AAR: Den Of Wolves 1

This blog post was written back in 2019. I’m just moving it here from it’s original internet location for historical documentation.

After-Action Report for the Megagame “Den of Wolves”

When: Sunday August 4th, 2019

AAR By: Tony Dougherty

Background Story

By the 27th century, armed with the advent of Faster Than Light (FTL) technology, Earth's nations had spread across the galaxy. New colonies had become self-sufficient and humanity had settled into relative peace - in part thanks to the formation of the Interstellar council. The council was made up of old-Earth nations and newly formed colonies who debated and negotiated for centuries to keep order.

Over the years, one nation - the Wolf nation - became more reclusive and suspicious of the other nations and eventually dropped out of the council completely. After several decades, “The Attack” as it became known, came from the Wolves as a complete surprise and completely crippled the combined strength of the Interstellar council. The attack seemed to come from everywhere at once using cyberattacks which disabled most electronic defense systems and hidden nukes on all the council planets that caused unimaginable damage.

A fleet of survivor ships gathered the last of council nations population and resources and fled for their lives - the Wolves promising to eradicate the last vestiges of the Interstellar council.

My role

Upon registration, I was assigned the captain position of the Salvador - a small medical ship from the old-Earth South American Nation (SAN). Our sister ship - the Lucas - was also a SAN vessel. Between the two of us, we had a single shuttle and council-member, both residing on the Lucas. The Lucas could produce some water and could create engineers.

I had another player on my team who was assigned the role of Chief Surgeon.

The Salvador contained 5 medical bays, a storage room, the bridge and the jump drive. We began the game with 1 doctor, 2 untrained crew, 1 soldier and a handful of one-use ability cards. We had zero resources to start the game; no food, water or fuel.

The other fleet ships

The Star Alpha held the Council President and his top advisors. The Aegis was the largest ship of the fleet and held most (if not all) of the fleet’s defenses. On board was the Admiral, the other officers and was fairly self-sufficient. They even had a sickbay.

The Dione had a massive population of citizens and hosted the council, the Icebreaker was our mining vessel, the Shepherd was our food production facility, the Quellon produced the most water, Refinery 124 converted mined resources into fuel, the Endeavour was our research vessel and the Vulcan was a prison ship.

Gameplay rules

On the Salvador, to heal a person, we had to assign a doctor and a sick or injured person to a sickbay. At the end of the turn, they were both flipped over, the sick person healed and the doctor became available for the next round.

Each turn, we had to roll a dice and use modifiers based on the committed food and water which raised or lowered the moral of our citizens. If the morale ever got too low, bad things would happen.

If we ever took on prisoners, we had to roll for riots at the start of each turn.

From a game-mechanics standpoint, that was essentially it for us. Outside of the mechanics, this was a Megagame. That meant that if you wanted to do something outside of the “rules” you could discuss your ideas with the control team. If it made thematic sense and you met their criteria, likely they’d let you do it. Other ships had other mechanics for production and fighting, but that’s all we had.

Action Report

The first few turns

Before the game began and during the first few minutes of the game, we spent our time getting to know the other players, their ships and what they were capable of doing. The comms officer of the Aegis had the ingenious idea to collect cell phone numbers from all other ships so we could communicate to each other when we were forced to stay in a location. That happened during a Wolf attack and at the end of each turn during a phase called Team time when we had to return to our home ships.

During the first turn, I spent the time trying to get resources for our ship. We needed very few by comparison but players were unwilling to give up resources freely. Trading was the word of the day and we had “nothing” to trade. No-one was sick or injured so most other teams saw us having no worth. When the turn was over, we dropped heavily in Morale and reevaluated our strategy for the next turn.

That meant begging. Trading was still happening but other ships started to realize that we had to work together to survive. If that meant giving up resources for “nothing”, then that’s what had to happen. We did get what we needed for a turn, but knew we’d have to beg again next turn. Not only did we have to beg for resources, we also had to beg for the use of a shuttle to get resources to us. Our sister ship had a shuttle but they held onto it fairly closely. We did have the ability to train doctors so we trained our second doctor and set work on a third.

At the end of the second turn, the second Wolf attack of the game took out 3 of our sickbays, crippling what we could achieve now that we had 3 doctors to use the sickbays. Not only that but more injured crew were being sent to us than we could handle. To fix our broken sickbays (which were also causing low morale), we needed 2 engineers and some materials from the mining ship. Now we had to beg for food, water, the engineers and the materials.

