Metatopia 2025
By Alex White
- 32 minutes read - 6713 wordsPax Deorum
By Jen Adcock Beta Test
A historical story game about Rome’s Vestal Virgins, a heavily restricted but also heavily privileged class of priestesses, whose personal sanctity was tied to the well-being of Rome itself. Through play, the characters find themselves under scrutiny as scapegoats for various political crises that will impact the city - after all, if Rome is under threat, surely a Vestal must have broken a vow. They must balance what political sway they have as priestesses, as well as managing their own personal goals and secrets, as events beyond their control place them in the path of tragedy.
This game involves managing a series of escalating clocks with prompt-driven GMless scenes of play. Content warning: historical mentions of slavery, animal sacrifice, and forced marriage, all of which are veiled.
This game was delightful. I’m always on the lookout for interesting political simulations, and this game scratches several itches.
Setup
As you can see from my photo, there are eight areas of potential concern facing the city, arranged in a clock face of their own. They each have clocks whose segments can be filled (or emptied) as the game progresses. The number of segments gives an indication of how likely that area is to become problematic. A particularly great touch is that adjacent clocks are related and if one clock fills, excess problems can spill one onto adjacent clocks, providing cascading failures! If a clock is filled and not resolved in that turn it flips over to a worse clock - the situation has got narratively worse and mechanically more fragile.
As players, you all take the role of a vestal virgin. Your character has an age, a few adjectives, a terrible secret that must not get out, and a couple of relationship questions. Below is an example of the relationship map we ended up with.
You also choose an area of focus for your vestal. This is a sheet of actions you can take which represent you using your social or political capital to reduce the strain in one key area and to a lesser extent the two related areas. All of them can help with duty too, which is really necessary as it fills up quickly and there are always problems there!
The final thing your character has is a clock which represents (I think) the amount of evidence which is out there about your secret. This is important because if something goes so badly wrong in the city that they decide to put one of the vestals on trial for breaking their vows (because that MUST be why there are problems, right?) the person they choose is the one whose secret is most exposed.
Core game loop
We go round the table and everyone rolls a d8 and a d4. The d8 tells you which area is under stress, the d4 tells you how many segments of the clock to fill in. In our game we had bad luck with the dice rolls with lots of 4’s, so by turn 3 it was all a nightmare! (I think that Jen may may adjusted this in the next playtest)
Then we go round the table again and each of the players decides what ‘move’ they want to make, has a little narrative scene about it (often involving another vestal IIRC) and then they erase one clock segment. Of course, they can choose to ignore the problems in the city and cover their own back by reducing their secret liability if they choose!
Finally we see if any clocks are full, and if so switch those clocks to the “worse version” of the problem.
Play continues until one of the “worse” clocks is filled and not fixed, at which point a trial starts.
The trial
This puts a trial clock in the appropriate place, resets some of the other clocks, and unlocks some more powerful moves on the character sheets. Broadly play continues with the new moves unlocked until the accused is exonerated or executed (!)
My thoughts
I loved playing this game. It engaged me with the premise and the mechanics felt like the city was in peril and we had real choices about fixing the problems or protecting our own backs.
Some of the relationship questions were weaker than others, but those would be easy things to tweak.
Eventually I’d like to see a little more help in understanding what ‘emptying your secret/vulnerability clock’ means in the game. I knew what i was doing mechanically, but I wasn’t super clear what was happening narratively there and would benefit from a little more hand holding.
In a four hour session rather than a two hour session there might be more time for role playing scenes which would be nice. I didn’t feel that I had the chance to inhabit my character much, but I suspect that was mostly the constraint of time.
Mechanically this game felt really ready for prime time. I look forward to the point where it is ready for release, because it’s a game I’d love to support and play in its final form.
The Mountain Dream
Aaron A Reed
Beta Test
The Mountain Dream is a GMless roleplaying and worldbuilding game about escaping into fantasies, and what fantastical worlds are good for when the real one’s on fire. Excavate the forgotten city of Zenith, whose residents once had the power to dream new worlds into being, and find out whether you’re doomed to relive its downfall or can envision a better future. Pull words from random books to shape your story and power your dreams, and explore to unlock new story moves that further your exploration of Zenith and its dreams.
