Toon is a game about Saturday morning cartoon characters: unconstrained chaos, pratfalls, and plans that absolutely should not work. (A new edition just funded on backerkit, but late pledges are still open.)
FATE Accelerated is a system that can run anything you put on the table. It takes some getting used to, but once it clicks it handles Cthulhu adventures and post-apocalyptic generation ships with equal ease. (A free SRD with all you need to play, or kitbash, is also available.)
One game is pure id. The other is pure flexibility.
Toon
The character sheet was the lightest I had seen at the time. The idea that you could get so much from so little was a genuine revelation.
Your schticks matter more than your stats, which tells you everything about the game's priorities. The fiction comes first, and the mechanics are there to make it funnier.
The low intelligence mechanic is quietly brilliant. If your INT is low enough, you might not realize something is impossible, which means you can do it anyway. That's not just a funny rule. It's a design philosophy about what cartoon logic actually means at the table.
Characters don't die. They fall down, and come back in a little while. That single decision keeps the chaos moving even when things go south faster than anyone planned.
I played a mouse with a giant wooden mallet. His master plan was absolutely unworkable. Anyone who interfered got flattened. The plan never worked. The mallet always did. That's Toon in one image.
FATE Accelerated
Aspects are the engine. Everything at the table can have one: the crumbling edge of the crevasse, the distillery full of flammable spirits, the relationship that's about to break badly. Invoke them, and the fiction moves. One false move and someone is falling. Two false moves and the whole fight is happening inside a conflagration.
That system means the environment is never just backdrop. It's a participant.
The flexibility compounds over time. Once you understand how aspects work, the system genuinely handles anything.
Running the Starship Warden with FATE, I converted on the fly because I didn't need stat blocks. I needed to be able to read and embody the space. The aspects did the rest. The ship came alive as we played through it, and the system never got in the way of that.
The honest case for the loser
FATE Accelerated does something Toon genuinely can't: it runs almost anything. Cthulhu horror, post-apocalyptic generation ships, political intrigue: all of it fits on the same chassis. You could probably build a Saturday morning cartoon game in FATE in an afternoon. That flexibility is real and it compounds across a gaming life. FATE also rewards a certain kind of player who wants to author the fiction as much as play it. That's not a small audience.
The pick
Toon, probably by putting a banana peel in FATE's path on the way to the judging table. FATE can run anything. Toon absolutely nails its specific space, and anyone with a sense of humor can sit down and play it. That accessibility matters. The mallet, the unworkable master plan, the mouse who didn't know when to quit: Toon produces that table energy without asking anything complicated of its players. Some games do one thing perfectly. That's enough to win.
