Gamestorm 2012

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.

Play 2011

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.

Anyway, a few specific highlights from the past twelve months:

Fabricated Realities
I made it to five different play-focused weekends this year (the others were Gamestorm, NemoCon, GoPlay NW, and CozyCon), as well as hosting a game day to play this year's Diana Jones Award nominees, and I had a wonderful time at all of them, but Fabricated Realities was something unique. Somehow, Grace, Jackson, and Ross managed to blend the low-key, friendly feeling of a house con with the open quality of a more traditional convention - not to mention a remarkable physical environment - and the results were amazing.

Netrunner
My CCG experience is practically nil - I hadn't even touched a Magic deck until late 2010 - so Netrunner was a revelation. A lot of that, though, has to do with the specifics of this design: the asymmetrical roles, the bluffing and feinting, the almost unbearable tension of having a vulnerable agenda. I'm grateful as hell to Matthew for inviting me to his closed-environment league, since I'm not sure when I would've otherwise played, and it's currently one of my favorite games.

Microscope
I realized recently that there are two distinct pleasures that I get from roleplaying. One is during those elusive moments when all of the players are in sync, when there's a magical feeling of shared discovery, when play is so intuitive and natural that you're almost not conscious of it anymore. But what I've come to understand is that there's a second pleasure that's equally rewarding, and that's taking another player's wholly unexpected contribution, something you never would have anticipated, and rolling with it, forming something completely new. Microscope excels at creating those moments.

My Daughter, the Queen of France
There's so much that this game does right: the way the fiction created by the players parallels the dynamics at the table; the way it gracefully allows for the false starts and time to warm up that might cause another game to stumble; the way it gradually folds in layers of complexity and emotional engagement. It's a jewel of a design that's never failed to be less than completely rewarding, and like I told Tori after playing two sessions of it, one right after the other: "I wouldn't play this game at a meetup night with strangers... because if they broke this game for me, I think I would cry."

GPNW 2010: The Believers

I mentioned in my quick rundown of Go Play NW 2010 that I was able to play Chris Bennett's "role-playing poem" The Believers, which I'd been curious about for quite a while. I had a terrific experience with it, and really like the idea of using similar short-form exercises to warm up before a longer play session. Something else that I wanted to share, though, was an artifact I ended up with when we were finished. In the 'Contact' phase of the game, the players are given the following instruction:

"While the first player is describing their belief, the other players should each be taking notes, writing down single words or phrases they hear that are evocative to them. For example, you might write down 'spinning lights' or 'scared out of my wits.'"

I'm finally getting around to putting away some of the stuff I brought back from Seattle, and amongst the various character sheets, fliers, and other ephemera in my bag of games, I discovered that I still had my Believers notes:

Susan

still alive, thirteen
lipstick smeared across my face
I shouldn't have let Mark...
went out to the ravine
I jumped
I felt so free

Kingston

Weekly World News
you drink three beers
when it ended, I didn't know what to do
who's going to hire a man with Batboy on his resume?
I was driving
my car was upside down
there's no way you can drive your entire car up into a tree

Darin

reoccurring dreams
people over my bed
one time I woke up
the person in my dream
the foot of my bed
it was calming
the dreams went away
just last week they started coming back

Summer Solstice 2010 & Thoughts on Go Play NW 2010

Happy solstice! I ended my spring on a high note, with my first Go Play NW, an event I've been looking forward to for months. My friends who've attended in previous years have been universally enthusiastic about their experiences, and I'm happy to say that I had an equally good time. I met a lot of new people, all of whom were friendly and welcoming, I had a very good time in every session I played, and it was a pleasure to be up in Seattle for the first time in almost a year. I had only two regrets: one, that I couldn't muster a little more energy for the games that I played on Sunday, and two, that I didn't have the time to eat at Plum Bistro or any of the other wonderful-looking places I'd been planning to visit. Oh, well - there's always next year.

Anyway, I'm hoping to post a little more about the weekend over the next few days, but for now, a quick rundown of everything I was able to play:

Two games of Fiasco, using the "Boomtown" and "Tales From Suburbia" playsets.

My first game of Lacuna, with almost no prior knowledge of the game, which now seems like the ideal way to come to it.

