Romance of the Seven Worlds AAR

Romance of the Seven Worlds (ROM7) was a megagame run at Wellycon XIV on Saturday 5 June 2021. It had 27 players, four control, and ran from about 10.30am to 4.30pm with a half lunch break. In this post, I will cover the feedback from players and control after the game, and my own observations of what worked well.

During the game Earth was saved as gravity generators were destroyed. This then set up the seven worlds to crash into each other, which was stopped by a magic ritual (with a tech project as backup). The Emperor had died, but come back to life through a clone, but with the High priest ascending to be one with Dyzan, it was going to be hard for the Emperor to complete their ritual of renewal for continued immortality. The destruction of Fangoria was going to make life hard for all the Zing addicts, as the drug was only cultivated on Fangoria.

Player Enjoyment

The median score was 4.6 out of 5, a small improvement on our last megagame The Colossus of Atlantis in June 2019. This is a good result, and that while a bit chaotic, nearly everyone had a good time and all but one player was interested in returning for future megagames.

Rules and Briefings

Everyone read the rules before the game (or at least part of the rules) and the rules got a 4 out of 5 for how well they prepared people for the game. This was a small improvement from 2019. Written feedback on the rules included a comment that it needed another draft, and someone also suggested video tutorials. I have long wanted to do video tutorials, but they require time and technology. The key obstacle is having the rules finished with enough lead time to make and distribute the video. The main block to finishing the rules early is player registrations for the game – if the number of players is not quite what the various subgames require, then the rules need to be amended. For ROM7 I locked the rules a week beforehand, having had to merge parts of the intended Minister and Noble subgames together.

Game Difficulty

The median answer here was 3.3, close to the Goldilocks sweet spot of 3. Our last game in 2019 got a 3.2 rating.

Rate of Play

The median answer here was 3.4, but the answers were not as tightly grouped for the Difficulty question. Our last game in 2019 got a 3.3 rating. As one person on the Control team put it, we got through ten turns of action in five game turns. Several players wrote comments about wanting better time keeping, and an easy to access board with turn number, current game phase, and time remaining in the turn. This may require some tech investment, or looking at ways of projecting the game time information. It is something we have done better in the past, but did not do well this time.

Player Involvement

The median answer was 4, most of the players felt pretty involved in the game. Our last game got a 4.1 rating. In written feedback, one player felt they did not have enough reasons to leave their world and interact with other players, while another was happy not to be involved with everything. Some feedback from the nobles that they found it hard to find the time to participate in the ministerial subgame.

Control

The median answer for how well the Control team did was 4.7, a small improvement on 2019 (4.6). Dutton, John, and Scott all did a great job, but the game would have run more effectively with six Control rather than four. About a third of the survey responders were willing to take on the Control role in the future, so hopefully a few hands will be raised when I ask for volunteers for Barracks Emperor in October.

Value for Money

This got a high 4.8 rating, a solid improvement on the 4.5 in 2019. In the ticket price survey, the median value for a day game was $NZ 30.40, and for a half-day game $NZ 15.80.

Venue

This is the fourth time we have run a megagame at Wellycon. For the previous three games we had a more discrete space to ourselves. Wellycon has grown, with 1100 people attending this year. So this year we got allocated some space on the stage, with instructions “take what you need, but no more.” The Control team is very aware that it was cramped, loud, and had non-players wandering through taking a short cut to the Dungeons & Dragons basement. It made the propaganda/media phase hard.

If that is the space we have available next year, then I think the better option will be to just run a demo table, with signups for a game later in June or July. Shifting to a weekend that is not a holiday weekend will also increase options for interested players who had other options for fun that weekend (such as a LARP convention out in Wainioumata, an SCA event up in Carterton, and all the hundreds of boardgames being played at Wellycon). The local community hall in Newlands where I live can be rented for about $200 for the day, and has power points, a kitchen, parking, and a supermarket two minutes walk away.

Communication and Marketing

It is pretty clear that Facebook, word of mouth from friends, and people signed up to our mailing list are the main ways we get people signing up for megagames. A couple of people found us through the Wellycon website, but the store posters did not pick up anyone this time as far as I can tell. A note on casting, while the Emperor role was cast almost instantly, we struggled to find players for the heroic Earthling or imperial minister roles – the Guild, Noble, and Common roles all proved more interesting.

Design Goals and Mechanics

I set out to design a game inspired by Flash Gordon, and I described it as a bit of a “reverse Watch the Skies“, where meddling Earthlings infiltrate and subvert an alien empire. My research consisted of watching the 1980 movie, the 1930s film serials (on Amazon prime), and reading reprints of the Sunday Comic strips from the 1930s and 40s. Compared to modern imitations like Star Wars, there is remarkably little in the way of academic or fan analysis on these works. In reflecting on past designs I wanted to make economic growth hard, and to have strong non-military solutions for problems. The game had mechanics for:

• Movement
• Exploration
• Combat
• Economy
• Science
• Magic
• Imperial government and petitions
• Romance
• Loyalty
• Pulp Actions

So there was a lot in the game, and it mostly worked and meshed well together.

Movement: I tried to keep this simple, you could move a character anywhere, but moving rockets or armies cost fuel tokens. Movement direct to the imperial capital faced barriers from “orbital defences” and “force fields”.

