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.

Not bad for a single week.

In the first 7 days of June 2015, I played the following games:

• Dark Gothic (semi-cooperative deck-building card game) x4 game sessions
• Shadows of Brimstone (cooperative miniatures board game)
• Pandemic: The Cure (cooperative dice game) x2 game sessions
• War of the Worlds (home-brewed RPG scenario)
• Ultimate Werewolf (8+ player bluffing/deduction party game) x7 game sessions
• Shadowrun Crossfire (cooperative deck-building card game) x6 game sessions
• Forbidden Desert (cooperative board game) x3 game sessions
• Dead of Winter (cooperative survival-horror board game) x2 game sessions
• Lego Avengers 1895 (home-brewed RPG scenario)

That's 27 plays total of 9 different games, with over 20 different people (ranging from as few as 2-3 in some of the games all the way up to 8-12 players per round of Ultimate Werewolf). Both RPGs were run by GMs I hadn't gamed with in four years or longer. Some of the games were pretty fast little things (Pandemic: The Cure can be pretty zippy), but there were several multi-hour games on that list (Brimstone, Dead of Winter, both RPGs). It's been a pretty great week in regards to restocking the fun after a recent gaming deficit. I actually had the opportunity to spend a little more time gaming than I did this week: I ended up cancelling an RPG session I was going to run on Wednesday because a player had a rough day at work and needed to call the night early. On top of all that, I spent 4 hours at an art museum this week, and took multiple long walks that added up to at least 10 miles.

I needed it, though. The past few weeks have been really stressful and exhausting (more about that some other time, perhaps). I really appreciated the chance to kick back and game my brains out for a few days.

Highlights from Emerald City Comic Con

I went to the Emerald City Comic Con last weekend.  My wife joined me on Friday, but due to illness she had to skip out on the other two days of the con (and three days of work after that). Cons are better when you've got a friend to gawk with, but I still had a lot of fun despite being on my own for the weekend.

I ran two sessions of Psi*Run for the Games On Demand / Story Game Seattle booth. The first was a little disjointed and didn't really come together until the third hour of play. That happens sometimes with the game, due to its highly improvisational nature. The second session found its footing immediately, and just took off. One of the players posted "playing my new favorite RPG, Psi*Run" to her Facebook page. So that's definitely a success. Both games were over-the-top crazy, but I suspect the first group might have enjoyed it a little more if I'd reigned in the zaniness a bit early on and given them a more coherent faction of Chasers.

While at the con, I made frequent visits to the Flying Frog Productions booth. The Frog continues to impress me with their customer service, friendliness, and with the immense fun their games provide. They told me a lot of what's coming up in future Brimstone expansions, which deserves a post of its own here sometime soon. Now that I'm not nursing my wife back to health, I should be able to find time to type that up.


Other purchases I made last weekend included:

• 4 expansion decks for Shadows of Brimstone, including much-needed new artifact cards for Targa and Jargono and some more blanks just in case we burn through those in a hurry too.
• 2 expansion decks for Fortune and Glory.
• A die-rolling tray to reduce dice-related clutter when playing big board games. I've had one for years, and decided it would be useful to get a second one.
• Two expansion decks for Super Fight that add Locations and Scenarios to provide some context for the ridiculous battles in the game.
• A handful of custom Lego minifigs and accessory pieces. I have plans to use these in an RPG I'm running called BrickerWorld.
• An album by local nerd-rock group Kirby Krackle. Got it signed by the song-writer.
• The goofy godzillesque board game Terror In Meeple City.
• Crazy game and science themed nail art (for my wife) from Espionage Cosmetics. She can decorate her fingers in nebulas and dice.
• A gift for an out-of-town friend that I probably can't talk about until it shows up in his mailbox.

Beyond that, I played a few demos, geeked out a lot, and just generally had fun. It was a really good con.




EDIT: Oops, forgot to mention the expansion deck "Curse of the Werewolf" for Dark Gothic. It's a very small expansion, but solid. I had to build an entry for it on Board Game Geek it was so new.

