[GenCon] Demos
The demos! Wow.
First, understand that he indie game community rallied together and purchased a large "peninsula-style" booth. There were eight small, round tables that would seat three or four people comfortably. There was a cramped but suitable 8'x8' nook with racks of indie games for sale and someone from Indie Press Revolution (IPR) working the cash register. They took credit cards. The tables were almost constantly in use while designers ran demos for interested gamers. There was a "menu" that listed around 40-50 games that could be purchased. Most had an asterisk after the name to signify that you could ask for a demo of this game, too.
By the end of con, I had played in 18 demos (one a repeat to help out). Of the remaining games on the menu, I'd played 9 before GenCon, I watched at least 2 more (Burning Empires and Mechaton).
The highlight games for me were Hero's Banner, whose demo I improved with a quick suggestion to the designer (give every player his own character or demo scene), and Perfect, my only RPG purchase at GenCon (I bought it immediately after the demo).
There were only two games that left me with a neutral or worse impression. Overall, I liked all the demos I played.
It Was a Mutual Decision (Adept Press, Ron Edwards) is a cute little game about an unavoidable break-up. You explore why you broke up and whose fault it was, and the game uses a bizarre "rat" theme to symbolize how people can act like monsters towards one another. It has some clever things in it, but it didn't grab me.
Shooting the Moon (Black & Green Games, Emily Care Boss) is another relationship game. The demo had a humorous bent and probably failed to carry the strength of the mechanics because it didn't seem to take itself seriously. Also, the demo's setup took too long so we missed the meat of the resolution and reward systems. All that aside, I liked the game and would love to try a full game of it. Emily is also extremely charming and, I suspect, a really good person.
I didn't actually play Burning Empires (Burning Wheel) but I did watch Luke's four-hour game (I only watched about a half hour). It looks like fun on crystal meth. Take the clever combat duelling rules from Burning Wheel and map that to firearms, add in maneuvers like flanking and suppressive fire, and you have an amazing, rocking time. I didn't see much of the BITs get used while I was there but I suspect the game rocks on toast.
Infinite Armies (BTRC, Greg Porter) was at GenCon last year, I'm told, but I hadn't played it yet. Greg patiently ran me through several rounds of a card battle. If you like quick tactical wargames, you must check it out. You use a PDF with some clever Javascript programming added to let you create your own army. You load images into the cards, select powers, and it calculates all the costs and writes them on the card. I could build a Lord of the Rings goblins army with catapults and you could build a Panzer tank army and we could meet in a fair fight. Seriously cool.
Cold City (Contested Ground Studios, Malcom Craig) left me, well, cold. The demo launched a bunch of American and European soldier and intelligence types into tunnels and we fought genetically mutated Nazi creations and struggled to expose each other. There were flashy combat moments described in enthusiastic detail by the contagiously excited Malcom, and there was a kind of Trust mechanic (presumably borrowed from The Mountain Witch) but the demo didn't sell the game to me. Malcolm is one of the authors of a|state. I suspect the game didn't click for me due to the source material but the mechanics weren't that memorable, either.
Mob Justice (Contested Ground Studios, Iain McAllister), from the same company, was hotter. You play a mobster at the end of his game. Your actions earn you reputation and your loyalties are tested. The demo was sharp and sold the game well.
SNAP (Custom Built Games, Gordon C. Landis) really didn't work for me. The game mechanics seemed to be arbitrary, or at least Gordon wasn't explaining them well. The demo was not good. Gordon dropped our ghost characters into a high school reunion setting where we didn't know each other, then asked me what I wanted from the other guy. I had no idea. I had little motivation. There was no capital-S Situation, as far as I could tell. I was supposed to be giving the other guy hints about his secret and offering him glass beads to indicate how much I'd told him, but I didn't understand why I should do this. The other player (Jye Nicholson) hinted things back at me about my secret. When we finally stopped the demo and the secrets were revealed, Jye and I both scratched our heads because the secrets still meant nothing to us. It was a bit boggling.
