There are, strictly speaking, two minimalist games that are worth the price of admission. Neither are OSR. Neither is on itch. And they were produced within 12 months of one another. Well, the renditions I'm talking about were.
The two games are the following:
Castle Falkenstein - A very different game came from R Talsorian back in the heyday of Cyberpunk2020. While CP2020 is a gritty techno-gang violence simulator, CF is a Victorian-era Steam Age fairy-tale game. It's intentionally based around cards and words, seeking to nearly completely eschew math, dice, and mechanics. While it doesn't quite make it, a few alternate systems in the sourcebook Comme Il Fait take it another few steps away. The chief innovation of this game is that it very intentionally tried to make the game books themselves props for the game as well, to varying degrees of success. It was also uncommon to see softcover full color books in these earlier days of the hobby (it was barely 20 years old in 1994!), and the entire line of CF was in full color and beautiful pastels. Other books would have different color palates. The most recent book is a bestiary of sorts and came out in 2020! Officially sanctioned and produced solely via Lulu. Bizarrely you can't even buy this book on RTal's website. You effectively have to find it on Lulu to know it exists.
Over the Edge 2E - A game born from a relatively freeform campaign of the author's. It was a highly stylized setting, a pseudo-anarchic island in the Mediterranean where lots of crazy stuff goes down. Heavily colored by post-WWII and the Cold War, while it's never really mentioned this is also an alternate history where either the cold war never ended or it's set a decade or longer before it's publication in 1995. The entire game revolves around a sort of fragile government, a pseudo-democracy with tons of factions/conspiracies. Everything from voodoo to aliens to MK Ultra to Ubermensch and maybe even time travel show up here or there in the setting, like a massive grab-bag of setting elements. It's up to the GM to focus the campaign into a specific format - horror, espionage/intrigue, investigation, etc.
Both of these games also predate The Forge by nearly a decade and created games better than those of The Forge to The Forge's ends without any of the poppycock theory they ruminated on endlessly prior to making their shit games nobody currently remembers. Sadly both R Talsorian and Jonathon Tweet have fallen victim to wokeness after 20 plus years. Cyberpunk Red and Over the Edge 3E both disappeared up their own asses. While Cyberpunk fans are used to getting shafted (see CP 3E, the edition they decanonized and never talk about) and just continuing to play CP2020, Atlas Games has been on life support with no fans for the better part of two decades now.