This game had a really interesting premise (what are fantastical worlds good for when the world is on fire) especially as a meta-commentary on gaming itself. For me it didn’t quite reach that premise in the game as we played it at this point.
Setup
We each had a character and for the purpose of this test I think they had been set up with a certain amount of ‘inspiration’ (a spendable resource) and 1, 2, or 3 dots by certain characteristics. One player had three dots in ‘create’, one had it most in ‘connection’ and one had it in ‘settle’. This reflected something which was especially important to the character. There was a brief description of who they were as a person (in my case a retired teacher in their 50’s who loved birdwatching and skiing). You each pick a book and generate three words randomly from it to put in a pool in the table. I had electricity, riverside, and meaning.
There was a sheet that showed us things that had already been discovered - three quite evocative dreamworlds, two districts on zenith (monastery and warehouse areas) and a few other things, including needs for the city, including food and education.
Core game loop
We took it in turn to take an action. There are a number of actions which are available at the start of the game, and completing some actions opens up additional future actions on a rather nice network of opportunities which are shown in a diagram. Rules page numbers were in actions we could take, others were blank but hinted at future opportunities.
Each of the actions is like its own independent mini-game, with a distinct set of rules and definitions in the rulebook.
The actions we each took were led by the initiating player and provided opportunities for collaborative input from the other players.
A journal is passed round the table, following the acting player. So if you had players 1, 2, 3, when player 1 was taking an action, player 3 would record in the journal what happened. When player 2 took an action, player 1 would be journalling. You are encouraged to try a range of different journalling styles. Some might write prose, some might record lists and one of our players journaled the home building via annotated doodles and pictures. So together you are building up a picture of your game world.
Details
The first player created a dreamworld. This involved reading through several pages of the rulebook, working out what some of the things mean, and there were five elements which would be true of a dreamworld (including safety, usefulness, imagination and a couple of others). The rules allowed us to use one of our words to pick one of those, but it wasn’t clear to us how the others meshed in - nor how much was the responsibility of the person instigating the action and how much was expected to be collaborative.
We ended up with a world in perpetual autumnal decay - beautiful, but dangerous as spending too much time there would cause us to decay as well. We were tiny, the leaves and trees were gigantic, and there were gigantic beings there who could help us (in some way). We didn’t get to the point of exploring a dream world.
Then the second player took an action to create a home for us, and I as the third player took an action to start building a community resource - a an education centre. In each case we had some quite detailed procedural rules to follow in order to flesh things out, sometimes using words from our pool of words, at other times just choosing to describe things.
The community resource was a small challenge so we had two tasks each of which had three steps to complete, but as long as we had made some progress on each of the tasks we could use the randomiser to see if we had succeeded early. In our case we did, and our education centre opened successfully although we had quite finished gathering resources or publicising it (our two tasks!)
My thoughts
I may have misread the game description, but I had expected that we would have more to do creating wonderful dream worlds and then using them to influence the real world, while the meat of the game as we played it was doing some relatively mundane community building stuff which didn’t engage with any of the existing dream worlds or the one we had just created.
I would love to have seen more of a conversation between the imaginative dreams and the real community, with a particular emphasis on the former rather than the latter.
I liked the idea of using books as both an oracle (in the terms of supplying words which we could use when defining things) and a randomiser. Out of curiosity I asked whether the designer had chosen the letters for simple, ordinary or complex tasks simply by their position in the alphabet or by looking at actual letter distribution in the English language, and I was delighted to learn that they had done a lot of research into letter frequency. Hurrah!
The journalling part of the game was really nice, and it reminded me a little of my experiences playing Myst back in the 90’s. A game which creates an artefact during play always attracts my attention!
There is a lot to like in the premise of this game, and as it develops further I would love to see more of an emphasis on the dream and its integration with a problem solving for the real world. Worth keeping an eye on.
The Light over the Tracks
By Heather Albano
Alpha Test
A module being written for the upcoming Trail of Cthulhu 2.0 (forthcoming from Pelgrane Press). The year is 1931; the place Gurdon, Arkansas. A ghost-hunting friend of the Investigators reports a bobbing light over the tracks of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad as they twist into a darkling wood. Is it the ghost of a murdered brakeman... or something much much worse?