Exploration: various secrets and treasures were hidden in imperial vaults, which could be found by exploring the wilderness maps. I think this worked well, but given the time pressures on the game turn, I did not need the “you are lost for a minute” cards.

Combat: this worked well for 1:1 battles, but stumbled when scaled up to battles involving a dozen players. The attempted attack on the imperial palace (see picture below) took way to long to resolve. The lasercut MDF tokens and various strength cubes were great, and I will be using them again. We were close to maxing out on counters by the end of the game (started with about 15 rockets and 13 armies in play, but had 30 counters for each available) so I think I could have dialed combat losses up a notch.

Economy: Most players had a base that had four actions they could do two times each turn (example pictured below), if they had the Radium Points (RPs). Gaining RPs, however, required fighting for them in the Radlands of Targol, or acquiring them in trade. The two Pirate players did well in these battles, gaining large amounts of RPs, then hoarding them as per their objectives. So the trickle down economy did not work. Still, the economy did not fall over – everyone had some free actions they could do – but I probably needed to have a player role dedicated to crushing the pirates.

Science and Magic: On the whole players managed to work down the tech trees to get to the advances they needed to solve various problems in time. The pollution aspect of economic advances did not come through well. I am personally a bit tired of science subgames and tech trees, but I felt I really needed Science in the game, given the role of Dr Zharkov in the original sources of inspiration. Designing a lot of useful science advances is a high effort/high risk part of design – it takes time to do right, and if you get it wrong you can break the game. I am thinking that my design time would be better spent on designing interesting asymmetric powers for specific player roles that are present in game turn one, focusing on things that spur player conversation and trade.

The science process required each science role to calculate how many science dice that they had. These were then rolled for a project, trying to generate a set of dice with scores of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. If you were short one die, you could take “Zing” a cognitive drug in the game, to adjust one die roll to a different number. Completed advances could be traded to another player by simply spending six dice.

Imperial Government: I think this needed a few more players to work, as it was a bit isolated form the rest of the game. No one, for example, used the power to grant permission to wage war, and the imperial government lacked a degree of menace. Perhaps in a future run there should be imperial generals actively deploying to the subject worlds to hunt down rebels and outlaws. If I run the game again for less than 25 players, this is the subgame I would cut out.

Imperial Petitions: The three councils (noble, guild, and commons) met for five minutes each turn to adopt a petition to the Emperor. The Emperor then chose one petition, which was implemented. This is a simple, but powerful mechanic, as could be seen with the petition that just said “Destroy Fangoria”, leading to a jungle world being deforested. Councils did crowd the game turn, but allowed me to give the Emperor great power in choosing which petition to grant, but not unlimited power. With more players (over 30) I would look at making this kind of subgame a full time diplomacy/political role.

Romance: this megagame had very weak factions at the start, the guild, noble, and common players on each world were intended to be “frenemies” rather than allies. The design intent was for the card draw and match romance mechanic to allow emergent factions to be created in play. This did not work well, and the Terran Charisma, a special action card the Earthlings each had which allowed one player to change a character objective each game turn, had a much more significant impact on the game. The mechanics remain sound, but require more time for the players to engage in them.

Loyalty: This was a very experimental mechanic, but it did work well. Each world had a bag of loyalty discs, initially a mix of imperial, noble, and guild tokens (three of each), and one outlaw token. Most players had actions that let them look at or change the discs. Loyalty linked to the economic and military games by determining the loyalty of strength cubes that the players built – which could be decisive in battle as one of the possible combat cards “Sway” determined the winner on a 2d6+Charisma+Loyal Strength Cubes (on both sides counters). Loyalty also linked to the success or failure of Pulp Actions (see below). Loyalty discs were also influenced by the Propaganda phase – Control would add a loyalty disc to each world bag based on who had the most effective speeches. Late in the game when Unobtanium bombs were used by rebels, imperial loyalty discs got added to all the world bags.

Pulp Actions: This was the creative special action/wizard wheeze for the game. They were constrained to actions suitable for small bands of plucky heroes or devious villains. In adjudication, Control would determine how many loyalty tokens you needed, and then randomly draw three world loyalty discs – reflecting the support of the little people on the world, the guard who deliberately looks away, the taxi driver who gets you away from the secret police, etc. This was part of my design intent – to emphasize politics and people over economic growth and military power. So when the rebels attempted to assassinate the Emperor, they needed to draw three white tokens from the world loyalty bag, while a player trying to escape quickly from a prison just needed to tie discs that favoured them, against discs of the captor’s loyalty. This mechanic worked well, but we needed more Control to have more bandwidth for player initiated pulp actions.

Note: when doing a pulp action to steal a rocket, please make sure you steal a fuel token first.

Components

A few experiments that worked well. First, I got a bunch of Neck Wallets to both display key character information at a glance, and to provide pockets for card and counter storage. One change needed here – spot colour to make role identification easier. The final character sheets were laminated, so if a player trained one of their traits, it could be quickly adjusted with a marker pen.