The Last GwenCon

Gwen Con X, the last Gwen Con ever, was this past weekend. After some troubles with a bus Friday night, Sarah and I were able to make it over there for 4 RPG scenarios and a couple short games of "Are You The Werewolf?" Overall, it was a great weekend, and I'd have been happy if any of these games had run twice as long as they did. All the games had some meaty in-character inter-party-conflict, with PCs arguing with one another in a way that echoed the bittersweet dissolution of our favorite Con. Happy to be there, saddened to go, there was a real sense of "let's go out with a bang" which manifested in some delightfully dysfunctional scenarios. Here's some highlights:

• We played in both of Tim Beach's lego games this year. Tim does these bizarre RPG mash-ups, with light rules so you can ham it up in-character. One of the games was a blend of several sci-fi franchises, with bits of Star Trek, BSG, Firefly, Terminator, Dr Who, and Galaxy Quest. The other was a "best of" game featuring characters and lego sets from the past 10 years of Tim's games at Gwen Con. Pretty crazy stuff, revolving around the love affair between Ash (from Evil Dead) and Catwoman (from DC Comics), while Dragons attacked Fort Legoredo and Zorro's horse played charades. In a lot of ways, Tim's games sum up the heart of Gwen Con for me, being scenarios you'll just never find anywhere else.
• For a more conventional RPG experience, I played Vampire: The Requiem for the first time. I've done lots of Masquerade in the past, but this was my first actual test of the "new" system. The rules are really a streamlined improvement over the older system, and it looks to be relatively easy to house-rule back in the setting elements of the previous edition that you might feel are missing. I took to it far better than I thought I would. Session was too short, but with solid character acting all around, and the most "personal horror" I'd seen in 10 years or so. My character nearly shot himself in the head, and three out of the 4 PCs really struggled with the beast within. The fourth quickly embraced that beast and became a real monster, which served as a great roleplaying foil for the other three.
• The academy award in the disfunctional party category was taken in a Cthulhu-meets-Cloverfield game that Michael Lee ran on Saturday night. It certainly wasn't a subtle scenario, and he really could have used a back-up character for the PC that died early, but it was a great game none the less. Two PCs were treasure-hunting archaeologists in it for the fame and glory, two were the Miskatonic University biologists who'd screwed them over, and two were the FBI agents investigating the other four. The scenario itself was short and sweet, and mainly just a pretense for the 6 players to bicker and threaten one another while a monster rampages in the background. You'd hate to have that conflict for a long-term game, but as a one-off it was a pretty clever device.
• The two games of "Are You A Werewolf?" were likewise short and faux-argument-laden, but extremely enjoyable as a result. One of them was the most ridiculous game of Werewolf ever, with literally zero normal townsfolk, and special identities for everyone.

A great send-off to the Con series that first caused my wife and I to move to Seattle. Saying "good bye" to dozens of "once a year friends" was hard, but in several cases it at least motivated us to finally exchange contact info and make some efforts towards seeing certain people more frequently.

We'll miss Gwen Con dearly, but at least it rode off into the sunset gracefully instead of burning out or imploding.

Burning the Clocktower, Damming the Gulch

For the majority of this year, I was running a Deadlands Reloaded game, a campaign entitled "Guns of Shallow Gulch". I ended it several weeks back (has it been a month?), and to this point I haven't blogged about it, because the ending was uncomfortable*.

The plot never full resolved. Here's where it left off:

The big bad, Cobb, was temporarily defeated, but was a few days away from being able to rematerialize, and the PCs knew it. The PCs were presented with the big clocktower in the middle of town, an enormous architectural ghost trap. Cobb's wife had told the PCs they could use the tower as a weapon against Cobb, that it might be able to destroy him. However, there was the danger that whoever built the tower would be able to harness his power in the process. The PCs had already dynamited the leader of the faction who built the tower, but they didn't really know for certain if they'd killed him.

As you can see, we were using legos for miniatures in this campaign, and I made a fairly intricate model of the clocktower, complete with corrupted altars, 1,000-year-old vampire coffin, and flayed souls dangling from spectral chains.