I’m not going to be talking rules because those are not under test here, and since it is a horror investigation adventure, there is a limit to how much I can safely say! I will do my best though.
Bottom line - I like this adventure and would happily run it for people when it is published.
The adventure is presented in a way which is sensitive to the timing and location (1931 Arkansas) which I think most people will appreciate.
All of the investigator pregen characters were appealing, and I really liked the one that I chose - a clerical assistant from Miskatonic University who had grown up in the shadow of strange things and was driven by her desire to understand them. More capable than her job title suggested!
The town of Gurdon is nicely presented, and has no redundant detail. Everything we heard and saw was useful if you thought it through! There is good historical information to be dug up too which all adds depth to the investigation and new leads to follow.
About halfway through there was one bit of information we were told that was genuinely creepy, and made a smooth transition from what seemed like a ghost story to a real lovecraftian horror story. It also tacitly posed the question of how much we might be prepared to give up in order to prevent such a great evil.
Some nice further scenes as we gathered some more information to oppose the threat, and engaged with various people in the town.
We didn’t have time to play through to the conclusion in our 2 hour playtest, but we had got most of the clues together and I know the designer decided to put more of an emphasis on some elements that we thought were just colour for the later playtests, which went even better.
My thoughts
A really nice, self-contained adventure for Trail of Cthulhu. You can make sensible progress, and careful observation and thinking is rewarded. The final scene will be memorable in lots of ways.
There are a lot of really interesting tie-ins to real world history and literature, both in America and further afield. All respectfully done.
I would certainly purchase and play this adventure when it comes out.
Desperation - Zombie Horror Survival
By Tim Hutchins
Alpha Test
- contact: https://thousandyearoldvampire.com
We whittle a large group of survivors down through the first night, the first week, and the first year of a zombie apocalypse. This is a scenario for Jason Morningstar’s Desperation system which means misery, death, and and an unusual take on shared characters. Content warnings: Everything you’d find in a zombie movie. Designer might switch this out for Desperation: Salt and Glass (described elsewhere in this game list).
Desperation is a great game with innovative mechanics - the original game of Desperation has two scenarios - an isolated town and a desperate sailing vessel, and a group of people get whittled down. This is a set of cards which Tim has produced to enable a typical zombie movie situation to be played through using those rules.
The neat thing about the Desperation game is that events which are drawn can be attached to any of characters on the table, and while doing so you give some details from that persons perspective about what is going on (“speaking their truth”). As Tim put it, a card which says “I burn the church down because it is full of hypocrites” hits differently depending on whether you put it on the town drunk or the town preacher.
Desperation can be found here https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/desperation
Core game loop
The players take it in turns to draw cards from the deck. The first ten or so are characters waking up to the reality of a zombie apocalypse happening - perhaps they hear police radio chatter, perhaps they see zombies in their back garden, perhaps someone is grabbed out of the car they are in… This puts them in play on the table.
The next set of events cover people escaping zombies (and over-zealous military) in their town, and starting to pair up with other characters, and in some cases die to the zombies.
Then we transition to chapter 2 which divides the characters into two groups, reflecting two sets of people trying to reach safety in the mountains. The chapter 2 events are more brutal, people start dieing or being abandoned by their peers and ending up on a dead person pool, and there is some conflict between the two groups.
Finally we transition to the last chapter (“55 seconds in Walmart”) which is full of people murdering each other accidentally, being snagged by zombies and so forth, until at last a card is drawn which ends the game and any survivors make it away.
My thoughts
The game was fun and hit the genre tropes really nicely - the Desperation mechanics lent themselves to this well. We had some interesting discussion about implied or assumed gender of various characters, and we had found that some characters seemed a more natural home for many cards than others did. One person struggled with a bit of narrative mismatch between the person who had been on a roof, but for the next event was in a building and people burned in floors above (but everyone else was in cars by that point). It was important for us to realise that time could pass between events for a given character!