Second, inspired by the foam counters used in a UK space race megagame, I got Battle Kiwi to make some MDF laser cut counters that could fit 10mm wooden cubes without requiring hours and hours of precise cutting of foamboard. This allows a lot of rich information to be packed into a counter. The example below has strength cubes loyal to Nobles (blue), Guild (orange), the Emperor (black), the Outlaws (white), as well as a Tech cube (yellow), and a Shock cube (pink). These work really well, as long as no one slaps the table hard. Total cost for 63 unit counters and a similar number of control markers was $NZ 167. I definitely plan to do something similar for Barracks Emperor, with one of these counters for each legion, and each cube representing a cohort.

Finally, I went for very abstract maps. ROM7 is not a hex counting panzer pusher game. So I purchased some art from Michal Kváč on Artstation, made a few tweaks in GIMP, and had seven worlds ready for exploration. I did learn not to rely on goggle drive when emailing files to the printer I use, Dropbox is the preferred solution for sending a dozen things off to print at once.

Closing Thoughts

This was a densely packed game, incorporating 18 months worth of ideas. For the number of players, I could have cut a subgame and a mechanic or two, but on the day it all worked out thanks to the players and control getting stuck into the game and having fun. On the whole, I feel like a future run of this game needs tweaks and a polish, not a rewrite.

Combat in Romance of the Seven Worlds

The design intent for the combat mechanics in Romance of the Seven Worlds is to have a quick process that produces outcomes similar to the comics and movies. In particular, combat can lead to units changing sides, or duels between opposing commanders. It is expressly not intended to produce realistic combat outcomes, or to require much in the way of logistics beyond spending fuel to move places.

One of the key factors in the combat system is a desire to limit the number of combat units each player can control. Most players will start the game with no more than one or two combat units, and have a maximum of three to five units that they can command. By limiting the number of units each player controls, we can have each individual unit be rich in information about its capabilities.

Each cube counts as one strength point. Yellow cubes are tech cubes, and count as a strength point for tech battles, when all other cubes are worth zero strength. The other colours used for strength cubes determine the faction loyalty that group of people support:

• Black: support the Emperor;
• White: support the Rebels;
• Blue: support the Nobles;
• Orange: support the Guilds.

So the unit pictured above has a strength of seven in Attrition battles, three in Tech battles, and one to two in Sway battles. Note that loyalty cubes may also be important for Pulp Actions targeted at the unit. The above unit is more likely to be sabotaged by the Rebels than anyone else. In Tactics and Chance battles it has a strength of zero.

Meteor Guard

This is a player versus environment (PVE) combat mechanic. Each game turn Control will pawn a number of meteor swarms in up to five of the zones on the Space Map. Players who control Rocket units can then choose to intercept the meteors and try to destroy them. This costs a fuel token, and you can only intercept meteors in one space zone each game turn.

This is a simple process, where the player rolls 2d6, adds unit strength, and if this is equal or greater than that meteor’s fixed strength rating, then the meteor is destroyed. If the roll is equal or less, then the Rocket takes one hit, reducing its strength. You can keep trying to shoot a meteor down as long as you have time left left in the Warlord Phase, and strength left in your Rocket.

Any meteors not shot down strike the planet in their space zone, damaging bases and units there. This is a bad thing, and players should work together to stop this.

Battle Process

This is a player versus player (PVP) combat mechanic. The usual trigger is a player moving units to a region controlled by another player, and declaring an attack. If in doubt, Control will determine if a battle happens.

First, any of the players involved in the battle draws a battle card. There are seven types of battle card:

• Cliffhanger: place a one minute sand timer down, when it runs out draw another battle card. If the Warlord Phase ends before the battle is resolved, then all the units involved in the battle are locked in combat until the next Warlord Phase (you could use a Pulp Action to escape the situation). For each Cliffhanger card draw, all players in the battle add 1d6 to the dice they roll.
• Romance: place a one minute sand timer down, players involved in the battle may court each other using the Romance mechanic. Unexpected alliances and betrayals may occur. Otherwise treat as a Cliffhanger.
• Attrition: roll 2d6 + Strength.
• Chance: roll 2d6. Do not count strength cubes at all for battles resolved by chance.
• Sway: roll 2d6 + Loyalty + character Charisma. You only count strength cubes that have loyalty matching your declared faction – this includes cubes on units controlled by other players!
• Tactics: roll 2d6 + character Tactics.
• Tech: roll 2d6 + Tech + character Science.

If for some reason you are unable to roll dice for your units, your side is assumed to roll a 2 when Control calls time at the end of the Warlord Phase. Character attributes only count if the character is present in the region where the battle is fought.

Astute players will have noted that outnumbering a player 10:1 matters not at all if a Chance battle occurs.

Duels

In battles, a tied result causes a duel to be fought between opposing commanders (duels may also take place in other parts of the game and use the process outlined here). Duels are 1:1 fights, no ganging up. At the start of the duel, each player announces the stakes they are fighting for:

• Capture: win one duel round to capture your opponent and win the battle;
• Wound: win two duel rounds to wound your opponent and win the battle;
• Kill: win three duel rounds to kill your opponent and win the battle.

To resolve the duel, each player rolls 2d6 and adds their Dueling score. Dueling ties can be won by playing an Inspiration card. Otherwise keep rolling until one player achieves their stake. Note that while a “Death” outcome for a character can be negated with a Pulp Action, the battle will still be lost. If both duelists achieve their stakes in the same round of dice rolls, then both sides are assumed to have lost the battle for casualty purposes, and the defender retains control of the region being fought over.

