I love Dialect as a roleplaying game. I love the language creation as a tool for telling a story of a culture, and the unique perspective on society that emerges because of that. Nearly every piece of the game is carefully thought out and plays very well at the table.

But there’s a little flaw in the game that bugs me. At the end of each Age, you’re supposed to read a prewritten paragraph of text about how the community changes. These don’t work nearly as well as the rest of the game.

I played a lot of games of Dialect at Origins (5 I think). In all those games (and my time running it before), the prewritten text (both red and black) often sat oddly on the game’s narrative that had emerged through play. The prewritten text would assume the story went one way when it had gone another.

I think this aspect would work a lot better if it were just a few carefully directed questions and the current prewritten text was just offered as examples or potential options.

The game says that you can invent your own path if you’ve already played the prewritten red and black paths. I just think “invent your own” should be the default.

This is a really minor complaint, on the whole. Dialect is pretty high on my list of favorite games. I just think in the future I might ditch these narrative paths and collaborate with the other players instead to progress the Isolation through the various Ages.