Sometime around this point, we saw the captain of the Refinery sitting at the Aegis table. He had been injured during a wolf attack and we being healed in their sickbay. We felt like he should’ve come to us for healing rather than the Aegis, making us feel even more worthless.

Engineers at this point were in very high demand, and we were being ranked as very low priority. Whilst we could scrape by for food and water, there was no way we were getting the engineers.

The Aegis commander sent coordinates for our first jump and we “plugged them into our navigation system”. The fuel we needed for the jump was provided very quickly as I assume the council had made the decision to get everyone what they needed. When everyone was ready, the Admiral held up his jump sign and shouted “JUMP”, that was immediately followed by every other ship doing the same thing. The control team checked fuel requirements and made sure the coordinates were entered correctly and were informed the jump was a success. Finally a little respite from the Wolves.

After the first jump

A turn or so later, we heard via the news and other rumors that we were being smeared, some of which was coming from our counsellor. Naturally we were most upset with this but he assured us that the rumors were unfounded.

My colleague did some nifty negotiating to get us some engineers so we could start working on getting our sickbays fixed. It was all about juggling healing priorities and trading unskilled workers (who were becoming vital as they could be turned into specialists and there was a desperate need for engineers).

About halfway through the game, after one of the battles with the Wolves, the Aegis took a prisoner. The prisoner was in a coma and the military leaders asked us to scan the Wolf for trackers and heal them if possible. We agreed and made them a priority.

The Choice

A turn later, once the prisoner had been revived, Control came over to us and said that the Wolf agent was offering us a deal. We could join them for guaranteed safety when they inevitably win. We asked if we could think about this for a little while and starting discussing the pros and cons of accepting the deal.

I had played a MegaGame before (Watch the Skies) and we had kept a pretty low profile, never rocking the boat. As much as I enjoyed that game, my only regret was that we should’ve done more. Knowing that Megagames thrive on interesting decisions, we decided to take the offer. Control told us the codeword to help us identify our fellow traitors was “Bark”, that we had to keep a low profile as a sleeper agent and that we had to transmit the jump coordinates to the Wolves whenever we jumped. Also, we felt like we had not gotten very much (resources or respect) in the first half of the game - what with having “nothing” to trade and not having council representation or even a shuttle to transport sick people around!

Both news and military commanders came over to us and asked us the status of the Wolf agent. The first time they came over, we told them healing was not going well and it’d take more time. The second time we told them the agent had been killed due to poisoning and there was nothing on the security cameras. The news team already had it in their heads that there was a conspiracy so our lie fell nicely into their narrative.

We briefly discussed going back to our plan of “jumping ship” to merge our resources, people and sickbays with the Aegis in order to cause chaos on the military ship during fights with the Wolves. We ultimately decided against it because we were well on our way on fixing our ship, thereby eliminating the cover story of needing a lifeboat. Not only that, we thought more autonomy would give us more freedom without someone looking over our shoulders the entire time.

Soon after we made the deal, we jumped again. The coordinates came to us via a group text message and I immediately forwarded the message on to the Wolves. Had the coordinates come to us individually, I’d have been much more careful to check that they were indeed the correct coordinates and that it wasn’t a ploy to rout out the traitors.

The Sickness

A little while later, we were informed by a random passerby that we were on quarantine due to the sickness. This was total news to us - both the sickness and the quarantine. Apparently the council had made the decision and they were about to ship sick people to us. Yet one more reason we felt like the red-headed step-child where decisions had been made without us being consulted or even informed. Soon shuttles with patients were being dropped off to us for healing to get rid of the sickness. We ended up with 4 crew and at this time, we had the capability to cure all 4 in a single turn (enough doctors and fixed sickbays). I also shouted via text that we needed care packages sent our way as we couldn’t go begging for food and water. We were told that during the quarantine, units and supplies could be dropped off but nothing could leave. We were eventually given permission to release ourselves from the quarantine under our own judgement.

Around the same time, our first undercover assignment came to us via another injured Wolf. He was dropped off to us by an unmarked shuttle and we were told to heal him and get him some new credentials. He was part of a side plot involving undercover media. Earlier on in the game, a Warrant was issued for the immediate arrest/kill of a reporter who was known to be a wolf spy, but at the time we thought nothing of it. After a turn he was fully healed, so we gave him new medical credentials (that was all we had access to) and got him on a ship bound for the Aegis.