Mortal Coil (Galileo Games, Brennan Taylor) had very clever bidding mechanics. We played washed-up Roman deities who had lost most of their power because no one worshiped them anymore and we were all wasting away at a bar in New Jersey. It was good fun even though we got interrupted a lot when people needed Brennan for IPR stuff. I played with Stephen Jarvis and Justin Jacobson (Blue Devil Games). Both names were familiar to me, and I wonder from where. I think Justin used to post on the GMAST-L or ADND-L lists, over a decade ago.
Shock: Social Science Fiction (Glyph Press, Joshua A. C. Newman) is a cool game that I needed to play so I could steal stuff for Verge! It's a hard SF game. You pick thematic issues and "shocks" and cross-reference them to create a panoply of protagonists and antagonists to tell stories about those themes. I played one of the earliest demos and brainstormed with Joshua about streamlining and improving it. The demo I played was pretty rocky (and long) but I got a sense of the game from it. I'm told that the demo was pretty tight a few hours later.
With Great Power... (Incarnadine Press, Michael Miller) is a narrative superheroes game. The system was tight and fun and I had a blast role-playing Liberty Belle and some incidental NPCs in other players' scenes. And I generally don't like supers games.
Perfect (Inciteful Entertainment, Joe McDonald) is a game about governmental oppression in a Victorian world. You play a "criminal" -- a dissident. It punched all my political buttons, hard. The demo was tight. I played a young man whose mother had just passed away, and the government had come to collect all of her paintings for "processing." I wanted my mother's portrait back. My attempt to break into the processing plant and escape with the painting failed and the black-robed Inquisitors forcibly "conditioned" me. I've never had so much fun losing dice rolls in my life. At the end of the short demo, I stood up and told him that I was sold and asked where I could buy it. I didn't do that with any other game at GenCon.
Primitive (Kevin Allen Jr. Design) was way, way too much fun. It's essentially a very simple game. You play cavemen in a fictional pre-history setting that never was, with dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. These cavemen don't have a spoken language other than grunts and hand gestures. During play, you are not allowed to speak to other players in character, but must gesture and grunt. It's actually easier than you'd think to communicate that way. Keith Senkowski and Jason Morningstar were my hairy companions for ten hilarious minutes as we threw rocks at, clubbed, and leaped upon a mammoth stuck in a tar pit. The game rules are very, very short and Kevin is asking $10 for it, so I didn't grab it. I'd have paid $6. I'd have paid $30 if he included a box set with the props he used for the demo -- the rabbit fur pelt with rules reminders printed on the skin, the bleached bones, and the smooth rocks. In some ways, this was the most clever game at con, for the language stuff.
AGON (one.seven design, John Harper) is beautiful to look at and a blast to play. You're a Greek hero competing for glory. The rules provide a simple but rich set of tools for tactical combat with a little role-playing attached. There was a lot of buzz around this game. I can see the beauty of it (inside and out) but it is, at heart, a little Gamist thing and I'm really not looking for that right now. I stole the idea of a Glory system for Firan though!
Waiting/Tea (One Thousand One, Jonathan Walton) blew my mind. Seriously. It's a little sample game that Jonathan put in Push: New Thinking About Roleplaying, a fat little book of game design theory articles with guest commentary in the margins. I bought the PDF before con but still haven't read it. Waiting/Tea is a short little two-player experiment game on one piece of paper per player. On one side was a map of a little Chinese temple. On the other side was a list of things I could have my character do in each room. To do those things, I merely had to say I do them. I played a young girl traveling to see the temple Master, but custom forced me to wait at the gate until I welcomed the next person to come through the gate. Remi played a temple priest who was told by the Master to make tea. Hence, "Waiting/Tea." I didn't expect much to happen. It looked like ZORK but with fewer options. Wow, what a surprise! Remi and I immediately had our characters at odds. He spurned me rudely at the gate. I dumped his buckets of water. There was real role-playing. It was loads of fun. The game has some cool implications for game theory (IIEE especially) and I need to go read Push now to see what Jonathan said about it.
