MacGimmick

MacGimmick is a beer-and-pretzels tabletop rpg about being a certain 80s action tinker guy.

The PDF is 7 pages, with a dense, well-organized zine style layout.

It begins with short fiction, which is a solid tone setter---if you're not familiar with the source material, you'll get the gist immediately.

Mechanically, MacGimmick is a one player multiple GMs game. The player is MacGuyv---immick, and the GMs play background characters and judge whether our hero's stratagems succeed.

There aren't dice here, instead the difficulty of checks is how many pieces you need to incorporate into the device you build.

You can't fail (it wouldn't be interesting, and it wouldn't fit the show,) but if you need to consult a web resource to figure out how to build your way out of danger, you give the GM a resource they can spend to introduce plot twists.

In terms of GM tools, there's some roll tables and good advice throughout, but no canned adventure or support for solo play.

Overall, this is a mechanically clever system that doesn't dwell on being mechanically clever because it's too busy having fun. The engine here is really novel! But more importantly you can turn a t-shirt and some rubber bands into a catapult and use them to launch you over the castle walls to break the scientists out of the dictatorship's clutches.

As a side note, I do think the style of this game could work for a lot of television of this era. Like, you could do Airwolf without a lot of modifications, just with "use a helicopter in increasingly unlikely situations" in the place of "contrive a contraption."

Minor Issues:

-Page 6, Exotic Components, "would might involve"