I particularly liked the ‘foreshadowing’ events, where someone has been bitten but is hiding it, or someone has some zombie blood splashed in their eye but they think they wiped it away in time.
It’s a neat playset for Desperation!
Dead Internet Theory
By Che Pieper Alpha Test
- Contact: https://www.patreon.com/s_che
Dead Internet Theory is a (roughly) PBTA game about time travel, digital simulacra, and the end of the world. It features an asymmetrical/GM-full player structure, mad-libs based character creation, high-concept time-travel abilities, and a deck of cards which we will explore, modify, duplicate, and deface over the course of play.
I love the premise, although we got bogged down in the details sometimes. I think the core game loop is the strongest part.
Setup
We each created a character mad-libs style. I had to give an adjective, a job, an age, a subject area, another subject area and a negative reaction. So it turns out that I was playing a pretty accountant, 27, who loves zoology but is continually forced to encounter pop music which disgusts her. Of course, once the first character is created everyone else can see the structure, so there is less of a surprise element in what you are doing with your creation!
There are a couple of questions which you are asked which gives you an emotional alignment of either Victorious, Violence, Romantic or Actualisation, and these give a checklist of some very directive things to do, the accomplishing of which will give you greater and greater powers. I was a Romantic and took an opportunity to “resolve a problem with open hearted honesty”. Someone else was Violence and could “push someone to hurt themselves when they don’t need to”(!)
We then agreed what our starting ‘world’ was like, and we decided it was near future, with zero privacy and advertising was being continually beamed into our brains. It is impossible to avoid noise and hard to make connection with people. This world was called ‘iLive’ and seems pretty dystopian, but it was going to get much worse.
Core game loop
The main (and most intriguing for me) part of the game is that you start laying a line of playing cards down from your starting point in your world. Each card placed is looked up in an oracle and provides a scene or scenario for you to play out. Some of them are innocuous and interesting, but some of them are omens of the ‘large evil’ which threatens all the worlds. The omens are where things get bad (or worse) and pose problems to overcome. After three omens Large Evil arrives. We define a few things about its powers, and then it starts consuming the timeline behind us by removing cards. That’s worrying!
However, each of the characters can quite quickly gain a special power which is called a doctorate. If you have a doctorate in English which includes speculative fiction you can create brand new timelines and move yourself there. I got that and created a new timeline where the world was green and pleasant, populated with elves who have a law of hospitality, live in plenty and have no computers. It was called “The Last Homely Place”. That got me safe from Large Evil for now. If someone chooses a doctorate in History, they can add a timeline before the start of your world, creating prior events in the world. There is another doctorate someone chose which allows them to bifurcate a timeline. They used it when they opened an electrical junction box and masses of Camel Spiders (Solifugids) jumped out at them. Unfortunately their bifurcated world was one where Large Evil exploded out of the junction box and destroyed them! Luckily they still existed in the other trouser leg of time, so their game would continue.
This creation of a timeline with prompts, creating new timelines or splitting existing timelines was brilliant. My favourite part of the game by a long way.
Details
There are a whole bunch of actions, many of which are minigames and these were much more uneven. Sometimes it is ‘take an action’ which was one roll and that was it. Or it might be ‘browse the web’ and I ended up creating a diagram of a wiki with subordinate pages, that was creating additional fiction for about 10 minutes while the other players watched. Not so much fun for them. Another action was ‘create fan art’ and the player was given crayons and paper and left to do something with that.
We didn’t do many of those, but it seems that the main purpose was to introduce additional fictional elements which could turn up in a future timeline, or to create ‘junk’ in your inventory which could be used in the future to help you do things, including overcoming Large Evil.
My thoughts
I loved the core game loop very, very much. I think I would have started things in the present day though, because the framing of this all starting as an internet game narratively suggests that you need to. It would also help the weirdness if your starting point is more normal IMO.
The minigames were unevenly balanced in terms of time, and for me distracted from the meat of the game in the core loop. I’d happily see them hugely simplified. Part of me wouldn’t miss them if they were not there, but as I mentioned earlier they do eventually create things which impact the game.
I’m not sure why the ultimate enemy is called ‘Large Evil’ because it seems such an anodyne word for a reality-consuming horror! I hope that is just a placeholder name.