A nice long session of Apocalypse World.

A pickup game of Lady Blackbird, easily my favorite of the three times I've played it.

A handful of short-form games, including The Believers, which I've been wanting to play for quite a while, and really enjoyed.

Several pickup games of Dominion.

All in all, it was a really terrific weekend. Many thanks to all the friendly folks I met, everyone that I played with, and especially to the Hugo House and all the GPNW organizers for putting together such an amazing event.

Play: Gamestorm 2010

I spent the last weekend in March across the river for Gamestorm 12. This was the third time that I've attended, and also the most rewarding. In previous years, it was easy to feel a little adrift - I didn't know anyone else at the con or register ahead of time, and as a result, I spent a lot of time looking for pickup boardgames or sitting in on panels. That was a lot of fun when I came upon something I was interested in, of course, but it also translated into a great deal of downtime and aimlessness. This year, I made much more of an effort to plan out my weekend and register for games ahead of time, and I also knew a few more folks in attendance, which made a big difference.

I wasn't sure what time I'd be getting in on Friday night, so I'd planned on playing things by ear. After saying hello to a few friends and playing a couple games of Roll Through the Ages, I joined a group in the boardgames area for the rest of the evening, where I was able to learn Amun-Re and Notre Dame. Both were titles I'd been curious about for a while, so I was happy to finally try them out.

Unfortunately, Saturday morning's game of Tulip Society was canceled, and so I found myself wandering around for a while before that evening's Burning Empires session, the "Fires Over Omac" scenario. I was playing with a couple of folks I'd played with before, and I had a lot of fun, but I can see how it really requires multiple sessions to make a fair assessment of BE. So much of what I like about the Burning Wheel system in general and Burning Empires in particular - things like the scene economy, maneuvers, and Firefight mechanics - are things that benefit from the kind of investment that it would be hard to create in a one-shot or convention game. I'd anticipated that might be the case, though, and really enjoyed seeing that stuff in action, even if it might not have been under the best of circumstances.

After we finished, Michael P. drafted Hans and I into trying out Fuck Youth, from the Norwegian Style anthology. I own the book, but I've never had a chance to play anything from it. It was definitely a change of gears after our Burning Empires game; the three of us sat on the floor in a quiet corner of the room, which seemed like an appropriate setting for what turned out to be a quiet game. I don't say that disparagingly - both mechanically and tonally, Fuck Youth is almost ethereal, drawing mostly on the players' memories and cues provided by the scene cards. After a long day, it felt really good to dive into an unfettered storytelling experience. I'm really happy that I was able to play this, and next year, I'd like to end every night with with something similar.

On Sunday morning, I joined an Apocalypse World game that Vincent Baker was running, which was a treat. It was just a taste - I think we only played a little over two hours, including character generation - but I had a wonderful time. Joel, who also played, posted a bit about his experience on his weblog. AW had kind of flown under my radar, despite how much playtesters posting online seem to be enjoying it. I mean, I was sure I would like it, but now that I've actually played, I'm really excited about it. A group of us have been talking about getting a regular game together, which I'd be thrilled about, but we haven't played a second session yet, so things are still at the fingers-crossed stage.

After a couple games of Lost Cities, Michael R. and I finished out our weekend with an AXE COP-themed Danger Patrol hack that Brendan had put together. You can see this AP report for all the details, but suffice to say that we were laughing pretty much nonstop from beginning to end. As Brendan points out, the pleasure of playing a fusion of DP and Axe Cop is in how quickly the players find themselves surrendering to unfettered, uninhibited imaginative play, without even realizing it's happening. It was terrific.

All in all, it was a great weekend. There were plenty of games that I was sorry to have missed - among them Heart of Ashes, Spectre of the Beast, "Where Are Your Keys?" and especially the convention finale Sea Dracula game, which you can see below - but I came home exhausted and happy, just as I'd hoped I would.