Battle Outcome

The player with the highest score wins the battle. If there are multiple players on one side, their scores are not combined together – it is just the highest score that counts.

The winning player gains control of the region where the battle took place (unless it was already controlled by an ally).

Units lose strength cubes based on the type of battle card used to resolve the battle:

• Cliffhanger: as below.
• Romance: if peace broke out between the players, no strength cubes are lost.
• Attrition: each of your units loses strength cubes equal to your foe’s highest die roll (max six cubes).
• Chance: each of your units loses strength cubes equal to your foe’s lowest die roll.
• Sway: winner gains all defeated strength cubes with matching loyalty from enemy units.
• Tactics: no one loses cubes.
• Tech: each of your units loses tech cubes equal to your foe’s lowest die roll (no loss if you have no tech cubes).

If a unit has no strength cubes left, it is destroyed and removed from play. It can be rebuilt later using the normal build action process. Surviving units on the defeated side can disperse and retreat into the local wilderness, or if Rockets are available, retreat to a controlled base on any of the seven worlds.

Battle Evolution

As various science projects are researched or Pulp Actions implemented, your combat capabilities may change during the game. The core mechanics above will remain, but new bonuses or penalties to the die roll, new battle cards, or different battle card draw process, or casualty process may happen.

Putting the Romance in Romance of the Seven Worlds

As I am running my Romance of the Seven Worlds megagame on 5 June at Wellycon, its time to start posting some explanations about the game mechanics. In this post, its the romance subgame.

The design intent for these mechanics is to reflect the source material, facilitate emergent factions that will surprise us in play, and to tie into the player objectives that should drive gameplay.

Romance is used in a broad sense, covering a wide spectrum of relationships – from bitter hatred and jealous rivals, through mutual respect and platonic friendships, to passionate true love. A megagame is not a dating app and this romance subgame is not an excuse to sexually harass people. Be respectful of the personal space of other players, and do not touch people without their consent. There will be a safety brief about these mechanics at the start of the game.

Romance of the Seven Worlds is inspired by a range of planetary romance novels, comic strips and film serials from the first half of the 20th century, and the classic Flash Gordon movie from 1980. In designing this game, the goal has been to try and replicate the sense of wonder, larger-than-life adventures, and pulp action from these sources, but without the racism, colonialism, and misogyny that were present in many of the stories. In these sources, characters often made quick decisions about whether or not they trusted or disliked each other. We also do not have the time of a weekend LARP to allow slow burn romances to kindle, so the romance rules reflect the original six panel comic strips, which did waste panels on sultry looks and sitcom miscommunication.

Image from The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire, Mike Butterworth & Don Lawrence 2019.

The romance subgame is optional – you must choose to opt in to the subgame during casting. All players with characters that can be romanced will have a heart symbol on their character tag. Romance is not restricted by character faction, role, gender or species – you can court any player with a romanceable character.

If you opt into the romance subgame, you will receive an envelope at the start of the game containing cards you can give to your friends and lovers. These might reflect you loaning special powers or character abilities, or a bonus Pulp Action card.

Courting

You will be able to “court” other player characters in the game mainly in the World Phase – which is the open unscripted part of the game turn when players are free to move about and do actions as they see fit. You might be able to use a Pulp Action to court in other game phases, and there is a chance that battles can be ended by Romance.

Courting requires your character tokens to be in the same physical space on one of the world maps. You then need to have a conversation with the player who is playing that character role in the megagame. If you both agree, then you can each draw a card from the Romance deck (a deck of playing cards). If the cards you draw are:

• Different Colours: nothing happens
• Both Red: you are friends.
• Both Black: you are rivals.
• Both Red and Matching Card: you are best friends.
• Both Black and Matching Card: you are bitter enemies.
• Both Jokers: you share an unbreakable bond.

A card matches if it is the same value, e.g. the Jack of Hearts and Jack of Diamonds are a best friends match, the Ace of Spades and the Ace of Clubs are a bitter enemies match. Once a relationship is established, you should roleplay the situation to the best of your ability. Specific mechanical effects follow. The card decks will be weighted towards producing friendly results at the start of the game.

You can court a player once per game turn. You can court any number of different players in the same game turn (but this may not be the best use of your time).

Friends

You like your friends and should try to help them where possible. You may reveal any, all, or none of your objectives to your friend, and you can change one of your objectives to match that of an objective your friend holds (or vice versa). Keep the playing card to use for Inspiration. You may draw Romance cards again with your friend.

Objectives Note: Most players will start with 3-5 objectives about what they want to accomplish in the game.

Inspiration Note: Inspiration cards can be played to ask Control for the benefit of the doubt in a narrative situation, or to win a tie. Yes, you can win battles through the power of friendship. Inspiration cards are one use. If both sides in a tie play inspiration cards, the value of the card will be used to break the tie where possible (Aces High, Hearts trump). Inspiration cards are one use.

Rivals

You wish to see ill done to your rival, whether by your hand or that of others. You should not willingly help your rival. Note this rivalry down as a new objective. You may draw Romance cards again to overcome the rivalry only if an appropriate narrative moment occurs (e.g. surviving a duel with your rival, being imprisoned with your rival, both of you have death warrants signed by the Emperor, your true love asks you to reconcile, etc). Return the cards you drew to the deck.

