Wallow Wide: when the gaming table becomes the set of an American crime series

We have all spent whole evenings glued to a screen, caught up in the battered daily lives of fictional cops. Whether we follow Sheriff Walt Longmire’s cowboy hat across the wild expanses of Wyoming, Raylan Givens’s confident stride in Justified, the heavy silences of True Detective, the icy absurdity of Fargo or the nervous camaraderie of a precinct in The Rookie, the fascination is the same. These fictions do not work because they unfold a legal procedure to the millimetre, but because they attach us to flawed characters, crushed by their choices and confronted with the misery of the world.

With Wallow Wide, Seb “Merlin DEX” Guillet and Obhéa Éditions set out to capture that precise alchemy. The aim is not to simulate the administrative routine of a police station, but to set an imaginary camera in the middle of the table. Each session is designed as a tense episode of about an hour of television, each campaign forms a full season, and the people around the table are not mere witnesses to a case: they are the headliners of their own series.

Murder is only a pretext: psychology as the engine

In a prestige crime series, the crime of the week is never the real subject of the story. A body found in a ditch, a rural bank robbery or a worrying disappearance are only revealers. The investigation acts as a social X-ray that lays bare a community’s grudges, but above all it serves as a catalyst to reveal the investigators’ intimate flaws.

Wallow Wide makes this rule its founding principle. The characters you play carry a heavy past, set down at creation in their personal files. One tries to solve his wife’s suspicious death while pretending to believe in a road accident. Another fled her old life after putting her own corrupt colleagues behind bars. A third drowns an unpayable moral debt in bourbon at the back of a seedy motel.

Throughout the season, one central question haunts all the protagonists: what is the weight of our inheritance? It is this existential through-line that gives the game its depth. The criminal investigation lets the members of the team come together in adversity and act, but it is their hushed conversations, their unspeakable secrets and their psychological wounds that make up the soul of the series.

The grammar of the screen: rhythm through cuts and ellipses

To convey the dynamic of an American series, the game master has to swap the classic storyteller’s cap for a director’s. It starts with rhythm. A Wallow Wide session is calibrated to last about four hours, without getting bogged down in the insignificant details of police logistics.

At the table, we apply the editing techniques of the small screen. A session ideally begins with a punchy cold open: a subjective view through the eyes of the future victim in an isolated barn, a farmer’s grim discovery of a wrecked pick-up at dawn, or a dive straight into the action, sirens blaring, before rewinding the thread of events.

During play, the staging constantly uses ellipses and hard cuts. In a series, we do not watch cops write interview reports for three hours, nor do we drive their vehicle for forty minutes in real time between two distant towns. One of the deputies grabs his keys from the desk, the scene cuts, and the next shot opens straight on the screech of tyres in front of the suspect’s door.

These quick transitions leave precious breathing spaces: the scenes of travel or of a break at the corner diner. These are the privileged moments when two deputies argue at the wheel about their family grudges, when an investigator confides her doubts to her team leader, or when two colleagues share a silent beer facing the immensity of the plains. These moments of human exposition are essential to let the narration breathe between two surges of adrenaline.

The directing tools: mechanics built to light up the screen

The Wallow Wide game system has been specially tailored to support this televisual dimension without ever weighing it down with dry calculations.

At the centre of the table are the Drama Points. This narrative resource lets players draw the spotlight onto their character in an anthology scene. By spending a Drama Point, a deputy can trigger a moving flashback to justify that she knows a hostile witness intimately from years before, reveal a touching weakness to move a suspect, or simply save her skin at the last moment in an out-of-control skid. Drama Points reward narrative boldness and encourage the table to polish its dialogue rather than optimise its statistics.

Major confrontations get a tightened, cinematic treatment. In a tense interrogation of a cunning suspect, the game offers a psychological duel condensed into a few rounds of exchange. Likewise, shootouts do not drag on in endless tactical skirmishes: Wallow Wide’s combat mode works like a tense revolver face-off. Before rolling their dice, each shooter chooses a stance between attack, defence and speed of initiative. Violence is rare, but when it breaks out it is sharp and brutal. A single bullet can break a career or pin a character to a hospital bed, a reminder that series heroes bleed and doubt like everyone else.

Finally, the basic resolution of three ten-sided dice — keeping only the median value — ensures a natural regularity of results. Chance does not break the spectacle on a whim, but maintains a constant pressure that showcases the characters’ real skills.

A county as a character, and the shadow of a Nemesis

A good crime series is recognised instantly by its visual atmosphere. In Wallow Wide, the setting of north-west Wyoming is not an inert backdrop: it plays the role of a character in its own right.

The sheriff’s office is based in the small town of Wallow Wide, with its dusty main street, its pick-ups parked in front of the diner, its austere churches and its lonely gas stations. Around this small town stretches the vast Fairmont County, dominated by the threatening foothills of Yellowstone National Park and swept by the icy winds of the Great Plains. When the continental winter strikes, snow isolates the farms, freezes the victims’ blood and turns the slightest tail into a survival test. This setting imposes its legal constraints: the Wild River Native American reservation cuts the territory in two, forbidding the sheriff from setting foot there without the consent of the tribal police or the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

To give body to this community, the game master has a gallery of recurring supporting roles who regularly cross the deputies’ path: the town’s mayor, charming but quick to manipulate those around him to protect his interests; the eccentric but fiercely meticulous medical examiner; or the county judge, inflexible about procedural defects.

And then, lurking behind the ordinary offences and the petty traffickers passing through, watches the indispensable figure of every great series: the Nemesis. Whether a mining cartel ready to poison the waterways to drive out the ranchers, a drug baron tied to lawless bikers, or the elusive sponsor of an old murder, this grey eminence distils its venom over several episodes. It leaves diffuse traces, slips past arrest warrants and feeds the team’s paranoia, up to the big season finale where the masks finally fall.

Writing your own opening credits

Approaching Wallow Wide from the angle of a television series radically transforms the play experience. We no longer play to accumulate treasure or push numbers up on a cardboard sheet: we play to hear the slam of a patrol-car door in the night, to feel the dust raised by the horses and the acrid smell of powder after an exchange of gunfire, and to watch fictional beings struggle between their duties as cops and their dignity as men and women.

It is an invitation to gather around the table, to switch on the spotlights of our shared imagination and to start the engine of a story of which we are at once the screenwriters, the directors and the unforgettable heroes.

Vocabulary notes

• PaT (Person at the Table): A feminine term for each participant gathered for the game. It is a reminder that the staging, the dramatic rhythm and the intensity of the dialogue come from the complicity of the whole table.
• Drama Points (DP): A narrative gauge the protagonists can use to force a stroke of brilliance on screen, call up a past memory as a flashback, or avoid a fatal outcome in a critical scene.
• Cold open: A device borrowed from television series that plunges the table straight into a shocking or mysterious event before even introducing the investigators’ daily lives.
• Through-line (fil rouge): A background narrative thread running through a whole season behind the one-off investigations, often tied to the characters’ intimate secrets or the doings of a major criminal.
• Nemesis: The main antagonist of a season or an entire series. A manipulator or major criminal, they act in the shadows and their complex motives long elude legal pursuit.
• Median die: The central mechanic of rolling three ten-sided dice and keeping the middle value, discarding absurd twists of fate to guarantee a realistic, controlled narrative.
• Fairmont County: A fictional administrative district of Wyoming serving as the game’s stage, torn between the town of Wallow Wide, the sovereign lands of the Wild River reservation and the great wild open spaces.