Nobody Wins: Gamble for Your Life in the Triangle Agency Roguelite The House Edge

Today we’re chatting with Caleb Zane Huett, co-founder of Haunted Table Games and lead designer on the SCP-like Triangle Agency, which won multiple awards in 2025. Now Haunted Games is making its sequel with The House’s Edge. Based in the Triangle Agency-verse, it’s a hack of FIST, an indie TTRPG game designed by B. Everett Dutton about paranormal supermercenaries.

Players will be part of a team of mercenaries breaking into a casino where a vault holds “anomalies,” aka entities and items with paranormal elements. They’re sent to go after “Nobody”, an old rival of the characters.

Unfortunately, it was a trap, and now they’re stuck in a time loop, forced to break into the Vault over and over on the same day in a Groundhog Day-esque loop.

TTRPG Insider spoke with Huett about where the game came from, how it fits into the Triangle-verse and more!

1. What's the origin story of THE HOUSE EDGE?

Originally, it was part of our Kickstarter stretch goals for Triangle Agency. At the time we were theming several of our plans around crossover games with other systems -- we released a mission with Liminal Horror, for example, and we have another one coming with The Company. We hired B. Everett Dutton to write the first draft of a FIST module with The House Edge's basic concept, intending the project to be pretty small. What she turned in was so exciting we decided to keep working on it, and now it's become way bigger! We're still providing the digital for free to all our original KS backers, but how well the campaign does will determine how hard we get to go on the final product, basically.

2. Why create a separate system using the FIST Hack? What about FIST's mechanics fit into your vision for the Triangle Agency IP/universe?

Most of all, I wanted to work with Dutton! Beyond that, it fit in nicely with something we wanted to do: show off a bunch of the Triangle Agency world's fun energy in a lower-lift way. Triangle Agency is designed to tell very specific stories in that world, but people still have a ton of questions about what goes on beyond an Agent's life. FIST's open-ended action ruleset gave us the perfect way to showcase the Triangle Agency world from the perspective of characters who approach it from the outside. It also lets us leverage the strong philosophy built into FIST to reinforce Triangle Agency's message. For me, making the Agency an outright villain from the start is a refreshing change of pace after years of writing in its voice!

3. You describe the game as a "roguelite" cardcrawl dungeon. What does that look like on the table?

You can see this described in detail on our campaign page, but basically: every session features one or more "loops" through the day of June 6, 1984. Each loop contains:

• An attempt to reach the bottom of the Vault. This is the cardcrawl--you shuffle a deck of cards and deal out 15. If you make it to the bottom, you save a set of characters trapped in Maximum Security, represented by the face cards. More likely, especially early on, you die before you reach that point.

• Each time you take damage, your HP turns into Chips, the game's currency — they stick around between Loops and can be used to purchase upgrades for the Casino and your gear loadout. When you die, you can submit a hand of cards from the rooms you completed as the Final Hand of that run; those hands give your character permanent upgrades to their stats or equipment, usually following poker hand value.

• Between runs, you hang out in the Pyramid Casino, talking to characters you've met, forming bonds with your fellow PCs, and preparing for the next run. (Think the preparation phase in roguelike games with stories, like Hades.)

• When you've freed a few characters with successful Vault runs, you can also do some recreational time traveling. Each set of characters has a tragic story about when they were captured by the Agency, or at least made vulnerable to it — you can do entire sessions in FIST-style sandbox missions we're calling KAIROS Missions to change history and help those characters heal from decades of being trapped and isolated.

• Eventually, repeated success in the Vault and KAIROS missions propels you forward in the overall story, and you'll head towards a big finale! But the Vault is always there if you want to try another run.

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Transforming Triangle Agency Lore into Your Game

4. Are there any intended lore or mechanical interactions between THE HOUSE EDGE and Triangle Agency? Would it be a way to do spinoffs within the Agency-verse (for lack of a better word) or could it interact and create a connected story?

The House Edge is a prequel to the events of any campaign using the Triangle Agency RPG. Because of how Triangle Agency works (it rewrites history as a matter of course, illustrated by the game's core "Ask the Agency" mechanic), even campaigns technically set prior to June 6, 1984 are still "after" The House Edge in a super-chronological sense. . . . that said, it's an RPG, so I am absolutely positive our players will find creative ways to make what I just said more complicated for their campaigns.

There is absolutely a strong story connection between The House Edge and the Triangle Agency RPG, but I don't want to give it away right now. Players of Triangle Agency are already starting to theorize about exactly what's going on here, and I'm having too much fun seeing that to explain it all outright! Something worth mentioning is that one of our main characters, Nobody, came from a Triangle Agency session that anyone can listen to--an AP on the Department of Variance of Somewhere Ohio podcast feed.

The most direct connection is something we're trying to unlock as a stretch goal at time of writing--if we reach the goal, we'll be writing rules for making your Triangle Agency character an optional boss in The House Edge. Time traveling isn't so complicated for the Agency, and it could give your current Triangle Agency character a chance to cameo in The House Edge campaign as a conscripted villain in the fight against FIST. We're calling these Anachronistic Wardens at the moment.

Oh, and as to whether it could be used to do spinoffs--FIST always could, I suppose, but like Triangle Agency, The House Edge is about a very specific situation. It's not intended to be used as a broader freeform campaign-builder.

5. As someone not too familiar with FIST as a system, how does your hack compare to it mechanically and thematically to Triangle Agency's sillier tones?

I think a ton of FIST players would be surprised to hear you describe Triangle Agency as sillier! But maybe I've got a skewed perspective. In the case of The House Edge, I think it is adhering pretty closely to the Triangle Agency horror/comedy tone, with maybe a stronger push toward comedy in the actual play. Triangle Agency is about characters who are pretty constantly beset by rules, bosses, personal crises, and troubling decisions. The House Edge is a time loop, which means the weight of your actions depends a lot more on your philosophy--do you treat people well no matter how many times you have to deal with them, or do you start to consider them agency-less obstacles in your way the fifth time they say the same line to you?

On the other hand, the KAIROS missions lean more toward FIST's mission design structure, and therefore its tone. These can be pretty intense, as they're explicitly high-drama action moments featuring characters who have been through a lot of pain, but... it's still supernatural mercenaries with psychic powers going back in time to interrupt, say, a kidnapping at a late-70s rock concert.

6. Does a player have to be familiar with Triangle Agency to play THE HOUSE EDGE?

Not at all. I think it can help GMs to be comfortable with how Anomalies work in our setting (rather than the SCP-style "every weird thing" rule, Anomalies are specifically created and driven by very human thoughts and feelings), but we'll have guidance for that in the book as well. Triangle Agency is the setting; what's going on in there is something everyone can discover together, including the GM, with how we've designed the game.

7. What's something you are excited for fans to discover in this?

There's a room in the demo that shows what the Agency used to capture Anomalies in the field before the Normal Briefcase, and I think it's one of the funniest things we've ever put to paper.

You can back House Edge on Kickstarter now.

What are your thoughts? Send any scoops, tips or press releases to [email protected].