Quiet Conclusion

I just realized I don't think I ever did a post from the end of The Quiet Year game that I played with my buddy Brendan from Chicago. It was a lot of fun. Here's a picture from the end of the game, to save me from writing a thousand words of play-by-play for a game we finished up a few weeks back:

We played on Roll20. Just a heads-up for anyone thinking of doing the same: the game is a lot of fun on Roll20, but it does have some technical hurdles you'll want to prepare for. Drawing is clumsier in the Roll20 interface than it is face-to-face, and labeling things with text is super-easy and more legible than it would be in-person, so we ended up with quick little scribbles and relied a lot more on our ability to put text on the map (than the rulebook officially discourages labeling, but on Roll20 it's a welcome tool). You'll notice that the fence on the map was drawn in by a couple hundred strokes of the drawing tool. By the end of the game, things were lagging a tiny bit, so it might be better to not draw every individual fence-post next time.

I was surprised the Roll20 version isn't quite ready-to-play straight-off-the-shelf. The default page has nowhere for you to note scarcities, abundances, or characters, so I changed the page size (landscape rather than portrait fit my screen better anyway) and added a section for notes on the side. It also doesn't come with anything to represent the Contempt tokens, and no placeable dice. So I used a token I'd uploaded for an old Warhammer RPG for Contempt, and slapped together a rollable table token of a d6. It was all pretty simple, but just be advised that if you do want to play it on Roll20, you can't just fire-and-forget at the marketplace, someone in the group is going to have to do a few minutes of work to prep the game before the first time you play. Thankfully, the deck is already loaded up, so it does save you a whole bunch of time and effort by not having to scan the deck in. It does feel worth the 8$ or 10$ it costs on the Roll20 marketplace, and I'm glad I bought it, but I was a little surprised that I had to provide my own dice and tokens. It seems like if the publisher had included those in the Roll20 assets, it wouldn't have cost them much time or effort, yet would have resulted in a much more polished product.

About half way through the second session, we realized that we should have been making notes in the chat window of each turn's development and what all Projects and Discoveries were. If we had done so from the beginning, then we'd have a nice chat log of what had happened, and it would have been much easier to pick back up when we came back two weeks later for the second half of the game. So file that tip away for next time.

The Noisy Season

Got together tonight on Roll20 with an old friend from half a continent away. After catching up (we hadn't seen each other since GenCon) we played 1/3 to 1/2 a game of The Quiet Year. If you haven't heard of it, The Quiet Year is a collaborative map-making game. We're building a community in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's a lot of fun. Here's our map as it stands at the moment:

I like The Quiet Year quite a bit. Enough to buy it on Roll20, despite owning a hardcopy that I suppose I could have just scanned in, or played by drawing cards in meatspace and just reading them into the video chat. It was enjoyable enough we're going to get together next week for the second half. (There's more than half a game left to do, but we spent the first hour mostly gabbing and catching up tonight, so it will probably zip by fast next time.)

The Roll20 implementation is pretty minimalist. It has all the pages of the rulebook as individual handouts, which is great for searching up individual rules, or for splitting up the reading of the rulebook between players. I wasn't completely convinced that Roll20's drawing tools were up to the task, and as you can see our drawings are pretty rough. I gotta say though, it worked well enough and was every bit as fun as in-person play. The Roll20 interface actually sped the game up, because if you had something a little more involved to draw you could fill in details while the other player took their turn. That's not normally a thing you can do when passing one sheet of paper back and forth in the physical game. So in some ways the Roll20 version is better than in-person (speed of play, and being able to play long-distance despite quarantine), and in other ways it is inferior to tabletop (mostly because the drawing tools on Roll20 aren't as easy to use as a box of colored pencils is).

I have always wanted to use The Quiet Year to create a map and history together with a playgroup, and then later set an RPG for the same group in that world we'd created together. It occurs to me that the Roll20 implementation would make it really easy to do that, as well as much easier to tweak that map (or upgrade it with a fancy version) after the start of the campaign. You would, however, then have a few dozen redundant rules-handouts jamming up your journal that you would want to delete or archive.  Even so, that is really cool, and now I really want to try that sometime.

