Tag: Jason Cordova

Our Halloween game night was incredible! I will never forget this session! 

We played The Society of Dreamers. In this one, your characters are a group of turn-of-the-century ‘researchers’ trying to determine the nature and motives of creatures that live inside your dreams called mnemosites. The gameplay involves first exploring the childhood of each of the main characters, including their formative experiences with the mnemosites, and later the actual formation of the Society and their attempt to understand the mnemosites through an afflicted person who has come to them for help. The game does that really cool emergent mystery thing that some games do (like Ocean and PSI*Run). 

For our Halloween game, I went for ambience. We played in the dark, with just a few candles lit, which made for a very creepy experience! Sometimes it got quite intense, like when we did one of the special Dream scenes, in which one character ‘dives’ into a dream and describes what they experience, while another character gives them directions on what to explore and where to go next. You do those scenes with your eyes closed, which even further intensifies it. 

Thanks to David LaFreniere Scott Owen and Jeff Burke for a Halloween unlike any other!

Jessica Scott and Aaron Scott have really been knocking it out of the park lately. Hot Guys Making Out was a great game suggestion (and Jess made tikka masala, to boot)!

In HGMO, you have four characters: Honore, the stern yet beautiful master of a manor house during the Spanish Civil War; Gonzalvo, the boy he takes in as his ward and with whom he falls in love; Maria, the wise (yet jealous) maid; and Olivier, the quiet, no-nonsense butler. 

The game is really beautifully paced. Each player essentially puts down a playing card and gives a bit of dialogue or description about what their character is doing. The next player follows, playing an equal or higher card. If they can’t play an equal or higher card, they pass, but give a bit of environmental description. Certain playing cards require certain special actions, such as Honore dropping his emotional guard and putting the moves on Gonsalvo, or Maria offering sage wisdom to the young lovers. If an ace gets played, that means a named threat is becoming increasingly dangerous or prominent. At our table, the threat was Honore’s former lover, a Nazi officer named Franz. 

The design is inspired by comic books, and the pacing feels right in that regard. There are no long speeches or tracts of dialogue, just bits of description, a sentence here and there, a brief internal monologue, and so forth. It feels really, really good; lots of tension and build-up. 

Thanks to Jess and Aaron for running the two tables and to everyone else who came out: Russell Benner Jeff Burke Steve Mains Jaime and Belinda!

Here are the pics from Sunday’s game of BXB. I love this game! It is perfectly delightful. 

In BXB, one player is Koichi, a “shy, little brother type” who is a brand-new freshman at Atarashi High School. The other three players are the older boys trying to win his heart by taking him on fun dates. The older characters include the star basketball player, a rich teen model, and a teacher in his early twenties (which, apparently, is neither against the law nor creepy in Japan). 

Thanks to Jessica Scott and Aaron Scott for running the games and to everyone else for coming out: Jeff Burke Russell Benner David LaFreniere , Jaime and Belinda!

I love In a Wicked Age. I know I’ve said it a dozen times before, but it’s true: the first session is always a little rough, but the second session (and each subsequent session) is amazing.

Last night was our second session in this three-session run, and it was a blast. The players were clearly past the learning curve of the first session, and really getting into the mechanics and how they can be leveraged to create a good story. 

At its core, In a Wicked Age requires you to embrace a hard divide between what your characters are doing in the fiction and what you, as a player, are doing to advance their Best Interests. You use the conflict resolution system to push toward negotiations and compromises between the players  (not the characters) to arrive at what will be the best story outcomes. It’s a fascinating system, because what you get in the end is a truly PvP roleplaying game (many games have a PvP orientation, but their rules don’t create actual, mechanical, winners and losers like IaWA does). 

Thanks to everyone who came out: Daniel Fowler David LaFreniere Kristen D Scott Owen Russell Benner and Kyle McCauley.