Play 2009

Board Games

I recorded 202 plays in 2009, a significant increase over the 108 I had in 2008. A lot of that was due to a conscious effort I'm making to play more often, but the bulk of my play lately has also been with very short games, many taking less than half an hour to finish. Finally, Elias is old enough now that we've started to play together this year, and as you might imagine, it's a development that I'm absolutely delighted with. Anyway, here are my five and dimes for the year:

Bananagrams (35 plays)
Far and away the game that ended up with the most plays, but that comes as little surprise: most of these have only run about five minutes, and it's an accessible game with pretty broad appeal - I like being able to play pretty much anywhere, and with friends and family members that might not care even for lighter designer games. Also, I logged all of these plays since the beginning of November, when Joanna and Katrina introduced it to me on a family vacation. If Bananagrams proves to have some longevity, I could be discussing a substantially higher playcount at this time next year!

Once Upon a Time (21 plays)
Like I mentioned above, Elias and I have started playing games together, and this is the one that's seen the most table time so far. Personally, I think of it as more of a story game than a conventional board or card game, but I love it. The fairy tale theme and collaborative storytelling mechanics, of course, are both things that I'm quite fond of, and the fact that Elias enjoys playing so much tickles me to no end.

Dominion (15 plays)
I know that I don't have nearly as many plays as some folks, and I doubt there's anything I could say about Dominion that hasn't already been said, but man, what a terrific game. I received my copy at the end of 2008, and while I've enjoyed it from the beginning, seeing the various cards in action has only deepened my appreciation for it. Probably my favorite game right now - I'm more or less always down for playing.

Coloretto (14 plays)
Another game that plays in a matter of minutes, and that I've been able to successfully introduce to a variety of folks. We've played it a lot as a filler, or while waiting for other folks to show up. As a result of liking this so much, I picked up a copy of Zooloretto, but it hasn't hit the table yet.

Pandemic (14 plays)
The folks that I play with are pretty fond of cooperative games - when I first started getting into designer games, we were playing Shadows Over Camelot pretty much every time we got together, and right now I'm in a group that's getting together for monthly games of Battlestar Galactica. Pandemic, though, is probably my favorite cooperative design at the moment - it's tight enough that even when we lose, it feels like just one more turn would have been enough to win, and it plays quickly enough that I'm always willing to get in two or three games if other people are up for it.

Adventures in Oz (6 plays)
Cara and I have read perhaps half a dozen of L. Frank Baum's Oz books to Elias, so he was pretty excited when we found a copy of this game. I'm afraid I don't have much to say about it; it's a pretty simple roll-and-move kids game, but Elias really enjoyed it, and I was happy to play.

The Kids of Catan (5 plays)
A birthday gift for Elias, though I'm afraid he hasn't taken to it as much I'd hoped. Then again, it's not a terribly interactive game, either - everything is pretty much predetermined by die rolls, so there isn't much in the way of interesting decision-making. It is gorgeous, though.

Memoir '44 (5 plays)
I actually don't remember playing very much Memoir this year, but apparently I did. Anyway, it's an enjoyable diversion, but I've never quite been able to get into it as much as some people. Perhaps that would change if I played with a bit more frequency...

Mystery Garden (5 plays)
Another game that I've played exclusively with Elias, Mystery Garden is more or less a dressed-up version of Twenty Questions, but I have a soft spot for Ravensburger games, having played them a bit when I was a kid.

Finally, a few other games of note: The monthly Battlestar Galactica game that I mentioned above has been a pleasure - it's been great to have a regular group with which to play a long game consistently, and to really grow familiar with the game. The Fury of Dracula game I played last fall was an unexpected joy. And Conflict of Heroes is a light wargame that I'm excited to play more of in 2010.

Roleplaying Games

While I loved RPGs as a kid, and I've been playing in off-again, on-again games of D&D since 2004, 2009 was the year that I really started roleplaying again in earnest. A big part of this stemmed from sitting in on some of the panels at Gamestorm and really starting to think about the kind of play I want from my roleplaying. In turn, that led to diving into all of the terrific new small press games that have come out in the last few years, and meeting a few local folks through GoPlayPDX that have been really helpful as I began to test these new waters. I haven't been able to get in much of the longer, multiple-session games that I'm looking for yet, but I've done a lot of reading that's really changed the way I think about my play. More importantly, I've been able to try out a raft of games that have shown me those innovations in action - especially Dogs in the Vineyard, Dust Devils, Lady Blackbird, Mouse Guard, and PTA - and I'm looking forward to playing even more this year.