If you asked people on the street to explain what they imagine when they hear the term TTRPG, most people will answer high fantasy or sci-fi narratives. However, this doesn’t mean that TTRPGs are restricted to these genres, as the TTRPG medium can be used to tell any story. This is beautifully proven by Zam’s Smelly Flatmates, which uses the LARP format to tell a thought-provoking story about sharing space with others.
Created by The Larpenters (Diana Monova & Lucas Dewulf), Zam’s Smelly Flatmates is a game for 3-8 players. In this game, players take the roles of anthropomorphized smells sharing an apartment. Before the game starts, each player is given a teacup. They are then tasked with exploring the space and deciding the scent they want to represent their character. When they’ve decided what odour they want to be, they should put items in their cup that give off the desired scent. Once the player has prepared their cup, they devise their character’s basic details (age, gender, pronouns, etc).
Talk And Smell To Move Forward
After this, the players gather around a table. Each player presents their character to the other players. During this segment, the players will also decide how their character ended up in this house share and their opinions of the other flatmates they share the space with.
Once every player has had a chance to introduce their character, the main phase starts. This phase is divided into three fifteen-minute days, with each day featuring a ten-minute daytime segment followed by a five-minute night segment.
During the day, players act out scenes of daily apartment life. However, there is one rule to keep in mind: you can only talk to someone if you can smell their smell. Thus, to speak to someone, a player must offer them their cup, and the other player must choose to sniff it and present their cup in return.
During this phase, players also have two votes to give. They must vote for one character who they believe to be “too much,” and one character who is “not enough”. These votes are secretly placed in a container, meaning that players won’t know the current vote tally during gameplay.
During the night phases, players have two choices. They can either approach another player and have a secret conversation with them, or they can add new things to their cup in an attempt to change their smell.
Once all of the days and nights have been completed, the players gather around the table again and count up the votes gathered across all of the days. Whichever character has the most votes is forced to leave the house. This player may then perform a short scene to wrap up the story, covering whether their character leaves quietly or decides to fight with the other flatmates on the way out.
A LARP That Captures The Struggle To Be A Good Flatmate
Zam’s Smelly Flatmates is a fantastic and moving LARP. While it might sound a little strange on paper, during play, all of its elements come together to make the game’s underlying message impossible to miss, without the designers ever having to be dramatically in your face about it. This is great as it means the players arrive at the revelation about the game’s meaning themselves, leading to a greater emotional payoff. Doubly so because this sudden revelation will likely lead to them connecting the in-game events with things that have happened in their own lives.
One thing I especially love about the game is that, despite its clear rules, it manages to maintain a natural vagueness. The best example of this is the votes the players cast during the game. The phrases “too much” and “too little” are not direct value judgements and can be read in numerous ways, meaning each player will base their vote on different criteria. Not only does this make the outcomes trickier to predict (and thus impossible for a player to play in a way that guarantees they win), but it perfectly captures the natural chaos of human interactions, as one person’s dream housemate can be another person’s nightmare.
The same is true of the smell mechanic. While it may seem like a little thing, as you play the game, you’ll quickly notice how big an effect personal bias has on what smells people choose to sniff and which ones they avoid. Like with the voting, there is no way to guarantee that every player will enjoy your smell, meaning it’s easy to end up in a loop of trying to change your scent to appeal to one person, only to alienate two others. Because of this, the game perfectly captures the often painful nature of shared living, where even actions with the best intentions can have unintended consequences, and you can work yourself into a downward spiral in a vain attempt to appease everyone else around you.
Based on my play session, I would suggest that anyone planning to run this game purchase some Potpourri or some pungent herbs specifically for use during the game, because there is a good chance that your playspace doesn’t have enough things with strong and unique scents. I initially presumed that I had enough. However, I quickly realized that if multiple players opted to add things to their cup during the night phases, we would run out quickly. So, it’s best to err on the side of caution and buy some sceneted stuff specifically for the game.
Zam’s Smelly Flatmates is one of my favorite LARPs of the year. Using easy-to-learn but well-thought-out mechanics, it conveys a very complex problem in a way that players can easily understand. Because of this, I think the game would be a great educational tool or discussion starter for a youth group or a college intake, as it helps show how tricky living with other people can be in a natural way that doesn’t assign strict value judgements to actions, reminding players that while being nice is helpful, it is impossible to please everyone and that you have to find a middle ground where everyone does their best to help the household without giving up all their needs in the process.