Control asked us if we were going to cure the patients and I told them that we were treating the symptoms but not the underlying sickness. After we lifted the quarantine, the media announced the lift and that all patients had been cured of “Barking mad” - the name we had come up with in the hopes that other traitors would know they had allies on the Salvador.

Next turn, control announced the admiral (a player) was murdered by a man in a white lab coat. A turn later, control asked us to roll a die for every crew member in every ship. On a 1-3, they had become sick and needed treatment. On a 4-6 they were OK. This was disastrous for the fleet as workers and specialists everywhere were affected, even our own Doctors. We decided to use our special ability cards to treat our doctors and prepared ourselves for the influx of sick people.

Around this time, we had another 2 players come to our table who had been injured in the latest round of Wolf attacks. We made them priority and healed them up and sent them back to their ships (we didn’t want to kill them - being out of the game is no fun for anyone).

Last Turn Madness

Control announced the last turn of the game. Privately, control came to us and told us to sow as much chaos as possible. My colleague and I discussed how we could do that within the confines of our station and we decided that with the influx of sick people and a recent announcement of an evacuation from the Aegis (which had been crippled in the last fighting), we would roundup as many crew as possible and give them an ultimatum: Join us or die! Narratively, we told control we’d convert a waiting room into a gas chamber or have a “special” injection for those crew that didn’t take the hint.

I went running round the tables with a shuttle collecting the sick and injured for our final big plan. Meanwhile the president player had been injured and had been transported to our ship. In the final moments of the game, as the fleet was preparing for a final jump and I had just returned to my ship after rounding up more crew for our ultimatum, something had transpired. As the president and an advisor were preparing a statement, the Wolves gave him his own ultimatum - join or die. He refused to give ground so the wolves took control of our airlocks and spaced him and all our patients, leaving me, my chief surgeon and the other doctors safe in the bridge. Our goal had been accomplished, albeit slightly differently than we’d planned.

As the fleet made its final jump, we sent the coordinates to the Wolf fleet and remained behind to catch up with our new friends.

Post-game notes

Once the game had finished, Control and the other ship captains gave quick summaries of some of the other plotlines that we might’ve missed. Then of course we chatted with other players and discussed what really happened.

We learnt there were 2 other traitors, one of whom was on the President’s ship at the beginning of the game. I’m not sure he did very much other than get captured and interrogated by the council. The other was a council member aligned to the mining ship. He had been sowing seeds of chaos in the council, keeping them focused on resources rather than hunting for traitors. He also planted bugs on other players which transmitted coordinates to the Wolf fleet. Due to the amount of time he took in the council, he was unable to speak to us after he heard the sickness name and realized we were his allies.

The captain on the refinery ship had instructions to hoard fuel, even though he was not a Wolf spy. As a result, we were never able to make large fleet jumps the entire game.

The Prison ship had some secret objective to implant prisoners with mind control devices or something. They were trying to keep happiness at an 11 but I don’t think any of it was for nefarious purposes.

By the end of the game, I think there were really only 2 other players that had any suspicions of us. One was a guy on the Aegis who (correctly) accused me of sending the agent to his ship to assassinate the Admiral. When he came over and accused me, I put it down to the chaos and confusion of the sick people coming and going when “Barking Mad” was sweeping the fleet. The other person was a reporter who was very suspicious of me collecting everyone on our ship right at the end of the game but there was too much going on by that point it was too late anyway.

Final thoughts

As I’m sure you can tell from the report, I had an absolute blast. I enjoyed it better than Watch the Skies, likely due to having more interesting decisions to make. I loved the frantic nature of everyone running around, prepping for jumps and attempting some semblance of teamwork. Miscommunication and selfishness are really what makes Megagames so good. People unwilling to work together without getting something for it leads to hoarding and negotiations. Miscommunication leads to double-speak and rumours which are hilarious when you get them second hand. When we were considering leaving the Salvador behind and moving in with the Aegis, it caused a real stir amongst the fleet.

For more information

For more information, check out https://megagamecoalition.com/

Many thanks to the writer, the organizers and control for making it such a great game (even though we didn’t have as many players as they were hoping for)