Dictionary of Mu (Paka's Thread Games, Judd "Paka" Karlman) is a setting supplement for Sorcerer, but that's understating it. He's basically created a rich world for Sorcerer in the form of a dictionary of entries about demons. The world is a mix of Conan the Barbarian, Barsoom, and the Old Testament. I'd read Sorcerer but never played it, so this was a cool demo for me. Judd is half of Sons of Kryos, who do the excellent gaming podcast.
Contenders (Prince of Darkness Games, Joe Prince) is a boxing RPG. You play a prizefighter struggling to win fights and protect something important to him. My boxer was trying to keep his hometown Catholic church from decaying physically and morally. It was a game I expected not to care about, but I could play a full session of it.
Hero's Banner (TCK Roleplaying, Tim C. Koppang) was a wonderful surprise. It's a game about heroism in the face of adversity. Every choice (romantic, political, or personal) can result in sweeping changes to your situation. The mechanics for this are fast and elegant. By the end of con, there was a lot of buzz about this game. It will likely win awards next year.
The Mountain Witch (Timefire Publishing, Tim Kleinart) has been around a while but I hadn't gotten to play it till now. You are a ronin -- a disgraced samurai working as a mercenary. You and other ronin are paid to travel to the lair of the mountain witch and kill her. Along the way, trust breaks down and the other ronin are a bigger threat than the witch, or so it seems.
That's a lot of games! I wish I had found time to play a few more: Breaking the Ice, Conspiracy of Shadows, Best Friends, Nine Worlds, The Princes' Kingdom, carry: a game about war, and 1001 Nights will have to wait till next time. I wanted to play Universalis with Ralph Mazza, as I need to learn more about it for Verge, but I got too busy with other things. I also hope to get in a Polaris game some day. I own Universalis and Polaris already though.
Go back to Adam's master GenCon thread.
First, understand that he indie game community rallied together and purchased a large "peninsula-style" booth. There were eight small, round tables that would seat three or four people comfortably. There was a cramped but suitable 8'x8' nook with racks of indie games for sale and someone from Indie Press Revolution (IPR) working the cash register. They took credit cards. The tables were almost constantly in use while designers ran demos for interested gamers. There was a "menu" that listed around 40-50 games that could be purchased. Most had an asterisk after the name to signify that you could ask for a demo of this game, too.
By the end of con, I had played in 18 demos (one a repeat to help out). Of the remaining games on the menu, I'd played 9 before GenCon, I watched at least 2 more (Burning Empires and Mechaton).
The highlight games for me were Hero's Banner, whose demo I improved with a quick suggestion to the designer (give every player his own character or demo scene), and Perfect, my only RPG purchase at GenCon (I bought it immediately after the demo).
There were only two games that left me with a neutral or worse impression. Overall, I liked all the demos I played.
It Was a Mutual Decision (Adept Press, Ron Edwards) is a cute little game about an unavoidable break-up. You explore why you broke up and whose fault it was, and the game uses a bizarre "rat" theme to symbolize how people can act like monsters towards one another. It has some clever things in it, but it didn't grab me.
Shooting the Moon (Black & Green Games, Emily Care Boss) is another relationship game. The demo had a humorous bent and probably failed to carry the strength of the mechanics because it didn't seem to take itself seriously. Also, the demo's setup took too long so we missed the meat of the resolution and reward systems. All that aside, I liked the game and would love to try a full game of it. Emily is also extremely charming and, I suspect, a really good person.
I didn't actually play Burning Empires (Burning Wheel) but I did watch Luke's four-hour game (I only watched about a half hour). It looks like fun on crystal meth. Take the clever combat duelling rules from Burning Wheel and map that to firearms, add in maneuvers like flanking and suppressive fire, and you have an amazing, rocking time. I didn't see much of the BITs get used while I was there but I suspect the game rocks on toast.