One thing that did disappoint me a little about the Roll20 implementation is the lack of bells and whistles. I had to add the tiny dice as rollable table tokens. For the Contempt Tokens, I had to steal a chip from an old WH40K RPG campaign I ran back in the day. The yellowed paper background was on a single pregenerated page that took a little bit of ingenuity to duplicate to other pages for a second game.

(Addendum: It occured to me a few weeks later that they probably set it up that way intending for you to launch the module as a new campaign each time you want to play, so having multiple pages per campaign wasn't even a thing they considered. I think I prefer to have all the maps from every game of The Quiet Year that I've ever done online all be accessible in the same campaign framework, for ease of reference, and so I can show off old maps when teaching the game to new players. I suppose that preference might change if I do ever get around to starting an RPG campaign with a round of The Quiet Year to make the map for the campaign. You might not want a dozen other maps clogging up your campaign in that situation.) 

All told, it was less than half an hour of work to set up a reusable online version of the game, but if I had just bought it and thought I could start play right away I would have been surprised that I needed to take those extra steps the first time. I don't really know the first thing about how hard it is to build a sellable product on the Roll20 Marketplace, but it seems like it wouldn't be too much to ask for the game to come with a few assets that were selectable from the art library of the marketplace item, such as a set of tiny dice icons (or better yet, a prebuilt rollable token), a themed graphic for Contempt, and the yellow parchment background that you could then drag and drop to start a new page (bonus points if you could use it in other games/campaigns). I wonder if that's possible?

Along those lines, I'm really surprised that the Roll20 interface doesn't really include any generic "glass bead" -style tokens. Maybe they worry that would cut into sales of art assets? It sure seems like it would be useful for any number of gaming applications, but not so cool that people would be willing to pay much for it. But it also doesn't seem like it would take much work for Roll20's staff to make a set of half a dozen colored bead tokens available as a freebie (Edit: Or just one, which the GM could color via the existing token Tint feature), since they already give away for free several dozen virtual miniatures that are way more detailed.

Anyhow, The Quiet Year is elegant, goofy fun, and I highly recommend it, whether in dead-tree or Roll20 version. It's not perfect, but it's definitely worth the modest asking price in either format.

Three Cons, Old Friends, and a Boom

I have been busy as heck lately, and playing a lot of games.

Work sent me out to GenCon, were I ran demos of Shadows of Brimstone, Forbidden Fortress, Last Night On Earth, Fortune & Glory, and A Touch Of Evil. It was super fun and I love sharing and teaching many of my favorite games to total strangers... but it was also very exhausting because GenCon is a huge show with a million faces and a hundred thousand games.

In my off hours at the con, I played a couple of new games I hadn't tried before.

Incan Gold is a fun press-your-luck game that I reliably came in... well, certainly not winning, but not in last place, either, so I feel like I did okay for a newbie. The best part was that I got to play the game with my old friend Brendan Riley, who lives far away and I hadn't seen in several years, and my buddy Bill French. I never would have expected them to meet, given that they live in different states, but GenCon is a place of miracles.

Brendan's company Rattlebox Games is playtesting a game called Udder Chaos, the only competitive cow-milking game I've ever seen. It's fast and goofy and full of rhymes. It was light-hearted fun, and you'd be helping support a old friend of mine, so check it out if you get a chance.

One night at GenCon I played a party game called Buy The Rights, in which you get a random hand of high concepts and genres and have to make your best pitch about why producers should invest money with you. I hammed it up, basically role-playing as a different screenwriter or producer in each round, and it turns out that nonsense is a very successful strategy in this game.

The other fun new experience of this GenCon for me was Hellapagos, a party game that starts out fully cooperative and then suddenly very quickly descends into murder and sometimes cannibalism. It was a social game that really felt like the first season of Lost. Everyone was working together to build a raft and catch fish, except for a couple slackers who just raided the wreckage for personal treasures. Much fun was had by all, including those who died when suddenly everyone started scrambling for the limited space on the raft. I, as one of those horrible slackers who spent a lot of turns searching the wreck, found a decent supply of bullets, which I traded 1 at a time to the only person who had found a gun, in exchange for her using them on people other than myself. In the end, 3 of the 8 players, including myself, made it back to civilization to tell the story of how we were the sole survivors of the wreck. Just don't ask about the barbecue.


