Rascal Shopping Spree 2026

It's a shopping episode! As part of Rascal's second anniversary celebration, Thomas and Chase jumped on a video call to spend their professional development money on a whole mess of games. If you're interested in the video version, head over to Rascal's YouTube channel to watch the pair emote at various webstore pages. Subscribe and all that other business while you're there; why not? (Mind the mess, as we launched the channel expressly for this hastily edited video)

An audio-only version will live in the normal podcast feed and should be scooped up by your podcatcher of choice. You'll miss Chase taking sips of tea, and Thomas thoughtfully tussling his beard, but such is the trade offs when you take our voices on the go.

At the end of the stream, Thomas and Chase donated the unused portion of their budget to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota by purchasing the No ICE in Minnesota bundle. If you'd like to donate as well — and snag a double handful of RPGs — the charity bundle will remain live on itch.io until mid-March.

Here's an exceprt:

Thomas: Here's my expectation for this game. It's going to be weird. It's going to be not like anything else I've played in the sense mechanically, right? I think it is just its own thing, and it's going to be a good text as well. I'm excited to find out if that's true or not.

Chase: This is about as different an approach at The King In Yellow as you can get from Impossible Landscapes. Like, this is the other side of the coin, right? You are really doing a 180 and be like, let's attack that other angle. Which is not a denigration on Impossible Landscapes. I've also played that game. What an incredible game, what an incredible experience. Deeply, imperfect in some ways, but, phew, what a work.

Thomas: Yes! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chase: This is altogether a different beast, but I'm so excited to see what you think about this in context of how it deals with the play, with the fiction, with all of that stuff around The King in Yellow.

Thomas: Man, obviously the thing that's gonna happen here is that we're gonna buy like a bunch of games, and this is gonna be, to some extent, our programming next year, right? If we read them, if we have thoughts and feelings, if we play them this stuff is gonna show up on Rascal. That's kinda cool.

Chase: It is essentially an armament of Chekov's Guns put on the mantelpiece, or knives held to our own throats. It's like, all right, you can't say you don't have games to play. You spent an entire stream purchasing them. I'm excited about this! These are the sort of games that I sometimes wish that I could play more of, but my friend group largely isn't a bunch of — and I say this with love and respect for you and everyone else who ascribes this label ---

Thomas: Just say it: assholes.

Chase: Theatre nerds.

[Both laugh]

Thomas: No, that was what I was thinking, as well.