I recognise that this is an alpha test, and quite a long way from the final form. I think that the core game loop is very solid, and I’m sure that the designer will refine those things which are just a little clunky at the moment.
Kill Your Darling
Jolyne Alpha Test
In this dark existential romance for two players, you play two halves of a whole split apart which come violently back together. Using Tarot cards as prompts, you will tell the story of your reunion. Whether it ends in happiness or in tragedy is up to you.
There were just two of us in this game, playing avatars of two concepts which were wrestling with our relationship. Were we going to come together in harmony or destroy one another?
Setup
First we decided that our pairing was going to be the geology and biology of Earth. My partner played geology and I played biology. We decided why we needed each other and how we harmed each other. I needed geology because they give me stability. They need biology because I change them. However, my tendency to proliferate can exhaust geology. And the scale of geology’s movements can harm me.
We also created a third party which could cause complications sometimes, and we decided that would be entropy, which caused decay of biology and erosion of geology.
We had a limited tarot deck placed between us, with a pair of major arcana cards at the end of the first act, a pair at the second act, and then a final card. Our deck only include the Cups and Swords and those five major arcana.
Core game loop
We took turns to draw a card, check what the normal interpretative guidelines would be for that card, and then describe what we do, then ask our partner a question about what we have just done and wait for their answer.
Generally speaking the Cups have quite nice interpretations and the Swords have quite aggressive ones. However any Queen or King meant that we killed something of the other partners avatar. A Page or Knight means that our third party Decay would push us apart in some way. An Ace was particularly positive.
An added complication was that if a card was ‘inverted’ we had to harm our partner, if it wasn’t inverted then we had to be kind to them.
The first pair of major arcana cards that appear are assigned to one another to reflect something about how we are. The second pair of major arcana cards that appear are assigned to each other to reflect what we think of the other one. The final card which ends the game tells us something about the final state of the game.
Details
Just a few highlights of the game - there was the time when geology woke from an ice age and flooded some of its plains and destroyed my forests. I requested they seek consent before such major moves.
Later in the game (after a whole series of bad cards had upped the narrative ante) I decided that humans had evolved now, and they were rapaciously extracting coal and other minerals from geology - digging deep and carelessly. I then had the gall to ask geology how they liked being my ‘subject’. They were righteously angry with me!
My thoughts
The biggest problem that we experienced in the game came from the use of the inverted cards. Narratively it was very hard to do something positive with Swords and even harder to do something negative with Cups! In addition, there wasn’t an even distribution of inverted and non-inverted cards in the deck, and I ended up with aggression after aggression in the later part of the game!
Both of the players felt that the game would probably have flowed a little better if we had just used the Card suits and values as prompts and ignored the inverted/not inverted thing.
Acting the roles of abstract entities was pretty hard, and we wondered whether the designer might consider including an ‘easy mode’ while learning the game by having something like two families, whether montagues and capulets, or possibly two mafia families seeking to come back together. That would give plenty of human level intrigue and at the family level killing off members of a family (but not the whole family) might be conceptually easier to grasp.
A Place to be Apart
By Tim Hutchins
Alpha Test
- Contact: https://thousandyearoldvampire.com
Players will answer Prompts on cards to generate a small community that is related to but isolated from a larger community, then they will use characters to explore that community. This is a hopeful game about people finding contentment within constrained settings. Content Warnings: Player generated content with x-card safety tools, incarceration or controlled environments.
This game was extending an existing game which is good at creating cosy communities by introducing power disparities with a larger community which could put constraints on that smaller community.
Setup
We had a think about the community that we wanted to play. After some discussion we settled on the idea of a seagoing community of fishers known as ‘navigators’ along with an island community called ‘landbound’.
There are a set of cards, each with three questions on. Some of the cards are about cosy themes like clothing, food and so forth. Some of the cards are about specific individuals in the community. Some of the cards (marked with black) are about directive rules and regulations.
There is also a sheet of additional rules depending upon whether either of the cards you pick up has one, two, three, or four ticks on it; they represent the number of times the card has been used.