Shortly after getting back from GenCon, I packed my suitcase a second time and headed to my favorite little (~1,000 attendees) local gaming convention, Dragonflight. I had originally planned to just go for fun, but at the last minute agreed to volunteer to run the Story Games Lounge when the usual volunteer dropped out. As it turns out, volunteering to run the Story Games room is itself a lot of fun.


First day of Dragonflight Game Convention:

GM'd an awesome double-length Psi*Run for 7 players.

Explored an alien planet in The Quiet Year

Lost a game of Snake Oil to the dreaded Fraud card

Played "2 Rooms and a Boom" till my brains hurt. It's a great social-deduction game, kind of like "Are You A Werewolf?" except everyone gets to play the entire game and know one has to die until the last couple seconds.

Won a game of Jetpack Unicorn. Honestly, I'm not crazy about this game. I think Superfight does the same thing, but better.

Played some more 2 Rooms and a Boom. (Across 6 games I've now been on both teams a couple times, been the bomber and been an Ambassador.)

On Day 2 of Dragonflight:

 GM'd Og the caveman RPG for 5 players. No use big words play Og. The cavemen met The Doctor, and caused a regeneration.

GM'd another successful Psi*Run, for 4 new players. Hallucinatory madness derailed everything in a delightful way.

Hosted a giant marathon Microscope timeline for 6 players. It was epic! One of the best-developed, most fleshed-out microscope games I've ever seen. These new players really picked it up quickly and dove deep into the game.

That night, I got the band back together! Playing in Laura Mortensen's annual midnight Urchin game, as my recurring character, Rory Wanker of the formerly famous Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickers. We're making a comeback, if only in my mind.

Other games played in the Story Game Lounge included more Quiet Year, some Zombie Cinema, and a few escapades of esteemed Baron Munchausen.

Day 3 of Dragonflight:

Played in a delightful Lego and d20s game run by Tim Beach. Two of the 5 players were kids, and they kept the game light-hearted and unpredictable. Tim did an amazing job of making the game work on the kids level and not lose the adults to boredom. Nearly all of my GMing experience in the last 20 years is with adults, but I can only imagine GMing for kids takes extra creativity, patience, and panache. Well done, sir.

Later that night:
I went to a birthday party at Zulu's game cafe. While there, we played a game of Dark Gothic. We all lost when the Shadows filled up in a sudden hurry. Quite the shame, as I was super close to winning, and probably could have done so in one to two more turns.


The next weekend:

Battlestar Galactica board game with old friends I hadn't seen in forever: Andy Collins, Gwen Kestrel, and Greg Collins (and their friend Ben). I was a frakking toaster the whole time, and I successfully destroyed the pathetic human fleet by breaking their morale. It was a solid game, and the humans came very close to winning. Possibly the closest game I've ever played of BSG. 

After that, we played Between Two Cities, which is a very clever cooperative drafting and tile-placement game where you're building a city together with the player on your right and simultaneously building another city together with the player on your left. I didn't do so good at this, coming in 4th out of 5th place. I love the entire-cooperative nature of the mechanics, and how that's counter-weighted by the scoring. It's a game that exists in a very unique head space. I want the players adjacent to me to do well, and any other players to do poorly, but I don't really have a way cause that second part. There's probably some deeper strategy I'm not seeing yet, but I can at least admire the novelty of this truly unique game.

We followed that up with Royal Turf. It's a Knizia game about horse racing and betting on horse racing. In the abstract the topic doesn't sound interesting to me at all, like if you said "want to play a game about racetrack betting?" I'd reply with "not unless it's Royal Turf". Every time I play it I feel like a) I'm really not very good at it,  and b) the game is surprisingly fun and enjoyable despite all that.

Then the wonderful Bobbie Hyde showed up to pick me up and we talked her into playing a round of Decrypto. It's a team code-guessing game, and we both really enjoyed it. If I didn't already own Codenames Duet, I would immediately rush out and by Decrypto. I feel Decrypto is a much better game than normal Codenames, but that makes it about equal with Codenames Duet (which is closer to codenames, but also generally a vastly improved version of Codenames itself).

So, it's been a summer cavalcade of new games and old friends. Pretty damn cool way to spend the days. And it ain't over yet. This weekend is PAX West! I will once again be running demos of Flying Frog adventure games. Sleep is for the weak.