The Games I Played at Breakout Con 2026: Brindlewood Bay
I attended Breakout Con 2026 last week. It was my first big convention in over a decade. I played 8 new (to me) TTRPGs over 4 days which is a record I don't think I'll beat any time soon. I hope to write down my thoughts on all of them eventually, starting with...
Brindewood Bay
In Brindlewood Bay you play a team of little old ladies who solve murders in the titular coastal village. It's got all your daytime TV and literary mystery tropes, with each player choosing a “Maven Move” named after an iconic fictional detective. I chose Ms Marple, which meant that I could breeze my way into any location regardless of whether I was supposed to be there or not.
The game revolves around collecting clues, which are vague enough that they don't narrow down the list of suspects too quickly. In fact, the key thing is that there isn't a pre-written solution to the mystery. It is the player's job to concoct a narrative based on the clues they find. The more clues they incorporate, the greater the bonus they can add when they make a “Theorize” move to try and solve the case.
Building this narrative was satisfying, and the scenes where we gathered clues were a good mix of investigation, interrogation, and intrigue. Things escalated quickly and the pace felt well-suited to a game based on hour-long TV episodes.
The one thing that I didn't grasp especially well was when or how we were should transition from gathering clues to solving the mystery. Given that we'd stand a better chance of succeeding in our Theorize roll with more clues, we wanted to gather as many as possible. We had over a dozen when we reached the end of our session, which allowed us to solve with ease. If we hadn't had the constraints of the convention schedule I felt that we'd have continued picking up clues until we simply couldn't fail. In theory there was a narrative time pressure too, but that didn't really come into play.
Essentially, it never felt like it made sense to Theorize while the option of searching for clues was present. Maybe that's not a choice that the players are expected to be considering. Without a 'real' solution to be uncovered there's no “ah ha!” moment where things fall into place. That's a big part of the material this game draws from, and I felt its absence.
I really enjoyed my session playing Brindlewood Bay. If someone in my home group picked it up I'd be very happy to play some more. There's a whole overarching mystery that I haven't even touched on here which you'd uncover as you play through the course of a campaign.