In a world plunged into eternal darkness, survival isn’t the goal—telling an unforgettable story is.
Imagine sitting around a table with friends, ten tea lights flickering between you, knowing with absolute certainty that by the time the last candle goes out, every character will be dead. This is Ten Candles, a revolutionary tabletop role-playing game that turns traditional RPG conventions on their head by making death not just possible, but inevitable.
The Beauty of Inevitable Doom
Ten Candles distinguishes itself from mainstream tabletop RPGs through its fundamental premise: this is not a survival horror game, it’s a tragedy horror experience. While games like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder focus on character progression and campaign-long narratives, Ten Candles is designed as a one-shot experience—a complete story told in a single session, like a movie rather than a TV series.
The game’s brilliance lies in its transparency about mortality. Players enter knowing their characters won’t survive, which fundamentally changes how they approach the game. Instead of min-maxing stats or hoarding resources for future sessions, players make decisions based purely on narrative impact.
Knowing that the players are all going to die means that your decisions will be made based on telling a good story rather than trying to sort of win the game.
Rules So Light They Could Float
Where traditional RPG rulebooks like those for Iron Kingdoms or Star Wars: Edge of the Empire can be hefty tomes, Ten Candles’ entire rulebook is remarkably slim—with half of it dedicated to gameplay examples and scenario ideas. This minimalist approach makes it perfect for newcomers intimidated by complex character sheets and exotic dice collections.
The game uses only standard six-sided dice—the kind found in every household board game. There are no skill trees, no complex modifiers, no intricate combat systems. Just simple, elegant mechanics that serve the story rather than dominate it.
Playing in the Dark
The game’s core concept is deliberately vague to allow maximum flexibility: Ten days ago, the world went dark. The sun simply stopped shining. Five days ago, “they” appeared—mysterious entities that could be aliens, Lovecraftian horrors, or something else entirely. Players take on the roles of survivors trying to navigate this apocalyptic darkness.
How the Candles Work
The game unfolds across ten scenes, each represented by a lit tea light. The mechanics are beautifully simple:
- Players roll a number of six-sided dice equal to the number of candles still burning
- Success requires just one six on any die
- Every one rolled removes that die from the pool until the scene ends
- When a player fails a roll, the scene ends and a candle is extinguished
- The dice pool resets to match the remaining candles
This creates a death spiral of tension. Early scenes might have players rolling ten dice, making success likely. By the final scene, they’re desperately hoping for a six on a single die.
Collective Storytelling Revolution
Unlike traditional RPGs where the Game Master controls the world and players control only their characters, Ten Candles democratizes narrative control. When players succeed on dice rolls, they often get to describe what happens or what they discover.
For instance, instead of the GM saying “You search the room and find a flashlight,” a successful roll might prompt: “You passed your dice roll—tell me what you found in that room.” This transforms players from participants into co-creators of the horror unfolding around them.
The Power Shift
As the game progresses, dice removed from failed rolls go to the GM. When the GM rolls as many or more sixes than the players on any check, they gain narrative control over the outcome. This mechanical representation of losing control perfectly mirrors the descent into chaos that defines great horror stories.
Early on the party might feel in control of the situation, but as events spiral out of control it gets more desperate towards the end until you’re just desperately trying to survive one moment after the next.
Key Takeaways
- Ten Candles is a one-shot RPG where character death is guaranteed, freeing players to prioritize storytelling over survival
- The game uses only six-sided dice and minimal rules, making it accessible to RPG newcomers
- Playing by actual candlelight creates unmatched atmospheric tension
- Shared narrative control between GM and players creates organic, collaborative storytelling
- The diminishing dice pool mechanically represents the characters’ deteriorating situation
- Success isn’t measured by survival but by the quality of the story told
A Different Kind of Victory
Ten Candles challenges our fundamental assumptions about what makes a game successful. In a medium often obsessed with character optimization and tactical victory, it dares to ask: what if losing was the point? What if the real achievement wasn’t defeating the monster, but creating a memorable narrative about facing it?
The game recognizes that some of horror’s most powerful moments come not from jump scares or gore, but from the slow, inevitable approach of doom. By making that doom explicit from the start, it frees players to embrace their fate and focus on how they meet it.
When that final candle flickers out and darkness claims the last survivor, the real light that remains is the story you’ve told together—a collaborative tragedy that could only exist because everyone at the table understood that in Ten Candles, nobody gets out alive.
Related Topics
- Collaborative storytelling games
- Horror tabletop RPGs
- One-shot RPG systems
- Narrative-focused gaming
- Alternative RPG mechanics
- Atmospheric game design
- Rules-light tabletop games
- Tragic storytelling in games