You probably know the story – a theme park where things go horribly awry, but instead of an accident on a ride or something there are real dinosaurs on the loose and they’re eating everyone. There is a solitary survivor, holed up in the park’s control center, trying to figure out how they’re going to survive and get off of the island. There is also, however, a raptor leading a pack of their fellows in trying to get to the human to avenge themselves upon their former tormenter. The human has chosen to live; can they? The raptor has chosen to embark on a crusade of vengeance; will it destroy them? This is Clever Girl, two-games-in-one by Matthew Gravelyn!

Mechanically speaking Clever Girl is built using the Wretched & Alone system. For the uninitiated, get yourself a deck of cards and a tumbling block tower of your choice. A W&A player will draw a card, and the game will provide a prompt to respond to based on which one they drew. Some cards will prompt you to pull a block from the tower – if the tower falls, you’re doomed. The only way out is to first draw the Ace of Hearts, place ten tokens upon it, and then for every future turn roll a die to see if you remove one. If you remove all ten before the tower falls, you get a chance to get out of whatever terrible situation you are in mostly intact.

Suffice to say that doing so is not easy or common. Surviving isn’t really the name of the game – it’s about telling the story of trying to.

Each W&A game should put their own twist on it – the original The Wretched was about the sole survivor of an alien attack aboard a spaceship, Light was about a mysterious lighthouse and its keeper, and Hope is Not A Plan is about project management.

Clever Girl does it in two ways, first with the obvious premise change of DinoLand gone mad. The second, though, is that there are two versions of Clever Girl that can be played on their own as standalone games or played together as a duet/two-player game: Human Edition and Raptor Edition.

In Clever Girl: Human Edition you play the aforementioned sole surviving human occupant of the park, probably an employee of DinoLand although it’s possible to play as a guest in order to feel extra overwhelmed. You thought you’d be safe in the control center, but the raptors have tracked your here, seemingly ignoring much easier prey in a hellbent effort to get to you. There’s not much hope, but survival is the only thing worth trying for anyway. Overall, the game describes itself as being about the extraordinary lengths a person will go through to survive, with the choice and will to survive being more important than actually doing so.

Regardless of Edition each turn of Clever Girl represents another terrifying day in the ruins of DinoLand, and is broken up into two phases, tasks and log. Tasks start with rolling a six-sided die and drawing that many cards from the deck, laying them out face down. One by one you flip those cards over, consulting the field guide (game book) to read its prompt and follow an instructions it gives you. Once you’ve done so for every card, you discard all of them and move onto the log phase. In the log phase you take a minute or two to reflect on what happened during tasks and how you feel about it all, and then you record your entry (however you wish to) for that day.

The game is more likely to end in ‘failure’ than not – if the tower ever falls, or if you can no longer draw a card, then you’re toast – exactly how it happens will vary, but all ‘bad’ endings are equally so. The only way to accomplish your goal, survival or vengeance, is to first draw the Ace of Hearts (you can choose to place it on the top of the deck to get started right away, or shuffle it in with the rest and take your chances that you’ll never see it). You then place ten tokens upon it, and at the end of every day you roll a d6; if you get a 6, remove a token. If you remove all ten, you pull from the tower one last time to see if you actually succeed…

Each suite of cards represents something different, a common W&A design trick. Hearts represents Technology, the literal tech of the park, and the Ace of Hearts that will start your path to survival involves activating the long-range communication system and broadcasting a distress message. Clubs are memories, the people who died, things from before the incident, and what drive you. Diamonds are infrastructure, the physical walls, fences, and doors that stand between you and becoming dinosaur food. Spades are the dinosaurs themselves, both the raptors actively hunting you and the other prehistoric monsters wandering the theme park.

In Clever Girl: Raptor Edition the lead raptor of a pack who were imprisoned and tormented by the humans, now set loose by some unknown incident. The park isn’t set up to sustain itself naturally, and food is running out near the control center, but there is this one human in there that you cannot forgive. It’s proving tougher than you thought, and the loyalty of the pack is wavering as  hunger closes in, but you must have your vengeance. Overall, the game describes itself as being about trauma and how we respond to it, the unhealthy fixation that abuse can create.