The clocktower was eating spirits and ghosts left and right. It was even gobbling down harrowed who got too close. One harrowed the PCs were hunting had tried to take shelter in it, and was destroyed. Another harrowed that was helping the party got attacked by the tower. I had the tower make some ballsy moves. It was just a minor variation on the evil clocktower in my old "H.O.D." LARP, which most of the play group had a love/hate relationship with back in the day, from that LARP campaign. At the LARP, various people had tried to destroy the tower, but no one ever succeeded. It was too powerful, and too well defended, and the players had that pesky Masquerade to worry about.

So, I kind of expected the same in this campaign. To their credit, the players really surprised me. They burned the place to the ground. It was a pretty good fight, they had to put down the ghosts who had bargained with the Tower (to be minions instead of lunch). All the PCs got away with their lives, but one lost his horse and took a bunch of wounds himself. Another got trapped inside the tower for several rounds, and had to fight his way out. In the end, they fled just as the reinforcements were arriving from the Templar Lodge that had built the tower. I really wasn't expecting them to be able to do that much damage to it - the tower was a goner.

Mind you, destroying the clocktower would have meant the PCs had to fight with Cobb again in a few days, and no good leads on ways to put him down permanently. As it was, the campaign wrapped, the gaming group disbanded, and we didn't have to deal with that.

More on the Clock Tower:
in this Deadlands campaign
in the old LARP

Lego miniatures:
The PCs
Chuckwagon

Other posts about the campaign:
starting each session with storytime
Blessed are powerhouses
every post about the campaign on a single page (includes all the above plus several more posts)

---

*: I ended the campaign for purely out-of-character reasons, which is why I've been slow to blog about it. I'd decided to end my friendship with two people - and since those two people played in the game, the game was going to have to go as well. I'm still too close to the events to write about it with wisdom. I expect I will look back at it years from now with remarkably few regrets, but for now, there's still a measure of guilt and worry that I could have done it in a less painful way. As an observer said to me about it: "Unfriending people in real life is a lot harder than on Facebook."

Chuckwagon

As mentioned in my earlier post, the timely application of three cards from the Adventure Deck completely short-circuited my plans in yesterday's game. I'm almost completely cool with that - my only regret is that I didn't get to use the minis I made.

I'd mentioned the possibility of a 3-way battle between the PCs, a witch, and a bunch of cowboys. The cowboys were mostly extras - the Cattle Baron was technically a Wild Card, but with underwhelming stats other than for commanding his "troops". Their cook, however, was a one-legged retired bank robber, a real badass Wild Card. I had a campsite prepared for the battle scene, complete with his chuckwagon. You can see it in the picture, above, with the cabinets open (and decked with food, pots and pans, and knives).

Meet the Posse

Shallow Gulch has been destroyed by Finnegan Cobb and his damned gun. Only a handful of folks survived.
From left to right:

• Jebediah Hunt, semi-retired Texas Ranger
• Sister Josephine, Blue Nun
• Natalie Bliss, the sunday school teacher and town gossip
• Dr. Immelmann, creator of an amazing flying stagecoach
• Baucum Pike, Hexslinger and schitzophrenic drifter

Some changes may still happen. Our lego collection only included one body that you'd really call feminine, so it went to the school teacher, as the Nun didn't need to be winning any beauty pageants. However, it is a blue body, and she is supposed to be a Blue Nun of Texas. So, I bit the bullet and ordered up a couple of females on Brick Link. Not only will that allow the ladyfolk PCs to be a bit more distinct at a glance, it'll also get me some proper saloon girl attire for NPCs. ;)

Dr. Immelmann's flying coach may also undergo some modifications. I built it to Kevin's rough specifications of size and shape, but he hasn't seen it yet as of this writting. Since it's a vital part of his character concept, I certainly won't give him any grief if he chooses to rebuild it some. He'll have to come over to my place between sessions to do so, though, 'cause I know what a disaster it would be to just pop open the lego collection while we're trying to roleplay. Everyone, me included, would be distracted.