Best Friends

While you can have any number of friends, you can only have one best friend at a time. If you already have a best friend, you must choose between them. Decide to either keep your card for inspiration, or for one of you to carry both inspiration cards. Give your best friend your bonus Pulp Action card (first best friend only). Both of you must reveal all of your objectives, and can change any, all, or none of your objectives to match each others. You may draw Romance cards again with your best friend.

Bitter Enemy

Only the death or disgrace and exile of your hated enemy will satisfy you. Add the elimination of your enemy to your objectives for the game. You can only have one bitter enemy at a time, if you already have a bitter enemy you must choose one feud to pursue. Return the cards you drew to the deck.

Unbreakable Bond / True Love

As for Best Friends, but give them your Unbreakable Bond Pulp Action card, which can always be played in situations involving your partner (normally Pulp Action cards are one use). You can only have one unbreakable bond at a time.

After Action Report – WTS: Cold War

On Saturday 2 June, Wellycon hosted its second Megagame. This year the Wellington Megagame Collective ran a Cold War adaptation of Jim Wallman’s Watch the Skies game. This report is written from my perspective as overall Megagame control.

Reactor meltdown in the Islamic Republics. Purple meeples are refugees. The poor refugees were kidnapped and gifted to the aliens. Alien “saucers” have landed everywhere – the black wooden blocks are their mission tokens.

Highlights

It was definitely an improvement on my past practice of doing almost all of the Megagame preparatory work myself, and instead having the tasks shared over a wider group of people at an earlier stage of development.

I spent a lot of time on the map, and I think it came out well, but could have been better. It is good to finally find a print shop that handle my weird requests. If I had a better idea of the table size I would have cut the map size down a bit. The map got a bit cramped in Europe – which had more detail than most WTS maps in order to reflect the Cold War geography.

Personal best moment for me was the Non-aligned Movement SOF team making first contact with a Medusan Jellyfish leader in Brazil, where the meeting ended with reciprocal xenophage (the humans ate an alien, and the aliens ate a human). This then became the pattern of human-alien interactions, which made the alien visit to the United Nations exciting (I had to interject a new rule “No eating Control”).

I quite enjoyed the spawning alien units at their undersea bases. While the Aliens did spread their crabs out to increase spawn, they did not reach the truly terrifying potential of matching a Magnificent drone (d12 unit) with a Queen, and spawning a vast horde. As it turned out a combination of tactical nuclear weapon depth charges and massed fleets was able to curb the death ray armed panzer crabs.

Listening to player stories in the pub later on was also a highlight.

Oddly enough the Cuban missile crisis just popped out in 1962 (first turn) just the way player actions and card choices worked.

The USA-USSR standoff in Cuba was resolved diplomatically.

Problems

Attempts to playtest new mechanics failed. This is something the Collective needs to get better at, and in the long term I would like us to get a state where games are playtested long before we are making the commitment to run them.

Late registrations meant that two weeks prior to the game being run we were uncertain if we actually had the minimum numbers. It is going to be difficult to run Megagames independently of host conventions unless we can secure player registration that makes us confident that we can afford to pay for the venue hire. For host conventions, player registration is essential for confirming our space. Due to increased attendance at Wellycon, we only had half the space we had the year before. If another ten players had turned up, we would have been crowded (and the USSR would have had to share its space with another team table).

It also turned out that both players who said they were bringing +3 guests, were bringing the same set of people – so eight registrations turned into just four registrations. Probably the best way forward here, is to see if we can have an additional charge of $5-10 for when we are at events like this, as that transaction tends to reveal actual commitment.

Late registration also delays casting and team selection, which increases the difficulty of getting briefs to players. It was only after the game was run that I figured out I could customise Meetup.com to send emails to subsets of the attendees rather than spamming everyone.

We only had one media player. Alan did a herculean task in staying on top of everything and then giving a relatively good overview to everyone each turn. Better control over registrations, and more registrations early on will let us add more players to this role.

How did the Cold War adaptations work?

Special actions – players sat on some of these cards because they targeted too much pain at their own nation. I eventually decided to let players sell cards back to me a Resource Point each. In hindsight, I should have made a custom deck for each human team, where all of the actions made more sense for them to play. The Alien special action cards worked well.

UN – Control made it simpler than I had written it up and let the players talk.

The Medusan Leader addresses the United Nations. “You eat! We eat!”

Military operations – this was the part of the game that took the longest to resolve. The Arms race (building units) could have been handled elsewhere (perhaps an action during team planning). The Logistics (movement phase) took a while because people built a lot of small units. Decision to not charge RPs to move made sense in a one year timescale and I am glad we did not have to figure that out midgame. The human interceptor game did not work out well – it took until the middle of the game for everyone to fully understand how it worked. One bit of feedback in the pub was that this section of the rules would have really benefited from a short explainer video. The aliens managed several 50+ terror turns and got more tech cards than all the human teams combined. This was also in part due to basing restrictions – the aliens were smart enough not to attack regions where everyone could intercept. I did internationalise a UK base towards the end of the game, but I think player actions disabled it fairly quickly.

South America got hit hard by the Aliens.

