Category: The Gauntlet: Our Community

I got to play a couple of the games in this KS collection with the designer, Meguey Baker, at Metatopia yesterday. They were really fun! The first one we played was a Halloween-themed game in which the players are a group of people (possibly children?) traveling to a cemetery at night to speak with their Beloved Dead. It was lovely and spooky, with a really nice ambiguity to the proceedings that made it all feel very mysterious. The second game was called Hounds of the Harvest. That one had each player taking on the role of a dog helping his people with, well, the harvest. It was really neat, and felt like a meditation on work and seasonality. The whole collection of eight games, in fact, are keyed to the seasons (solstices and all that), and in the two games I played, the mechanics did a great job of reinforcing that feeling. It seems like each game would make a great time-filler, and the text gives them the feel of a poem or a folk tale. If that sounds appealing, you should definitely check it out! 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1179631078/playing-natures-year

Has anyone figured out the best way to play Fiasco over Hangouts or Roll20? Any tools you’re aware of would be super-appreciated. My Google skills are failing me right now. 

Metatopia was ok. I was in a couple of fun playtests, and got to meet a few designers whose work I admire. That was neat. I also did a lot of shopping. A number of pre-existing commitments made it hard for me to spend more than six or seven hours there in total, but since I live nearby, it wasn’t a big deal to just pop in and out.

Mostly I was just kind of lonely. This will surprise you, but I am an extremely shy person, which made it hard to just walk up to people and start talking to them. I feel like you have to have a buddy or something if you’re going to go to one of these things, especially a professional event where everyone already knows each other, and you don’t know anyone. 

I don’t think I really have any takeaways as such. It seemed like everyone was having a good time. 

It causes me physical pain to acknowledge someone’s RPG discussion podcast might be as good as ours, but I will struggle through it to say this episode of The Tabletop Superhighway is really great! It’s the first time I’ve heard Mark Diaz Truman speak, and let me tell you: while the intersection of gaming and social issues may not be The Gauntlet’s focus, I’m really happy these smart folks are out there having conversations like this. It’s an interesting discussion, conducted in a way that is vigorous but respectful. Kudos to the hosts on this episode, Larry Spiel and Alex Roberts. 

http://thetabletopsuperhighway.com/2015/10/12/episode-31-art-gaming-and-free-speech-with-mark-diaz-truman/

Have you played Jackson Tegu’s Kaleidoscope yet? If not, we still have one opening in our Nov. 15th Hangouts game. 

We have played this game four or five times in the last year or so, and it is so much fun. It’s a hack of Ben Robbins’ s Microscope, but instead of creating a grand history,  you and your friends have just watched a strange foreign film, and now you are sitting around discussing various scenes from it. As in Microscope, you create a timeline, only this time it’s a breakdown of the film and its various parts. The gameplay creates a movie that is alternately bizarre and hilarious and poignant. And whenever we’ve finished a session, we always sit around and talk about the film’s symbolism and meaning (as if momentarily forgetting we did not, in fact, just watch a real movie). It is a sublime experience, and probably doesn’t get the love it deserves. 

If you want that last spot, follow the link. If you’re interested in checking the game itself out, you can pick it up here: http://www.photographsoflightning.com/kaleidoscope/

https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cqb8cia0293v4i48bssti333h3k?authkey=CPXcycmMp4DkEA