Two well-tooled games with almost nothing else in common. OSE is a campaign chassis for years of dungeon delving. Under the Floorboards is an after-school special where getting eaten by the cat is technically on the table.
Both games scored identically on GM Scaffolding: lightweight but well-supported, purposeful without being prescriptive. That's where the overlap ends.
OSE
OSE hands you tools and procedures that will sustain a campaign well, backed by one of the strongest ecosystems in OSR gaming. Character creation takes ten to fifteen minutes and you're playing immediately. The scope can feel broad for a new player, but OSE is still the game I'd use to introduce someone to the D&D family. It avoids the system creep that weighs down other entries in that lineage.
The GM and the dice build the world here. The book hands you a blank slate by default, with richly realized settings available if you reach into the ecosystem. You could bend OSE toward pulp adventure or light science fantasy without much trouble. Horror, mystery, and supers would require more work than the system wants to do.
A good OSE session feels like a sword and sorcery story: exciting, purposeful, with room for whimsy or darkness depending on what the table brings. It's a fantasy game, and it does that one thing across a very long campaign.
Under the Floorboards
Under the Floorboards has almost no friction. Two simple mechanics, three well-defined phases, and a setting that players inhabit immediately without explanation. You could hand it to someone who has never played an RPG and be in the scouting phase inside of fifteen minutes. The book hands you richly detailed locations: description, possible goals, obstacles, hazards, and complications layered in. You can play straight from the page on day one.
The scouting phase is where the table builds the world together: naming the location, placing obstacles, describing hazards. That shared authorship front-loads investment in a way most dungeon games skip entirely. Then the expedition tests what they built against what they actually find. The gap between the two is where the game lives.
The register is warm without being toothless. Getting eaten by the cat is on the table. For the most part, though, it's small creatures trying to make do in a big world, and that specific emotional frequency is something OSE can't replicate.
The honest case for the loser
Under the Floorboards is the more immediately accessible game in this matchup, and the more fully realized one out of the box. The radar chart shows it: World Presence at 4 against OSE's 2 means UtF hands you a complete, inhabitable world before you've written a single note. The scouting phase creates investment that OSE never tries to manufacture. And the emotional register, warm, specific, quietly tense, is something that compounds across a short campaign in ways that stay with a table. UtF might get back to my table first. That's not nothing.
The pick
OSE, and it comes down to Session Shape and scope. Under the Floorboards peaks at a short campaign. OSE peaks at years of play, a living ecosystem, and a community writing adventures for it every month. In a semi-final, the game that can carry a table across a decade deserves the nod over the game that produces one perfect kind of session. The little gems that a little less scaffolding unveils are still waiting. So is the study with the cat. OSE gets there first.
That's my pick. Who'd you have sent through? Tell me in the comments.
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