Science – lack of alien tech meant most of the funky 60s tech never got finished. The Space Race mechanic worked, but could have been a little faster (either one less space on the track, or double the spaces and faster movement for everyone to feel a sense of progress). There were good Nobel prize awards (France for agriculture – research on Alien Foods). The Doomsday Clock could have had a little more mechanical heft, but it gave the media something to talk about, and helped some Control injects early in the game. The Aliens did so well they ran short of tech cards, and compounding the shortage was an insufficient number of a couple of key card types to finish some of their tech sheets. I did add more alien technology cards via non-player UK and as a bonus for SOF operations and victory against alien ground forces.

At least one human team got Fusion Power, but no one copied the Alien Death Rays.

DEFCON – stayed at 4-5 for most of the game. The last two turns featured several nukes and a lot of open warfare (USA invasion of France, USSR invasion of China, India, Middle East) and a lot of die rolls where a “one” meant global nuclear war. So while the USSR and USA got away with a lot of invasions in the last turn, and some some emergency +! DEFCON cards, they could have ‘lost” the game there. It was noble of France and Indo-China not to return fire.

Information Operations – these played fast (good) but players were frustrated at not being able to directly initiate specific zone actions (luck of the draw). People did have some DEFCON cards to get around this (and seeing how static DEFCON was for most of the game I could have had more of them). Playtesting how long this mechanic took would have made it better. Stability – was a prompt for control as to where to spawn refugees and revolutionary units. That worked well enough. Influence – privilege cards for dominating continent zones also seemed to work well.

The Influence Operation table.

Player Feedback

Enjoyment: 4.8 out of five. So despite some problems everyone had a good time.

Briefings: 3.6 out of five. Room for improvement here – I need to delegate more of the writing burden.

Difficulty: 3.7 out of five (where one is too hard and five is too easy). I prefer too easy to to hard, Control can always add a little more chaos mid-game, but its much harder to make it simpler mid-game.

Rate of Play: 3.3 out of five. Close to the sweet spot of three, and if the military operations had been faster we would have been fine.

Control: 4.7 out of five. Great job everyone!

Involvement: 4.5 out of five. I did check up on players who seemed to be off to one side of the game to see if everything was okay, and they all confirmed they were having a good time.

Value for Money: 4.7. I did get feedback that people would have happily paid a bit more. One visitor who had played WTS in the USA said we had a really great set up. The average that players said they were willing to play for a day long game was $31, for a shorter game $19.50. Preferred length of games was just under six hours (we were closer to eight hours including registration, game, lunch break, debrief, and pack up).

Alan, the hardest working journalist in the world. Not warm hat in keeping with the Viking theme of Wellycon.

Specific Feedback Comment

I forgot to tell people there were comment boxes on the back of their feedback forms, so we got a bit less text feedback this time. My comments follow in italics.

Keep: “I love the interactions between all the teams and how it was both individual and collaborative.”

Stop: “Nothing.”

Start: “Tighter turnarounds.”

Keep: “The real-world parts! Really cool to resolve the China/Cuban/etc crises.”

Stop: “The UN felt very disconnected from the rest of the game – maybe there’s a way to integrate it more.” Control was taking stuff that happened on the main map over to the UN table, and vice versa. There were a few important treaties too, especially the detente between the USA and USSR. 

Start: “More coming together during the game so everyone could be up to date on what happened.” A key part of how Megagames are different from boardgames is in not knowing everything that is happening, and finding your negotiations/map action have been overtaken by events elsewhere.

Keep: “Science track worked pretty well, would like to see more of that format.”

Start: “More media presence. I feel Alan was a bit stretched with being the only media person.” Agreed, there was no one else to cover the news of his assassination by Soviet agents.

Keep: “The ability to discuss outside the box ideas/turns with Control and their willingness to include them.” I think a key enabler for this, is to keep the overall game engine as simple as possible.

Start: “Control introducing events that change the nature of the game in interesting ways.” I prefer that players drive the game events. This avoids a sense of rail roading. We did do a few things, such as telling one of the French players that there was ancient alien technology inside him, and telling the aliens that the “cosmic seed” they were looking for was on Earth. If we had another completed another turn, these could have escalated the narrative.

Keep: “Combat system.” Well I am glad someone liked it!

Keep: “Open movement between tables except where thematic.” The USSR did try to persuade a couple of key players to a meeting behind the Iron Curtain, just before the USA-USSR combined offensive to purge Earth of alien clients, with a view to detaining the players. Wisely, they declined.

Keep: “Distinct roles.”

Start: “More distinct team leader role.” By not having a lot of mechanical levers to push, the team leader has time for the diplomacy game, and also time to be creative and take proposals for special actions to Control.

Keep: “In general it was excellent. All the mechanics that I saw were straightforward. the timing felt right.” A pub comment from the Soviet leader along the lines that every time he felt things were starting to drag, bing, that is when Control rolled the next turn forward.

Stop: “I felt that the unitary global terror index was a problem. Having all the global governments falling essentially due to actions solely in South America was unsatisfying.” There was a feedback loop from global Terror to zone stability – we reduced stability in the zones where the aliens were most active. The issue with local terror indexes, is that we might be eliminating individual team governments very early in the game. The USSR and USA are also global powers, with global interests.