The suites represent different things in Raptor Edition, some similar but flipped and some unique. Hearts represent the Control Center, the human’s physical defenses that you are trying to overcome, and the Ace of Hearts that will lead you to your prey is about finding a weakness to exploit. Clubs are The Island, the natural environment, resources, and other dinosaurs. Diamonds are your Raptor Pack, their loyalty and obedience (or increasing lack thereof) and their efforts to help you. Spades are the human you hunt: their presence, how the affect you, and how they elude you.

Not all cards, or suites, are equal. Diamonds and Spades in both games are particularly rife with prompts to pull from the tower. Kings cards don’t call for a pull but are particularly bad narratively speaking, and you don’t discard them like the others, instead placing them in front of you. Collecting all four Kings is an additional losing condition for the game that’ll take you out even if the tower hasn’t fallen and there are still cards in the deck. Aces, on the other hand, are helpful, and are also not (all immediately) discarded. The Ace of Hearts is obvious, but the others are also good: the Ace of Diamonds make it easier to progress on the Ace of Hearts win condition, the Ace of Clubs lets you discard and ignore another card once, and the Ace of Spades lets you shuffle the King of Spades back into the deck once.

Let’s look at some examples. The 8 of Hearts for the Human describes the control center’s breakroom as being well-stocked with coffee pods that are unfortunately of the absolute worst flavors, and asks if you grin and bear it or go without. For the Raptor it involves other dinosaurs moving into the control center compound to make a home of it, and asks how their presence gets in your way. On a Six of Hearts the Raptor sends one of their packmates to investigate a small building nearby which promptly explodes, asks how the pack reacts to their burns and scars, and prompts a tower pull. From the human perspective a nearby power station explodes and the power flickers but stays on; you have no idea what caused it, and you have to pull from the tower.

10 of Clubs? For the Human, there’s a half-eaten body just outside of the control center that got that way because you chose not to risk the raptors getting inside; what was the last thing they said to you before they were killed? For the Raptor, you found and killed the human, relishing the kill… until you realized it wasn’t the right human. Does that make you feel stronger or weaker? Finally, as the Raptor the 3 of Spades tells us that the only time you let your guard down is when the human sleeps, but one night they startle you awake before fleeing back inside; do you ever sleep soundly again? Pull from the tower. On the other side of the card, the Human sneaks out to try and get some supplies when they think the raptors must be sleeping, but is startled to find that one is always watching; pull from the tower.

As I mentioned, you’ve essentially got two single player games here that tackle the same premise from opposite ends, but you can make this into a single two player game of Human vs. Raptor easily. Still just one deck of cards, but two tumbling block towers, one for the human player and one for the raptor player. When figuring out who your characters are, the players should talk about shared experiences between the human and the raptor before the park’s collapse occurred. When taking turns, the players alternate who is drawing the cards and rolling the die, but when a card is revealed both players consult their books and respond to that card’s prompt. You may have noticed that the examples above mirrored each other, and the two players will do the same as they describe what happened.

The books give you the chance to not know exactly how the different end conditions affect the characters, and I’ll respect that here. Suffice to say the odds are not in any way improved, and while some bad ends for one might mean a nominally good end for the other, there’s a chance for more total tragedy as well.

The individual Editions of Clever Girl bring a unique premise to the Wretched & Alone landscape, which is exactly what you want to see when reading works based on an SRD. On the mechanical level they don’t individually do anything particularly innovative, sticking to the mold created by the original game and document and used by other games in the space. That’s fine, because together the two editions do a great job of taking a solo idea into a duet form in a way that’s more than just ‘add a player and talk to each other’, complimenting each other in both the general writing style and in each prompt. With further advice for additional players, multiple humans, multiple raptors, and cooperative and competitive approaches to each, it’s… well, quite Clever.

You can get both versions of Clever Girl in PDF form at itch.io for $10 total. We get the physical two book set plus the PDFs (thanks Michelle!) from the PAX Eastian IPR for $20 (if you happen to visit an IPR convention booth that has Clever Girl you could, if you so choose, buy just one Edition). IPR is physically out of stock as of this writing though, so either check back or chase down your prey further afield at Knave of Cups or ratti incantati!

Will the prehistoric predators claim one final victim or will the cunning human survive long enough to be rescued? Will both perish instead? Hold on to your butts, you’ll have to play Clever Girl to find out!