Comments | mrteapot: Department Nine Playtest Report

mrteapot

Department Nine Playtest Report

Jul 27, 2010 15:23

This last Saturday we had a playtest of Department Nine, my 2007 Game Chef game. I've playtested the original rules a few times in a form only slightly modified from the Game Chef version. They always worked, but the game never seemed to be firing on all cylinders. So this playtest had substantial revisions to the setup phase, core conflict and ( Read more... )

game chef, were-swan, greek myth, department nine, time travel, flying car, rpgs, playtest, shapeshifting yak, bureaucracy, benjamin franklin, game design, roleplaying, defective doomsday device, espionage

Comments 1

robotnik July 27 2010, 20:16:15 UTC

Department Nine is a very odd sort of collision of several genres. I used to describe the genre as "Time travel/espionage/classical Greek Tragedy/comedy". That leaves off the white collar/bureaucratic absurdity, though. It's like watching Minority Report, Back to the Future, The Office, Burn After Reading and Oedipus Rex all at once, perhaps.

This sounds great.

We had a were-swan manager being blackmailed by his employee, who was channelling advanced technology (eventually, a doomsday device) back in time to Benjamin Franklin to ensure the Yanks wont he revolution. We had an illicit office romance involving going back in time to have megafauna safaris. We had glyptodon races interrupted by sabertoothed tigers and flying car police chases interrupted by monkeys flinging poo. We had a spy disguised as a pizza delivery guy get in a three way sex scene with a woman and her future self.

And this sounds even better. "Time travel/espionage/classical Greek Tragedy/comedy" is not even getting half way to describing it.