Rather than focusing on the duel itself, I Have The High Ground is about the scathing conversation leading up to the moment a sword is drawn. As Jess puts it, this game is about “The slower, higher tension duel that occurs before any damage is done—before any blow is even struck. The duel of word and wit, of casual motion and threatening maneuvers.” I played I Have The High Ground with a very close friend and long-time creative partner, which naturally made it easier to relax into the story and really swing for the fences. We ended up telling a story about two former allies with an “unrequited respect,” ultimately culminating in some kind of laser sword duel on a desolate mountain world.
I Have The High Ground makes excellent use of a Rochambeau mechanic whereby Thrusts beat Feints, Feints beat Blocks, and Blocks beat Thrusts. Because the game takes place before the duel actually begins but still chooses to use these duel-specific terms, players are kept constantly on edge and thinking of their interactions in terms of competition. At the end of the day it’s a collaborative game, so choosing which option is most likely to win isn’t necessarily the “right” way to play. But I Have The High Ground has a sneaky way of making you consider every move as tactically as your character would, instantly blurring the line.
As we played, I constantly found myself thinking about not only what my character would do, but about which approach they thought would work best. Every option made perfect sense. In that way, the game remained competitive even as it helped me and my friend tell an extremely collaborative story. Was I reacting to the fiction and choosing the option I thought made the most sense for my character? Yes. But was I also trying to read what my opponent and their character were going to do and attempting to counter it? Also yes.
Throughout the game, I knew my character wasn’t really in mortal danger. But I did run the risk of looking silly, and that was a fate worse than death. The rounds that I lost and ended up seeming foolish really felt like losses, and motivated me to try even harder the next time. At the same time, every loss felt like it flowed naturally from both players’ choices. The book includes great descriptions of each action interaction, making it seamless to describe exactly who comes out on top in each exchange.
Competitive storytelling games occupy an incredibly interesting space. At first blush it may seem like making the tactically sound choice will get in the way of making the most interesting choice. But in a game like I Have The High Ground, these two quickly become one and the same. I really appreciate the fact that playing a competitive game forces the players into making strong choices. There’s no room for hand-waving or diverting from the prompts when points are at stake.
I think the driving factor behind I Have The High Ground’s success is that the kind of story it’s telling is extremely specific. I Have The High Ground is trying to guide the players through one specific type of scene, a scene that we’ve all seen a hundred times before. In addition to the famous duel evoked by the title, my friend and I found ourselves reminiscing about any number of interactions between Batman and the Joker, as well as the “You caught me monologuing!” scene between Mr. Incredible and Syndrome in The Incredibles.
I Have The High Ground zooms in so far on this one kind of scene that it is able to offer some unique insight into how these scenes are constructed. The game literally quantifies how far you have to push someone before they’ll draw their weapon, how far you have to push before they strike the first blow. By mapping a story onto a relatively rigid mechanical structure, this game lets you follow every beat in a way that you might not get by simply watching a scene like this play out or by playing this kind of scene as pure roleplay. After playing, we put on the climactic duel from Revenge of the Sith to chart exactly when in their game of I Have The High Ground Anakin and Obi-Wan score points and who wins (it’s Anakin). I’ve played plenty of RPGs that have given me a deeper appreciation for their source material and genre, but never one that pushed me to look into the construction of a specific scene like this.
My only criticisms of I Have The High Ground end up feeling like nitpicks. The core gameplay is so satisfying and intuitive that the Penalty mechanic, which disrupts the Rochambeau and is one of the few times in the game when a random roll is used to determine an outcome, felt somewhat arbitrary. On the other hand, both of the Penalties we played panned out in a way that was extremely satisfying. The prompts for the characters’ history contain some really excellent and electrifying prose, so the ones that aren’t exceptional stand out. All in all, these are extremely minor complaints about an otherwise truly excellent game. If the rest of the game wasn’t so good, these wouldn’t even be negatives.
I will be playing I Have The High Ground again. Because it is focused on the structure of a scene rather than any of the trappings, I can easily see it being replayed time and time again in different settings with completely different characters. I haven’t even touched on the queerness both explicit and implicit in the game’s structure and source material, which I am thoroughly looking forward to exploring in future playthroughs. All in all, I Have The High Ground is a must-read and must-play for anyone who likes one liners, high stakes banter, and of course capes.
I Have The High Ground can be found at Jess’s itch.io page. You can find all of Jess’s work, including fiction, essays, and TTRPGs at https://jessfrom.online/