Tag: Jason Cordova

We had a fun Sunday afternoon of gaming. We started with Jackson Tegu’s Kaleidoscope, and then ended with a card game, One Night: Ultimate Werewolf. 

We have played Kaleidoscope before, and it is great fun. It’s a hack of Microscope, but instead of building the history of a world, you are a group of people who have just watched a weird foreign film, and you are recounting memorable scenes. The game rules have a terrific sense of humor, and since you read most of it aloud as you play, they do a great job of getting you in the right head space for the game. The outcomes tend to be surreal and hilarious, and Sunday was no exception. 

One Night: Ultimate Werewolf was a big surprise for me. People have been making Werewolf games for years, and I’ve always kind of written them off, but One Night is pretty special. First of all, it is playable with a small number, which is a big change from traditional Werewolf, which often requires ten or more people. Second, it has a companion app that reads out the instructions, eliminating the need for a “host” player. The game also introduces a number of new roles to the game, and you can mix and match them to change up play. Very fun, and easy to get to the table. We played about ten games in the span of two hours. 

Thanks to Steve Mains Ferrell Riley and Kyle McCauley for coming out. 

We had a solid first session of Dungeon World for Saturday Morning Cartoons, our first event over on Gauntlet Hangouts. Thanks to David LaFreniere Richard Rogers steven watkins and Yoshi Creelman for joining me. 

The Gauntlet is an ongoing conversation about roleplaying games. Part of that conversation is using certain words and phrases in a very specific manner. I like to call it our ‘vocabulary.’ It’s not unlike the terms that were adopted during the old Forge days, though certainly not as comprehensive and utilitarian as those. Honestly, most of ours are just silly things, but the fact they are commonly understood by our members helps strengthen the bonds in our community. 

Here are a few I can think of off the top of my head:

DLC – a rule we missed in a game we have been playing for some time. 

The Tone Conversation – the conversation we have before a game to discuss the tone we’re trying to hit. Most often used when realizing we forgot to do it. 

What’s on the tin/box? – what a game promises to the players, either in terms of theme or story. 

Can you think of any others? 

I ran my first session of Paul Czege’s The Clay That Woke  tonight and I wanted to share some quick thoughts. 

The session prep for this game is easy and quite enjoyable. It’s right up there with Dogs in the Vineyard for me in terms of games that have a structured prep that allow you to get it set-up fairly quickly, while also forcing you to spend time thinking critically about the world. The entire time I was engaging with the prep process, I was chewing on the elements necessary to bring the world alive. It felt good (and I felt prepared). 

Notes from gameplay: it is not a game that comes immediately or easily. It took us about an hour into the session before we really started hitting our groove (and we’re fairly experienced gamers). But unfurl itself the game did. We gradually began to understand the token economy, and got a good feel for how these minotaurs conduct themselves. There were really good moments where I could visually perceive the players restraining themselves in an attempt to play the minotaurs honestly, preserving their Silence. There were also times when the players had clearly had enough of restraint, and allowed their minotaurs to act on instinct and emotion – loss of Silence tokens be damned! I think the push and pull of the players’ reactions is a big credit to the game. 

We didn’t get to the jungle this session, and I’m kind of glad. It was enough for us to get accustomed to life in the Degringolade, and simply master the Krater of Lots. We have some nice little story arcs going, a couple of which ended on cliffhangers, and there are at least two minotaurs ready to travel to the jungle at the start of session 2. I suspect the game will continue to open itself up (Voices, gifts, and externals – oh my!), and I’m excited to see where it goes. 

An observation: I have no idea if Paul intended this or not, but the setting feels like the American South during Jim Crow. The parallels popped-up over and over again. In that regard, it was a very thought-provoking, and occasionally uncomfortable, game. I certainly wouldn’t expect anything less from the designer of My Life with Master.  

Got this pic from Daniel Lewis. We’re all set for the 4th of July! Holler!