Triangle Agency makes the (brief)case for buying physical books again

Opening my review copy of Triangle Agency: Normal Briefcase felt like living out the end of Pulp Fiction — a look inside something that wasn’t meant for human eyes. Within this box set, presented as a briefcase with corporate stickers and deep claw gashes, is a treasure of a game unlike any other I’ve ever read. Think Control meets Severance meets The Office, with a touch of House of Leaves thrown in for good measure. More than anything else, the physical element of reading this book created an experience that forced me to bounce around the book. Moving through its mechanics and fiction felt like a choose-your-own-adventure game hidden in the guise of a satirical corporate handbook with a highly-spoilable secret. 

Triangle Agency by Haunted Table Games is a tabletop role-playing game which asks players to become employees at the highly secretive agency of the same name, which operates clandestinely to capture or neutralize supernatural anomalies in the eponymous Normal Briefcase. Except you, dear Agent, are actually an anomaly, forced to conform to the whims of the Agency, lest you become a danger to yourself — and more importantly, the company. But there’s a twist. The game positions itself as the true reality; the tabletop RPG is one of the company’s newest initiatives. Those playing the game are actually hallucinating a completely different life to cope with the eldritch horrors of corporate synergy.

Not everything is available to entry level Agents, of course. There are “Playwalled” sections, hidden from view until more of the game is played or read. Reading ahead in the book is both encouraged and punished by the in-fiction authors, with mechanical disadvantages applied to readers who aren’t the group’s General Manager. The GM, though just another Agent with more responsibilities, is rewarded for their efforts by the evolution of the books’ voice… or maybe more accurately, its descent into madness. I rarely find myself writing in the margins of tabletop games, but I couldn’t help but have a conversation with this text, marking all the clever satirical lines and cuts of the faux-friendly corporate handbook. Soon enough, it started talking back.

Maybe most importantly, Triangle Agency is funny. The punchline-per-page ratio is astronomical. Woven into every paragraph is some comedic dissection of the ways corporations ask their employees to sacrifice their lives for the good of the company. Barely hidden behind a hollow smile and an insistence on work-life balance is the underlying understanding that Agents are expendable assets to be controlled. Division and corporate hierarchy is the name of the game and worker unity is the biggest anomaly of all. 

At every opportunity the physical text of Triangle Agency works to evoke the absurd horror of working under late-stage capitalism, while never letting its lofty concept run away with its playability. This game is as enjoyable and easy to jump into as it is to read. While a digital edition of Triangle Agency would still be filled with equally brilliant language, mechanics, and art direction, holding the physical book in your hands and flipping back and forth from the early sections to the playwalled documents, is as much a part of the experience as sitting down at the table with your fellow agents and rolling dice. 

Triangle Agency: Normal Briefcase, which includes the corebook, The Vault expansion (which includes 12 missions), a spiral character organizer, six d4, and five secret dice; is available now for $90. The standalone Triangle Agency book is also available for $60. A digital edition is available for $30.