Rosenstrasse - Starter guide

What is Rosenstrasse?

Rosenstrasse is a historical roleplaying game about four couples in Berlin between 1933 and 1943. Each couple lives in what the Reich will come to call a mixed marriage, and over one long evening you follow them from the year Hitler takes power to the week the women of Berlin stand in the Rosenstrasse and demand their husbands back. It is a game about love, marriage and quiet resistance, and about how a city turns against its own people one regulation at a time.

The tone is elegiac rather than horrifying. There are no monsters and no villains at the table; the danger is a letter from the housing office, a colleague who stops saying hello, a doctor who can no longer practise. The game is built to be emotionally immersive without being crushing, and it ends on a historical fact that most people have never heard of: in 1943, unarmed women protested in the open, for days, and the men were released.

Rosenstrasse was designed by Moyra Turkington and Jessica Hammer and is published by Unruly Designs. It grew out of years of playtesting, including an IndieCade selection in 2017, and was a finalist for the Diana Jones Award in 2023 and an ENNIE nominee for Best Writing in 2022. Netherbook carries the Deluxe Boxed Set.

How does the system work?

Rosenstrasse has no dice and no stats. One person is the facilitator, working from the Director's Guide; the others are players, and each player takes two characters, one man and one woman, drawn from the four couples. The facilitator does not need to be a historian or a veteran game master. The book hands over exactly what to say and show at each moment, including the historical context, so the facilitator's real job is to hold the room and keep the pace.

The engine is the Rosenstrasse deck. The facilitator draws a card for a specific character: a short scene, a piece of news, a knock at the door, followed by a question about what that character thinks, feels or does. The player answers, in description or in character, and the facilitator checks the guide for what follows. Scene by scene, the decade passes: a prologue for the marriages themselves, then the slow erosion of rights, then the years in which the net tightens but mixed marriages still offer a fragile protection, and finally the roundups of early 1943, when play alternates between the imprisoned men and the women outside in the street.

Two rules give the game its weight. The first is risk. Whenever a male character comes to the attention of the Reich, he gains a risk token, and in the epilogue those tokens decide his fate. The game never tells you which choice was safe; you only find out at the end. The second is the workshop before play. The facilitator runs a short calibration with the group, agreeing on which storylines everyone is comfortable with and checking in on personal connections to this history. The book is explicit that the players' experience comes before the game itself.

What do you need to start?

The Deluxe Boxed Set contains everything: a 228-page Director's Guide, eight character cards, the 94-card Rosenstrasse deck, twenty risk tokens, four star patches in velvet bags and twenty postcards. Add pencils, a table and, ideally, a quiet room.

The game is played in a single session of two to five hours, with two to four players plus a facilitator. Plan for an evening: a four-player game with a proper workshop and debrief comfortably fills four hours. It can be run at the table or as a semi-live game with players standing and moving, and it has found a home in classrooms and museums as well as in living rooms. Only the facilitator needs to read anything in advance.

Who is this game for?

Rosenstrasse is for groups who want a roleplaying game to mean something. It suits players who love character drama and are willing to sit with discomfort, and it is an unusually good choice for people who do not normally play roleplaying games at all: teachers, book clubs, families with adult children, anyone who would rather have a serious conversation than roll dice. Nobody has to improvise a voice or learn a system; the cards ask you what your character does, and you answer.

Be honest about the subject. This is a game about antisemitism, persecution and genocide, and it is for adults. It asks for a facilitator who is comfortable holding difficult scenes and a group that is willing to talk afterwards. If your table wants escapism, jokes or tactics, pick a different evening for those. And if anyone at the table has a personal or family connection to this history, the workshop exists for exactly that reason; take it seriously.

How does it compare to other systems?

Compared to Dungeons & Dragons, nearly everything is reversed. No dice, no combat, no character sheets full of numbers, no campaign. One finished story in one sitting, with characters written for you and a fate that depends on what you chose rather than what you rolled.

On our own shelves the closest neighbour is Alice is Missing: also a card-driven, facilitated one-shot with a fixed structure, a heavy ending and no game master in the traditional sense, though Alice is played in silence over text messages and is fiction, where Rosenstrasse is played out loud and is history. Dialect is a kindred spirit in tone: a game about a community losing something precious, cards prompting the conversation, no dice. If what draws you is the structure of a single tense evening, Dread offers the same shape with a horror setting and a Jenga tower.

Where do you start?

Choose a facilitator and give them the Director's Guide a week in advance. It is long, but it is written to be followed rather than memorised, and a single read is enough. Then choose the evening with care: this is not a game for the end of a party. Run the workshop in full, even with close friends, and keep the debrief on the schedule. Groups almost always want to talk afterwards, and many want to look things up; the guide has material for both.

Play it once with four players if you can. The game is written for that number, and the alternation between the men in detention and the women in the street works best when every player holds one of each.

Recommended products at Netherbook

The Rosenstrasse Deluxe Boxed Set (EUR 59,95) is the only product you need, and it is complete: everything the facilitator and players use is in the box. It lives in our new Historical collection. If this kind of play lands with your group, Alice is Missing (EUR 34,95) is the next facilitated one-shot to try, Dialect (EUR 29,95) shares its mood of loss and its card-driven structure, and The Quiet Year (EUR 49,95) is the game for a group that wants to build a community rather than watch one being dismantled.