Core game loop
At the start of each turn everyone draws two cards. You think about something which answers the questions (or is inspired by the questions) on both the first and the second card and answer both of those questions. You then add a tick to both of the cards and return them to the pile. If one of the cards is a person, you may narrate a scene involving that character and their engagement with the other question.
In second and subsequent turns you may be answering the second or third question on one of the cards. When doing so, the answers should take into account earlier questions and answers on the card, not just in a thematic way but in a specific way.
If at least one of the cards has a tick on it, you should also introduce a problem. If at least one has two ticks there should be a solution proposed which people disagree on. If at least one has three ticks, there should be a solution which makes the problem worse. If at least one card has four ticks, you should provide a solution which resolves the problem, cross out the card and discard it.
My thoughts
We ran into a series of problems when playing this game. First of all we didn’t realise that the answers should be from the context of the smaller community (the landbound), not the more powerful community (the navigators). I found this was a little frustrating because it was the seagoing navigators that were more interesting, they were where my heart wanted to be! So as part of the setup it is important to make sure that you agree which smaller community you wanted to play.
Secondly, we didn’t realise that the second questions were supposed to tie in directly to the first question on the cards, rather than just be thematically related. Of course we didn’t find out that this was a problem until the third time those cards came up,
Thirdly, problems were introduced as part of an answer to the two questions across a pair of cards - but then that pair of cards didn’t come up again, as after shuffling there were new pairs! So we were not necessarily developing the problems, as creating lots of little new problems, some of which were created in a state of disarray because of the tick situation.
Fourthly, in the situation where something arises with four ticks on it, there is no guarantee that the core question to be answered was actually part of that card which gets crossed out and discarded (and there was no space to write an answer on that card, because with four ticks it has already had its three questions answered).
As we bumped into each of these problems, there was much confusion! Unlike a game of Dialect where at the end we have a really good sense of the community that has been created, I don’t think we had any sense about this community at all, and were just confused. We did end up with a criminal justice system, a rites of passage, and a set of farming, celebration and healing practices.
Only one character actually ended up being used to explore the setting (several of the cards, including characters, were removed from the deck after the first couple of rounds to speed things up for the 2 hour slot, and that meant that two of the three characters went, which was a shame in retrospect)
As I write here, I wonder if the game would have run more smoothly if instead of trying to provide one answer across the combination of questions on two cards, we just gave two answers on each turn - one for card one and one for card two? That would have made it much more straightforward to have three questions on each card that build on one another, with increasing problems and amenable to a solution. As we played the cognitive load of trying to answer a pair of prompts in a way which was congruent with the previous answers on both cards and the increasing problem situation was huge and we often had to ask the other players to help us out with ideas.
Now this was labelled as an alpha test, and as such it was a bit experimental. It felt like the most alpha of all the games I played.
The World’s Problems
By Emily Care Boss
Beta Test
- website: http://www.blackgreengames.com
- Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/keirgreeneyes
A game of espionage and bureaucracy. Play highly skilled field intelligence agents, called Wreckers, on dangerous missions, and the water-cooler corner machinations which put them into play. An original system influenced by the Powered by the Apocalypse engine. Character focused, multi-role, GM-ful play.
This is a 1970’s set game of espionage very much in the LeCarré mode rather than the James Bond mode. There was a delightful level of period and character detail that drew me into the game and left me wanting to play more (much more!)
In a two hour session we didn’t have time to do much more than character generation and a couple of initial scenes relating to the office, so there is lots I can’t comment on yet, but plenty to enjoy nonetheless.
Setup
We each play two principal characters - a wrecker and a member of the support staff, an analyst. These two roles have two very distinct character sheets, with different sets of information and rules. I’ll talk about the wrecker first, and then the analyst.
We also have political situations, missions which are in the offing, various allied and enemy ambassadors, various political department heads… lots of juicy details that I’ll touch on.
The wreckers all have a ‘capacity for violence’ and have on the front some basic elements of their background, and interesting sets of checkboxes that hint about their personal physical condition and the state of their cover identity (which can include suspected, compromised, blown etc). The reverse of the character sheet has a big list of skills, and you have some marked from profession, some from basic training and so forth. We never got around to using these as we didn’t do any missions. There are also some great relationship bits I’ll talk about later in detail.