Infinite Armies (BTRC, Greg Porter) was at GenCon last year, I'm told, but I hadn't played it yet. Greg patiently ran me through several rounds of a card battle. If you like quick tactical wargames, you must check it out. You use a PDF with some clever Javascript programming added to let you create your own army. You load images into the cards, select powers, and it calculates all the costs and writes them on the card. I could build a Lord of the Rings goblins army with catapults and you could build a Panzer tank army and we could meet in a fair fight. Seriously cool.
Cold City (Contested Ground Studios, Malcom Craig) left me, well, cold. The demo launched a bunch of American and European soldier and intelligence types into tunnels and we fought genetically mutated Nazi creations and struggled to expose each other. There were flashy combat moments described in enthusiastic detail by the contagiously excited Malcom, and there was a kind of Trust mechanic (presumably borrowed from The Mountain Witch) but the demo didn't sell the game to me. Malcolm is one of the authors of a|state. I suspect the game didn't click for me due to the source material but the mechanics weren't that memorable, either.
Mob Justice (Contested Ground Studios, Iain McAllister), from the same company, was hotter. You play a mobster at the end of his game. Your actions earn you reputation and your loyalties are tested. The demo was sharp and sold the game well.
SNAP (Custom Built Games, Gordon C. Landis) really didn't work for me. The game mechanics seemed to be arbitrary, or at least Gordon wasn't explaining them well. The demo was not good. Gordon dropped our ghost characters into a high school reunion setting where we didn't know each other, then asked me what I wanted from the other guy. I had no idea. I had little motivation. There was no capital-S Situation, as far as I could tell. I was supposed to be giving the other guy hints about his secret and offering him glass beads to indicate how much I'd told him, but I didn't understand why I should do this. The other player (Jye Nicholson) hinted things back at me about my secret. When we finally stopped the demo and the secrets were revealed, Jye and I both scratched our heads because the secrets still meant nothing to us. It was a bit boggling.
Mortal Coil (Galileo Games, Brennan Taylor) had very clever bidding mechanics. We played washed-up Roman deities who had lost most of their power because no one worshiped them anymore and we were all wasting away at a bar in New Jersey. It was good fun even though we got interrupted a lot when people needed Brennan for IPR stuff. I played with Stephen Jarvis and Justin Jacobson (Blue Devil Games). Both names were familiar to me, and I wonder from where. I think Justin used to post on the GMAST-L or ADND-L lists, over a decade ago.
Shock: Social Science Fiction (Glyph Press, Joshua A. C. Newman) is a cool game that I needed to play so I could steal stuff for Verge! It's a hard SF game. You pick thematic issues and "shocks" and cross-reference them to create a panoply of protagonists and antagonists to tell stories about those themes. I played one of the earliest demos and brainstormed with Joshua about streamlining and improving it. The demo I played was pretty rocky (and long) but I got a sense of the game from it. I'm told that the demo was pretty tight a few hours later.
With Great Power... (Incarnadine Press, Michael Miller) is a narrative superheroes game. The system was tight and fun and I had a blast role-playing Liberty Belle and some incidental NPCs in other players' scenes. And I generally don't like supers games.
Perfect (Inciteful Entertainment, Joe McDonald) is a game about governmental oppression in a Victorian world. You play a "criminal" -- a dissident. It punched all my political buttons, hard. The demo was tight. I played a young man whose mother had just passed away, and the government had come to collect all of her paintings for "processing." I wanted my mother's portrait back. My attempt to break into the processing plant and escape with the painting failed and the black-robed Inquisitors forcibly "conditioned" me. I've never had so much fun losing dice rolls in my life. At the end of the short demo, I stood up and told him that I was sold and asked where I could buy it. I didn't do that with any other game at GenCon.