Start: “Split global Terror per region.” See comment above.

Keep: “Egg-timers/limited time for wibbling.”

Keep: “teams.”

Stop: “All or nothing combat”. The combat was intended to encompass action over an entire year of real time. Army strength formations tend to suffer about 1% losses per day action. But the real reason was to KISS (Keep it simple). Something that would have followed the USA and USSR invasions if we had another turn was the uprising of revolutionary units in the regions they had occupied.

Rolling the combat dice

Keep: “Nobel prize type nominations and scientific bragging.”

Stop: “No complaints.”

Start: “A little more involvement in strategy from science.”

Keep: “Influence [operations] area was super fun but a little less randomness on outcome would be great.” Because of the lack of playtesting, I built the outcome resolution for speed.

Stop: “Not stop, but the military role was clearly the hardest and the most time consuming. A way to lessen this slightly would be great.” Early briefings, video explainers, an extra Control body to help processing, and moving some functions elsewhere could all happen in a re-run of the game.

Start: “A more detailed combat rule set.” The problem with longer rules is getting people to read them. Short video clips is probably the way to communicate with the modern audience.

Keep: “Creative ideas.”

Start: “Communicating through email the roles (we didn’t realise until we arrived that we could have done more to dress up). More exciting happenings from Control.”

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback. We really appreciate it, and we hope we can use it to make future games better.

What next for the Wellington Collective?

First we have a well deserved rest from our small part in New Zealand’s largest gaming convention. We polled people on what game we should run next. First, the most unpopular designs were:

1. Operation Unthinkable (USA+UK+allies versus USSR in July 1945)
2. Shape of Things to Come (WWII as imagined by H. G. Wells)
3. Invasion 2050 (a future war between Australia and New Zealand)
4. Aquila Rift (tactical Space Pirates).

I am a little sad that the idea I had done the most preliminary research on (Operation Unthinkable) was the least popular, but I will just park it for the future.

The most popular designs were:

1. Mars 1938 (A planetary romance on Old Mars, with Nazis)
2. The Reaching Moon (high-fantasy in Glorantha)
3. Colossus of Atlantis (giant robots in a doomed Atlantis)
4. Watch the Skies: Dragons (a fantasy take on WTS, with Elves, Dwarves, Humans, a Dark Lady, and Dragon attacks to abduct princes and royal treasuries).

A will do a subsequent post offering a longer treatment of the four most popular ideas.

Megagame plans for 2018

This is what I hope to achieve in the Megagame space in 2018:

1. Set up a Wellington area collective of people interested in designing, testing, and running Megagames.
2. Run Watch the Skies at Wellycon in June.
3. Run a revised version of Colossus of Atlantis in the second half of 2018.

Last year I had hoped to do a megagame of Operation Unthinkable (an alternate history scenario where the USSR and USA/UK fight a war in central Europe in 1945) in late 2018. I am being more realistic about how much I can get done, and this is now more likely to be a project in 2019.

Wellington Megagame Collective

I want to run Megagames that work as good games and are a heap of fun for the players. But I need help. The volunteers I have had for Control in running games have been fantastic, but running The Galaxy Will Burn taught me that I need to ask for more help earlier in the process in order to make the final game a good one, with all the supporting logistics sorted out ahead of time.

So if you would like to be involved, send me an email at grand.vizier@gmail.com. I will be looking at setting up some kind of discussion meeting later in March to handle the basics of group name, purpose, how the money gets handled, and what kind of initial structure is needed. I’d like Watch the Skies to be the first group effort.

Watch the Skies

Watch the Skies (WTS) is the most famous megagame design in the world right now. I think a factor in its popularity is that its so easy to build on the template of “today’s world” plus “mysterious aliens”. The aliens can be friendly, they can be hostile, they can be divided into factions, or anything else that Control’s imagination can come up with. At GENCON the aliens were there to cover the genocide of the Dinosaurs, which required drilling down through Italy into the planetary core to retrieve their old Doomsday machine.

My initial concept for WTS is to set it during the early Cold War – taking inspiration from the movies of the 1950s and 60s rather than more recent media like the X-Files and UFO TV series. So rather than multiple teams of similar sizes, its more likely to be two large teams (USA and USSR), the alien team, and a number of smaller teams (US and USSR ally states or more non-aligned nations like India or China). I will take input and refine the idea from whoever volunteers for the Collective, as figuring out how the aliens will slot into the game is important.

Colossus of Atlantis

Over the next few months I intend to revise Colossus of Atlantis for a game in Wellington in the second half of the year, building on the feedback and experience from last year. I have been doing some more reading of Greek history, and looking at how several games about the Peloponnesian War have handled things like city-state politics and battle resolution. At a high level the changes I want to make are:

