I looked at this as a part of Capsule Reviews #9: HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle but a chance draw from a review round-robin has geas-ed me to take another look - so let us delve deeper.
GREEN CORRIDOR has up to five players be agents of REWIND, a group of survivors of the climate catastrophe and corporatism that has ravaged the world. Agents seek out pockets of The Green, habitable regions where people and wildlife can flourish, aiming to reconnect them by exploring a hex-map and rebuild the world one ecological pathway at a time.
A punchy tri-fold pamphlet game, print it out and fold it, works well - good contrast, clear layout, nice piece of art for the front cover. So what do you actually get?
Agents have three stats, challenges are resolved by roll under system. To start off you assign 3, 4 and 5 to your stats (Wildcare, Contact & Hazmat) and that is your agent. Ready to go.
The basic game is about travelling a hex-map towards 'green locations' from your central base, attempting to create 'green corridors' by overcoming the challenges in the hexes along the way. There are quite a lot of mechanics packed in here which take a little unpicking but the basic loop is that a newly encountered hex/location will have d3 challenges, with either d6 or d8 assigned to them and you take turns attempting to 'wind down' the challenge die by describing the attempt in a way aligned with the stat you intend to use and then rolling under your stat with a d6. Success decrements the challenge die by two, failure leaves you with the option to burn a point off your stat to reduce the challenge die by one.
The key point is that you only get three attempts per location and to clear a location you have to get the total on the challenge die down to lower than half its starting point. Unclear to me whether the challenge dice are rolled or you always take their max value - one assumes rolled as max value and three attempts is going to be very hard to achieve early on.
You also have a personal mission where for each location you can describe how you are progressing towards that (and increment the mission die) which is useful as once per journey you can take your mission success away from a challenge encountered. Similarly, as you clear your green corridor that builds 'connection' and it too can be used to reduce challenges you encounter.
Together this makes a snowball effect - early locations are going to be tough but by the time you hit the later locations you will have decent personal mission and connection numbers.
The one tricky thing is that it works off a hex map which one is unlikely to find lying around, which hampers the portability a little - but I do not think it would suffer too badly from just being run on a square-grid and grid paper is easily found.
Pithy and stripped down, a good seed that lends itself to inspiring a GM to pick up and run with it. A relatively light framework but the wind-down mechanic seems like it could work well. Depending on your play table, you might get in a journey per 45-60mins and then scale that up to whatever timeslot you have to fill, which is pretty good for a game that fits in your jacket pocket.
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