# Sign tags: #game/rpg/sign ![[Sign (cover).jpg|600]] **Sign** is a live-action game for 4 to 7 people about spending a school day in total silence and building a language from nothing as you go. It's Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu's follow-up to their language-obsessed debut **Dialect**, pointed at the opposite end of the lifecycle: instead of watching a language die, you're present at its birth. The premise is drawn straight from history — Deaf children brought together at a Managua school in 1977, given no shared language, responded by inventing one, the foundation of modern Nicaraguan Sign Language — and **Sign** asks you to feel what that day was actually like for the kids who lived it. It's a free download, and the hobby's own awards had to note that "it's free is clearly a mistake." ## Setting Nicaragua in the 1970s had no sign language at all. If you were deaf, you were alone — a few gestures shared with a trusted handful, nothing close to deep expression. In 1977 the country's deaf children were brought to an experimental school in Managua, expected to learn lip reading. By and large they didn't. They did something more remarkable: among their true peers for the first time, they built a language together, giving the deaf across an entire country a voice. **Sign** walks a small piece of that journey. The players are the kids on their first day. One person takes the **Teacher** — a facilitator, not a creator of language — and the rest become **Students**, each built from a Character card: a child with a past, three **Relationship Goals**, and a private **Truth** (the hope or fear they can't yet express). The room is split into a circle-of-chairs classroom and an open recess area, and the whole game unfolds across three pairs of class and recess plus one final class. You're told up front that these children are more privileged than their real-world counterparts were — a deliberate design compromise to keep the experience approachable — and that this isn't a game about the modern Deaf experience, but about a language born from the hands of children and the universal desire to be understood. ## Mechanics This is live-action, not tabletop: you embody your character, move, and gesture. Once the game starts there is **no speech, no established sign language, no writing** except when the rules invite it. You create signs — grounded in your character, the setting, and each other — and every time you fail to make yourself understood, or fail to understand someone else, you **mark a Compromise** on your hand (or a note card): a visible tally of the times the world couldn't hear you. That tally is the game's drama. The shape of play is simple and rigid. On the first day you invent a **sign for your new name** — not the one your parents gave you, the one you'll use here — and the class repeats it, one by one. The **first class** is introductions in sign; the **first recess** is free play, trying to have a conversation with everyone and watching most attempts fail. The **second class** hands out **Word cards** and has each student define a sign for a chosen word, which the class learns and repeats; the **third class** does the same, but now the words are your own, chosen to express your Truth and bridge the Compromises you've racked up. The **third recess** is the payoff: you sign your Truth as plainly as you can or want, to whomever you trust with it. A **final class** gives each student a turn in the spotlight while the others describe them and say how they make them feel. There are no dice, no points, no written resolution — the mechanics are the marks on your hands and the language you've built together, and the whole thing runs about two hours. The Teacher's job is to keep it safe and moving: agreeing on touch boundaries ahead of time, holding a pause word ("cut"), corralling students back to class, and deciding, with their inner teacher, whether a child needs a comforting hand or a corner. ## Editions **Sign** (2015) is a single edition. The free digital release — the booklet and card sets that sit in the library — is the version that took Best Free Game at the 2015 Indie RPG Awards and a 2015 Golden Cobra Honorable Mention, and was a 2017 Indiecade Finalist. *In the library.* The same game ships as a physical print edition from Thorny Games, its proceeds funding the Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, and fans have produced Dutch and Norwegian digital translations; none of those are in the library. ## References - [Sign — Thorny Games](https://thornygames.com/pages/sign) - [Sign: A Game About Being Understood — itch.io](https://thornygames.itch.io/sign-a-game-about-being-understood) - [Best Free Game 2015 — The Indie RPG Awards](http://www.indie-rpg-awards.com/2015/best_free_game.shtml) - [2015 Golden Cobra — Honorable Mentions](http://www.goldencobra.org/2015winners.html) - ['Sign' Strips Away Your Voice While You Develop Your Own Language — Bell of Lost Souls](https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2019/04/sign-strips-away-your-voice-while-you-develop-your-own-language.html) - [Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects](http://nicaraguansignlanguageprojects.org/Home_Page.php)