# RPG a Day 2023 - Day 7: Smartest RPG You've Played
tags: #thoughts/RPGaDay/2023
![[RPGaDay2023.png]]
This is an immensely hard question. I literally live in an RPG library. My walls are lined with games. Every one of them has something about them that is clever.
So I'm going to judge based on pure word to idea ratio, and the answer has to be [[Wushu]]. It's a tiny game, mechanically and physically. But the ideas that it throws on the table and invites you to engage with are super dense.
[http://danielbayn.com/wushu/](http://danielbayn.com/wushu/ "http://danielbayn.com/wushu/")
You get 1d6 per cool idea you say. There's no question, no debate, whatever you say is what literally happened in the fiction. You roll a fistful of dice split into attack and defense, effectively, and compare the result to a Trait which is broadly defined. Roll under. The number of successes depletes a counter set by the GM. When the counter's done, the scene's done. If you don't defend yourself successfully, a counter on your character decreases and if it hits zero you're done.
That's it. That's the game.
I can literally run it without reference to the books at all and have people creating characters on 3 x 5 cards and playing a great game in under 15 minutes.
The rest of the text available for the game is all about ways to tweak it and use what is there to achieve various effects and narrative structures, mainly mimicking geek culture media.
You want Star Wars? You want the Matrix? You want Wild Wild West?
Done. Let's play.
If there is a drawback – and this is now a drawback in my gameplaying selection – it's that it is not a GMless game. It is very much a GMd game. With a little hacking you could probably make it GMless leveraging some awesome oracles and that sort of thing.
But in terms of intelligence density, in terms of just being a really SMART game? It's top of the pile.
And if you haven't tried it yet – did I mention it's free?