Primitive (Kevin Allen Jr. Design) was way, way too much fun. It's essentially a very simple game. You play cavemen in a fictional pre-history setting that never was, with dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. These cavemen don't have a spoken language other than grunts and hand gestures. During play, you are not allowed to speak to other players in character, but must gesture and grunt. It's actually easier than you'd think to communicate that way. Keith Senkowski and Jason Morningstar were my hairy companions for ten hilarious minutes as we threw rocks at, clubbed, and leaped upon a mammoth stuck in a tar pit. The game rules are very, very short and Kevin is asking $10 for it, so I didn't grab it. I'd have paid $6. I'd have paid $30 if he included a box set with the props he used for the demo -- the rabbit fur pelt with rules reminders printed on the skin, the bleached bones, and the smooth rocks. In some ways, this was the most clever game at con, for the language stuff.
AGON (one.seven design, John Harper) is beautiful to look at and a blast to play. You're a Greek hero competing for glory. The rules provide a simple but rich set of tools for tactical combat with a little role-playing attached. There was a lot of buzz around this game. I can see the beauty of it (inside and out) but it is, at heart, a little Gamist thing and I'm really not looking for that right now. I stole the idea of a Glory system for Firan though!
Waiting/Tea (One Thousand One, Jonathan Walton) blew my mind. Seriously. It's a little sample game that Jonathan put in Push: New Thinking About Roleplaying, a fat little book of game design theory articles with guest commentary in the margins. I bought the PDF before con but still haven't read it. Waiting/Tea is a short little two-player experiment game on one piece of paper per player. On one side was a map of a little Chinese temple. On the other side was a list of things I could have my character do in each room. To do those things, I merely had to say I do them. I played a young girl traveling to see the temple Master, but custom forced me to wait at the gate until I welcomed the next person to come through the gate. Remi played a temple priest who was told by the Master to make tea. Hence, "Waiting/Tea." I didn't expect much to happen. It looked like ZORK but with fewer options. Wow, what a surprise! Remi and I immediately had our characters at odds. He spurned me rudely at the gate. I dumped his buckets of water. There was real role-playing. It was loads of fun. The game has some cool implications for game theory (IIEE especially) and I need to go read Push now to see what Jonathan said about it.
Dictionary of Mu (Paka's Thread Games, Judd "Paka" Karlman) is a setting supplement for Sorcerer, but that's understating it. He's basically created a rich world for Sorcerer in the form of a dictionary of entries about demons. The world is a mix of Conan the Barbarian, Barsoom, and the Old Testament. I'd read Sorcerer but never played it, so this was a cool demo for me. Judd is half of Sons of Kryos, who do the excellent gaming podcast.
Contenders (Prince of Darkness Games, Joe Prince) is a boxing RPG. You play a prizefighter struggling to win fights and protect something important to him. My boxer was trying to keep his hometown Catholic church from decaying physically and morally. It was a game I expected not to care about, but I could play a full session of it.
Hero's Banner (TCK Roleplaying, Tim C. Koppang) was a wonderful surprise. It's a game about heroism in the face of adversity. Every choice (romantic, political, or personal) can result in sweeping changes to your situation. The mechanics for this are fast and elegant. By the end of con, there was a lot of buzz about this game. It will likely win awards next year.
The Mountain Witch (Timefire Publishing, Tim Kleinart) has been around a while but I hadn't gotten to play it till now. You are a ronin -- a disgraced samurai working as a mercenary. You and other ronin are paid to travel to the lair of the mountain witch and kill her. Along the way, trust breaks down and the other ronin are a bigger threat than the witch, or so it seems.
That's a lot of games! I wish I had found time to play a few more: Breaking the Ice, Conspiracy of Shadows, Best Friends, Nine Worlds, The Princes' Kingdom, carry: a game about war, and 1001 Nights will have to wait till next time. I wanted to play Universalis with Ralph Mazza, as I need to learn more about it for Verge, but I got too busy with other things. I also hope to get in a Polaris game some day. I own Universalis and Polaris already though.
Go back to Adam's master GenCon thread.