1. Reduce the overall number of game components, while expanding the opportunity for player creativity when it comes to designing and building Colossi, Wonders, Spells etc.
2. Have a Junta style map of the city of Atlantis, with the potential for street battles there between different factions to change the government. The image above gives you an idea of the city layout, although its dimensions are a bit off and there is at least one too many rings compared to Plato’s description.
3. More detailed continent maps, so “Libya” actually looks like North Africa.
4. More emphasis on the kind of political factions found in Ancient Greece, e.g. Oligarchs, Democrats, Tyrants, Medes, etc. The factions struggle to control voting blocs in Atlantis, and to control the semi-autonomous Atlantean colonies.
5. Emphasising the role of fear, interest, and honour identified by Thucydides in triggering conflicts. I may frame Atlantis as being at the height of its power, with the rival empires as the rising challenges to Atlantean supremacy (to echo current real world politics a little). For dealing with the rival Empires I want to have a simple global map, so all up there will be three levels of map in the game: globe, continent, and Atlantis. The globe map may include a hollow earth section.
6. Changing the structure of play away from 20 minutes for each of the Map Phase, Team Phase, and Council Phase to one where the play at Map tables can proceed in an asynchronous fashion (i.e. if one map table gets its turn done quickly, they move onto their next turn rather than waiting for everyone else to catch up). After an hour of play there would be a half hour break for diplomacy, snacks and toilet breaks ending in the Assembly phase where votes are resolved on important matters.

Quite a bit of work to do there, which is another reason to run WTS in June. Also, if you have recommendations for venues in the Wellington area, please let me know. The ideal venue is available for an all day hire, has a large hall with a kitchen, toilets, and a side room or two, and needs to be priced around $200. I think the price is largely going to restrict us to Church and community halls.

 

Aquila Rift Feedback

Last Saturday at Wellycon X, I ran the Aquila Rift Megagame, with the assistance of five control players and the enthusiasm of 26 players. A lot of the game files are available online, if you are interested in taking a look. Aquila Rift was intended to be more of a casual Megagame, and none of the players had played one before, and only a few had heard of them before Wellycon – although one player had watched the Shut Up & Sit Down Watch the Skies video several times.

Each map table had roughly 14 systems that players could move between. Blue routes were pirate only, red routes inflicted damage. White markers indicate routes onto other map tables. The Control table has everything needed to run the map game, and one of the committees.

Setup started around 1100 and took a bit over two hours with one other person helping. Travis was also heaven sent when another member of the Control team texted to tell me he had rolled his ankle that morning while tramping. Travis volunteered to drive out and do a pick up so we would not be shorthanded.

We set up six tables, but only used five.

We had around 19 signups before Wellycon started, so we picked up several people on the day, and also had four last minute cancellations – they felt that they could not commit to a four hour game.

A live action game of Codenames ran over time, so we started late (~4.30pm) and played through to 8.30pm. All up we got through 18 map turns and six committee phases. I was pretty happy with how the interaction between the map game and the committee game worked. There were problems, but in general I think the concept works for the kind of low player number Megagame I can run in Wellington. Every player gets to wear at least two hats. If I could get 60+ players I would focus more on one role per player.

Richard managed to be both Pirate King and Public Enemy Number One at the same time

One new thing I did this time was to get some video. We did not have a spare person to run the camera, so I just left it in place with a Tripod. I will be teaching myself how to edit video this weekend and then I will try and put the highlights of game play and end of game speeches up on YouTube.

This ship was almost destroyed in battle, just two more hexes of damage would have finished it off.

While law and order was maintained in some sectors, in others it collapsed, and pirates were able to “put the sector on farm”. The Viceroy gave good speeches, but teams were more united in the search for lost relics than in cooperating for the development of the sector. Some player feedback though t there were too many pirates. There were twice as many pirates as other roles, but only about one more Pirate than there were Patrol and Governor players.

The top five end of game plunder scores in the bank were:

1. $1,163 – Alya
2. $986 – Zachary
3. $708 – Richard
4. $698 – Jack
5. $557 – Hannah.

On the whole I was happy with how the game system worked. Combat was the complicated bit, but it seems to have worked out okay – but one person did give feedback that it was too complicated. Where I was surprised, was just how much plunder appeared in the game – it was quite a bit more than in the playtests. This distorted the committee a bit, so if I run Aquila Rift again I would look at the plunder economy first, rejigging the committees second, and making combat simpler as the third priority. The search for the lost ships also seems to have been a good unifying element for teamwork in the game.

Players were inventive with the dry erase markers.

Number Crunching from the Feedback Forms

I got 20 responses to the feedback survey form. Not to future self, have a few biro pens lying around for this – dry erase pens are not good for writing feedback. People were asked to rate things from 1-5, and high numbers were usually good.

• Enjoyment 4.55 (high)
• Briefing 3.6 (room for improvement)
• Difficulty 3.2 (easy for some, hard for others)
• Rate of Play 3.45 (not too fast for most)
• Control 4.125 (good job guys!)
• Involvement 4.45 (good but several suggestions for more)
• Value 4.35 (good value).

I am very happy with the 4.55 rating for enjoyment! In terms of support for future games, 85% said they would like to play a Megagame again, and were willing to pay an the average of $27.65 for a whole day game and $18.50 for an evening game. Fourteen people also said they would like to help Control in the future. I think about 75% of the player and control team had read at least part of the game rules before the game.

In the middle of a map turn.

I intend to recycle a lot of the game structure from Aquila Rift in The Galaxy Will Burn. Some players gave feedback on Aquila Rift that they wanted more politics, intrigue and an expanded faction game. TGWB will definitely have that.

My thanks go out to Wellycon for giving us the space to play in, to my control team of Alan, Dutton, Travis, John and Alistair, and to all of the players for an enjoyable game.