Been keeping pretty busy lately. Running two RPGs on the regular, each meeting online every-other week. Also playing in two RPGs, also biweekly. And then cramming in board games, computer games, and even solitaire miniatures into my late evenings. Here's the seven games eating up the majority of my time:
1. Night's Black Agents has been ongoing for several years now, since 2017. Two sessions ago the PCs crashed a meeting of Renfields and a motorcycle gang all working for a vampiric cabal. They created a lot of chaos, got the gang fighting itself. They realized in the process that one of the biggest vampires (Count Orlok) is making some sort of move on the territory of one of his biggest vampiric rivals (the intel was a little vague as to whether his move is against Elizabeth Bathory, or Dracula). While all the feuding vampires are busy in Romania, there's an opportunity for the PCs to strike at one Orlok's properties that they'd identified in Munich. This will probably be the most dangerous target they've gone after, so I'll need to roll out the big guns for the next couple of sessions. What I love about NBA is the tools for building intricate investigative plots and complicated enemy organization charts. We're 5 years into a mystery/detective game that has occasionally had to skip sessions for two months at a time due to schedule conflicts, and yet the game still has momentum largely because of the tools the system provides to the GM and players. We were recently discussing the idea of taking the game back to face-to-face analog sessions, and realized that whatever we do, we absolutely want to keep the Roll20 Adversary Map even if we do start meeting back up in-person.
2. I'm also GMing an Amber Diceless Roleplay campaign. It's about 20 sessions in, despite my only getting around to posting the campaign logs here of the first 7 sessions so far. A huge backlog of material, but hard to summarize or talk about without spoiling upcoming plot surprises. Crazy colorful characters, byzantine multi-layered plots and schemes. The universe imperiled, as it often is in such games. Lots of fun. What I love about Amber is the narrative freedom. The story can go literally anywhere, riff on any pop culture icon or break new ground. The rules are so minimal that, as GM, I can spend all my energies on plotline and character, never having to spend even a minute thinking about whether an upcoming fight scene will be sufficiently challenging yet not roll over into a TPK if the dice fail. GMing Amber is pure creative joy.
3. I'm playing in an Unknown Armies game. What I love is 70% my GM's take on it, 20% the weirdness other players have injected, 10% the setting and game itself, and 0% the mechanics. I'm at best a little "meh" on the mechanics. I've written most of a lengthy analysis post about it, and keep not quite finishing it because I'm having trouble getting blogger to properly format my charts. Deep data number crunching has convinced me that the game would be much better if the PCs started with a little more numerical oomph out the gates. More on that if I ever get the charts working. I will say this, I'm digging the weirdness and open-ness of the setting, and what the participants of the game are doing with it. Our party/cabal of characters isn't making much progress on our goals just yet, but we're definitely chewing the scenery and finding it delicious. My character is a Chief Medical Examiner in her community, who keeps doing autopsies of people she thinks are her dopplegangers. That was part of my character introduction, and I told the GM that I was happy with however he wanted to interpret that. At this point, it seems to be that my character is from a parallel universe and is only just starting to figure that out, and that other parallel me's are also ending up in this reality. The GM even enlisted me to surreptitiously play one of my dopplegangers in a single scene, which the other players didn't see coming. They gave not-me a gun registered in one of the other PC's name, and just a ton of intel that we really didn't want the opposition to have. It felt kind of dirty, but the fallout from this bait-and-switch moment is shaping up to be narrative gold. What I love about Unknown Armies is definitely the GM's doing. I've been gaming with him for years, and this is definitely the best, most engaging, game I've seen him run. One of the best I've ever been player in, honestly.
4. Dungeons & Dragons, an oldie but a goodie. I'm running a once-or-twice-a-year D&D game for friends in other cities, but that hasn't had a session in a few months, so nothing new to report there. The other D&D game I'm in is biweekly game where the GM throws the challenge ratings out the window and doesn't pull his punches. It too is great fun, but it is really tense at the same time. It almost has a horror-game vibe in that every week I feel like my character is just about to die... but it's not using any horror tropes at all. It's mostly about politics, at least on paper, as the big-bads who keep sending assassin after us include a couple of Senators of a powerful city-state. The GM is pretty good at applying the thumb-screws. What I love about this campaign is getting to navigate against the storm, to struggle onward in the face of insurmountable odds. Assuming it doesn't all end in a TPK, it's gonna feel like a hell of an accomplishment when we dethrone those baddies.
And then I've been doing a bit of solitaire gaming in the background on free nights.
5. I've played a fair chunk of Stellaris lately, which is a sci-fi-themed "4X" game. Basically you start with one world, and expand out into the galaxy. It's a pretty long run-time for each game, and only worth cracking open when you have an evening to set aside for it because you'll spend the first 45 minutes just refreshing yourself on the state you left your empire in last time. What I love about it is how much it has going on at once. Actual play is kinda slow and chill, but punctuated with "oh crap" moments when you get invaded, and interesting little event chains of events when your archaeologists start uncovering the ruins of ancient extinct civilizations. It's got a ton of different sci-fi tropes stirred in.
6. This weekend I dove back in to 5 Parsecs From Home. It's a solitaire miniatures game with emergent narrative structure. The third edition just came out, and I love the major upgrade to the look and feel of the game. What minis you use are up to you (or you can very easily run it in your favorite virtual table-top), as it has no official minis, so I'm mostly talking about how I love the visual upgrade to the rulebook. I'd played half a dozen sessions of the previous edition a year and a half ago. That edition was fun, but not much to look at. The new edition is a cooperation with Modiphius, and is a pretty slickly produced product. Could maybe use a better index, but the search function on the PDF is your friend. What I really love about the game is the freeform way a narrative emerges as you play the campaign mode. Last night, I found myself making intentionally bad decisions for the long-term success of my ship full of charming space rogues, because I felt it was what the characters would do. If a game that is mostly charts and die-rolls gets inside your head like that and inspires Firefly-esque drama, it's achieved something powerful.
7. And lastly, I'm playing an asynchronous game of Beyond The Sun on Board Game Arena, taking roughly a turn per day. The game is very interesting. I'm not quite going to say "I'm loving it" quite yet, but I'm intrigued, and it's growing on me. It's pretty novel, and was bordering on overwhelming
at roughly the 5th turn of the game, but I'm starting to get the hang of
it now. What I really like about this game is how the technology tree develops uniquely in each game, it's a pretty compelling little puzzle with a constantly changing solution. I suspect I'll want to play it again soon, and if it's one of those that gets better as you get more comfortable with the decision trees, it may well end up becoming a "I love it" recommendation.
So that's what I've been playing lately. How about you? Any games you'd endorse?
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