The Story Behind Buchmafia

It started with a number: 35 marks for a hardcover, fixed by law and justified by culture. In the world of Buchmafia that price is guarded by the Price-Fixing Trust, a cartel registered as a charitable society. To make the books look thick enough for their price, it has them printed on volume paper foamed up to four centimetres: 190 pages of text, and the rest is air. Printing one costs 1.40 marks, and that single line sits on a sheet nobody is supposed to see.

Up against the cartel is a crew it threw out itself. The Trust calls these four people Remittendes, the word for unsold books that go back to the publisher to be pulped:

• Ruth Kalander, "The Roller", has levers and dials in front of her, but not a single word.
• Ansgar Pleite, "Galley", is the only one with readable text in front of him, and he corrects it while reading aloud.
• Selma Golder, "Gilt Edge", sees under loupe and raking light what nobody else can see.
• Nuri Wendt, "Check Digit", sits at the terminal and the register and trusts no system that runs on paper.

That became the principle of the cases: everyone sees the same story, but nobody sees the same tool. Whoever has a number in front of them doesn't know what it means, and whoever knows can't reach the lever. So you have to talk, and that is the game.

Four nights in a row

The story is spread over several games, and it has an order:

1. The Luftnummer tells the day before, as a point & click for one to four players.
2. In Case 01, Operation Hardcover, a stamp on the edge of a book turns it into a damaged copy, and damaged copies are exempt from fixed prices.
3. In Case 02, The World Register, fifteen years later books only exist for rent, and the Trust keeps the register itself.
4. Case 03, Sign-Off, is about a radio station that secretly keeps broadcasting at night.

If you want all of it in one go, read the comic: four chapters in about five minutes, turning its own pages or at your own pace. It tells how the cases end but gives away no puzzle, and two pages are sealed for anyone who still wants to play them.

At the table that means: read the comic before your first evening if you want to know who you're breaking in with, or afterwards if you want to know what happens next. You still set the stamp yourselves.