Free Game Friday—Risus: The Anything RPG

Welcome back to Free Game Friday! Last week I looked at Ars Magica, so for this week I've decided to highlight a less rules-intensive RPG that you can just dive into with minimal effort and appropriate amounts of beer and pretzels. What I speak of is the game with more purple stick figures than I've ever seen collected in one place—Risus: The Anything RPG.

I'm not going to explain the rules here—heck, it's only six pages long, so any explaining I do would be silly since you should really just read the damn thing. As briefly as possible, though: it's meant for funny games but can be adapted to more serious ones, character creation takes about 20 seconds, instead of "character classes" there are "Clichés," the core rules end after the first four pages (the last two pages being "Advanced Rules"), but the hardcore Risus fanbase has made tons of expansions for the game into various genres just in case you want to go more in depth (including translations of the game into Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Danish, Croatian, Dutch, Czech, Polish and Norwegian).

Risus is a +3 hoot, wonderfully effective at making a satisfying and amusing game when you and your group are totally burnt out, and best of all—it's free!