TTRPGs or TTRPGs in general, so a sentence explaining how those tables work would be a great addition, as it would allow me to throw the game at curious friends knowing that they will be able to intuitively immerse themselves in the game.
The Long Span is a moving TTRPG that is sure to stick with you long after you finish it. While on paper, it is a TTRPG about building a bridge, due to the game’s evocative text and well-chosen mechanics, it works as a metaphor for many long-term projects we go through during life, from trying to realize a big creative dream, to the slow and difficult process of self-actualizing and becoming your true self. This means that, no matter who you are, you’ll find yourself feeling for your character and their bridge-building plight, leading to a deeply emotional solo TTRPG experience.
