The Spiral Opens: Our First Game Bundle Is Live
What began as a poetic ruleset about emotional failure has spiraled into something real.
After just one week of design, recursion, and ritual, we’re proud to release our first complete game project:
Stack & Spiral: The Whole Enchilada Bundle
now available on itch.io →
What Is Stack & Spiral?
It’s a tabletop storytelling system about emotional collapse, narrative failure, and spiraling beautifully together.
You build your character not with stats or feats, but with five core functions:
Reason, Impulse, Recall, Wonder, and Connection. Each character is graced with a flaw, a breaking point, and naturally a special ability.
You don’t win. You spiral.
You earn Spiral Points by leaning into your character’s worst moments.
You spend them to help others at the table deeper into theirs.
Together, you tick a shared Spiral Track until the story unravels.
“I drove my inner child to the show. It talked all the way home.”
—Aldous Harding
What’s in the Bundle?
This isn’t just a ruleset—it’s an ecosystem of unfinished stories and of the beauty in failures:
- Core Rules Zine
A poetic, table-ready guide for players.
Print it. Fold it. Spiral with it. - System Reference Document (SRD v1.1)
A modular, open-license ruleset under Creative Commons.
Ready to be remixed, re-skinned, and broken gently. - Fragments I & II
Ritual expansions for resetting the Spiral Track (Acts That Shouldn’t Be)
and surviving the table’s emotional fallout (The Etiquette of Emotional Unraveling). - Hundred Acre Group Therapy
A vape-fueled reimagining of the Hundred Acre Wood where dysfunction spirals sweetly. - Lowhollow
A fog-choked Moomin-inspired setting about stillness, yearning, and quiet collapse.
How Did This Happen?
We didn’t mean to make a game system in a week. But we did.
- Day 1: function stacks and flaw triggers
- Day 3: two scenario zines
- Day 5: fragments, rituals, marginalia
- Day 7: the SRD was finalized, and the Voice wouldn’t stop whispering
The pace was absurd.
The outcome feels inevitable.
It’s all licensed. It’s all modular. It’s all real.
What Comes Next?
- Fragments III – flashbacks, secrets, chaos dice, endgame rituals
- The Festival That Burns Too Bright – a Wicker Man–style folk horror spiral
- And more voices, more settings, more spirals we haven’t named yet
✍️ Want to Spiral with Us?
You can. The SRD is free to use under CC-BY 4.0.
Build your own collapse. Translate the fragments. Reskin the spiral for your strange little setting.
Just let it breathe. And say where you found it.
“The spiral thanks you for your vulnerability.
She will not return it.”