This year's Gamestorm was from March 22nd to March 25th. This is a repost of my report back in the relevant Story Games thread.This was my fifth Gamestorm, and far and away my favorite. It was also the first year I attended all four days, and that was definitely worth it, though I was pretty exhausted by the end. I was busy enough with Indie Hurricane stuff and games that I'd scheduled that I barely saw the rest of the con - I spent maybe half an hour in the boardgame room and two minutes in the dealer's hall. Anyway, here's what I ended up playing:
We Are Here To See The Evil Wizard Kormakur with Robert, Ross, Michael W, and Morgan. This was a great way to start things off - one of Bully Pulpit's free little experimental games that they were giving away last month. We played for about an hour and a half, which was a great way to kind of ease into the convention mindset.
My Daughter, The Queen Of France with Abi, Michael P, Nicholas, Matt, Morgan, and Al. This was a tough one. I broke both my "no MDQF with strangers" vow and my "no story games with more than four people" vow because, well, MDQF is my
favorite game, and apparently I can't pass up an opportunity to play it. As it turns out, playing with strangers was no problem (everyone was great), but seven people is more than a little unwieldy, and as Shakespeare, I completely forgot to write Abi's character into any of the scenes. Don't get me wrong: I still really enjoyed it. Next time, though, I'm playing with three others, and we're finding a quiet corner of the hotel to play in.
Penny For My Thoughts with Ross, Morgan, and Al. We decided we were still up for another game after finishing MDQF at 9:30, so we started up a game of Penny, figuring we'd be finished by midnight. WRONG. I think we finally wrapped up around 1:30 - it's great game, and I might have found my character's arc the most satisfying of the four times I've played, but we were falling asleep at the table by the end.
Mouse Guard with Candy, Adre, Justin, and Paul. I think this went really well! It's funny, though: Joel had asked me if I'd be interested in running this in the Children's Programming track, which I was, but Friday was still a school day, so I ended up playing with four adults. We had a four-hour slot, so I scrapped my plans to run a pregen scenario and had everyone make characters (which was a nice way to introduce some of the rules) and then whipped up a mission on the fly. Everyone really seemed to enjoy themselves, and we got to hit all the stuff that I think is important to show off in MG: Nature, Fate, Nature, Persona, Nature, scripted conflicts, Nature, Beliefs, Nature, Goals, Nature, Instincts, Nature, etc.
Umbra with Carl, Twyla, Seth, and John. This is Carl's Shadowrun-inspired hack for AGON. I suspect that I don't have a competitive bone in my body, so AGON isn't the best fit for me, but I love to see it in action, and it was great to see Twyla and John tie for Rep (Glory). And of course, it's always a treat to play in a game that Carl's running.
Fiasco with Brady, Johnzo, and Cathe. One of us had never played before, so we went with the Suburbia playset, and everything went swimmingly: teenage Tile World manager in love with his stepmother, middle-aged Tile World sales attendant setting the manager's car on fire, dog turd held triumphantly aloft in divorce court, etc.
Monsterhearts with Brendan, Jackson, and Michael P. I'd never played Monsterhearts before, and man, was that a mistake. We played part one of Joe's "Misty Harbour" scenario, and things went great. Which is to say, um, things went
horribly wrong.Slammin' with Morgan, Hans, and Jonathan. Pretty silly, and a lot of fun! It took a little while to get the hang of how the turns work, but this one definitely takes the "AXE COP Danger Patrol" award for most giggling of the con for me. I hadn't realized Jackson had these at the IH booth - I would've picked up a copy.
Shelter In Place My first time running (or playing, for that matter) a LARP. The LARP folks were terrific about organizational stuff, and I had fun, but I definitely realized I have a lot to learn about setting up this kind of thing. More about that
here.
Murderous Ghosts with Bryan. We only played for a few minutes on Sunday morning while we waited for the early games to start, and I just felt like I was starting to get the hang of it when we stopped, but I'm pretty excited about this one! I wanna find a copy of my own soon.
Zombie Cinema with Johnzo, Sherry, and Brendan. Along with Fiasco, this is my go-to pickup game for three or four people. We ended up telling the story of a pathogen carried by in-flight meals and of the four survivors trapped in quarantine at PDX.
Also boardgames! I think I played
Catacombs with Michael W,
Samurai with Adre, Justin, and Ross,
Dominion with Bryan and Sev, and a great game of
Battlestar Galactica with Brendan, Christian, Johnzo, Matthew, and Twyla.
So yeah, I think that was it! I was really excited about this year, and I was just thrilled with how everything turned out. It was especially great to play with folks like Christian and Johnzo, who I've hung out with a fair amount but have never actually played anything with. Thanks so much to everyone I played with, everyone that facilitated open gaming, and especially to Joel and Hans for organizing the Indie Hurricane stuff and Fi for coordinating LARP stuff.
This year's Gamestorm was from March 22nd to March 25th. This is a repost of my report back in the relevant Story Games thread.
I logged 319 board game plays (including some expansions) and 78 story game plays in 2011, by far the most in both categories since I began keeping track. In retrospect, what's most remarkable to me about those numbers isn't just how much I played this year, but how easy it was to play that much. I talk a lot about how, at its best, the story game or indie RPG scene or whatever you'd like to call it synthesizes the two formative cultural experiences of my adolescence: Dungeons & Dragons and the DIY punk scene. Both story games and punk place an emphasis on decentralizing creativity; both are relatively small, in terms of population; both can create moments of spontaneous intimacy and understanding between their participants; and as a result, both tend to foster much stronger connections between those participants than one might expect. The last twelve months have really borne out last idea, and really crystallized how much I think of my fellow players as one of my communities, and of many of them as good friends. As a result, I feel like I'm all the closer to an ideal of mine: that play and creativity, rather than being a discrete activity, separate from one's "real" world, would instead be a passion woven into the fabric of everyday life.
I might have seen fewer films in 2011 than in any year in recent memory, and so assembling this list was a little trickier than I'd anticipated. That says more, I suspect, about how I've been spending my time lately than about the quality of this year's releases. There's always no shortage of films I regret having missed by the end of December, but it's a particularly long list this time around: Margin Call, A Separation, Meek's Cutoff, Super, The Tree of Life, Certified Copy, Melancholia, The Skin I Live In, and The Future, with many others no doubt having slipped my mind.