The support staff have a different character sheet with different things on them. There were different roles available including administrator, devices guy, and cipher clerk. I played the cipher clerk. They have a long list of moves on their sheet. Many of these moves are ones that can be used during missions, and there is a mission ‘clock’ on the character sheet - as you get further on in the missions, additional moves become available. Judith, my code breaker, has moves which can bring advantages to problems or aid the wrecker’s skills through intercepting transmissions and breaking codes.
As well as this, we had three friendly ambassadors, three enemy ambassadors, and a whole list of heads of departs (e.g. secretary of defence, secretary of education, secretary of health and others). They each have names, other heads they like or dislike, things they want and so forth. Missions require sign-offs from various department heads, so understanding what they want and dislike is important!
The political situation is Africa in 1977. Idi Amin is the brutal ruler of Uganda, and he considers all British people spies, so we are going to have to land people in Kenya and cross the border to get them out safely. In addition the head of station in Vienna has started a relationship with the wife of an ex-KGB general. Is she a honeytrap, or is it an opportunity for us to turn her?
Core game loop
We didn’t get to the point of playing through this, but I think I’m right in saying that we have a negotiation phase at home in the office, where the wreckers are relating to their boss, to the various analysts, the heads of departments and diplomats. Then we switch and they go on missions, supported by the analysts.
Honestly both elements of this sound like lots of fun.
Details
I’d just like to highlight the great relationships which a wrecker has. We each picked two - one for a relationship with an analyst, and one for a relationship with someone else. These relationships are assumed to be mutual. I particularly like that we express what characterises the relationship. E.g.
- Friendly with / shared activity
- Rivalry with / compete over
- Flirting with / wants to ask
- Angry with / petty wish
For instance, one of the other wreckers was “Angry with the French Ambassador, who had made fun of her command of French. As a result she hoped that the Ambassadors plans for labour relation improvements failed”
My wrecker was angry with another one of the Analysts, Kevin, because his gambling addiction makes him unreliable. My petty wish is that he loses big. My wrecker was also flirting with Ms Pritchard, head of department for external affairs and my bosses boss.
A couple of scenes we had before we closed: in the first, the number one wrecker stopped at a patisserie and arrived early for the morning briefing with a delicious pastry for the administrative analyst who controls the planner. With a bit of flirty shared banter and pastry the wrecker got some inside information about the missions coming up that day.
The other scene was early in the morning before the briefing in a posh hotel room in Park Lane. My wrecker has just finished getting dressed and he then helps the lady he spent the night with to zip up her dress. We see it is Ms Pritchard, his bosses boss. He massages her shoulders and mentions to her that the Vienna job would be much better aligned for his jewel thief skills, while another one of the wreckers with cross country experience would be much better suited for the Ugandan job. They share a deep kiss, and Pritchard agrees, moving him from the Uganda to the Vienna mission.
My thoughts
I loved every part of this game. The somewhat grubby scenarios we found ourselves in. The cleverly drawn analysts who are fun to play and also will be contributing to missions. The complex possibilities of a negotiation phase with all those political moving parts. I can’t wait to play it again in more detail.
I have a natural suspicion of long skill lists like the wrecker has, and in my own games always keep an eye out for the possibilities of collapsing some skills together (especially when some are rarely used). However, I’ll withhold judgement here until I see missions playing out! it is very interesting that the wrecker and the analyst have such different character sheets to reflect their different modes of play.
Testing My Games
I also had some very successful playtests of two of my games - the forthcoming Escape to Utopia, and the slightly further away Road to Romance. I'll cover those playtests in more detail in a subsequent post.
Conclusion
As always Metatopia has been an absolute delight. It is wonderful meeting old and new friends, enthusiastic designers and playtesters, both around the game tables and in the many conversations during the day and late into the night. I'm repeating myself from earlier reports, but smart people, talking passionately about the subjects they love is very invigorating!
All credit to Avonelle, Vinney and their friends at Double Exposure who make it all possible. Find out more about what they do here: https://dexposure.com/home.html