AAR: DoW @ Gencon 2022

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

When: Sunday August 7th, 2022 @ Gencon

AAR By: Tony Dougherty (Control)

Background and pre-game

As regulars to my blog know, I have played in DoW twice now, once as the “completely trustworthy” captain of the Salvador and once as the “just trying to do the right thing” Admiral of the fleet. This time I wanted to help control it so I could see how things worked behind the scenes for when I run it in Louisville next year. Noah from the MegaGame coalition was running this and he’s run DoW a bunch so I knew I’d learn a lot from him. 

Go back and read those blog posts if you want more background on DoW. Other than that, not much to say other than let’s dive in! 

Third 1

Just as everyone is getting settled in, there’s nothing like throwing a Wolf attack at the fleet to keep them on their toes. Noah tells me that you don’t want them to settle down and be prepared - you want the pressure to feel like it’s on all the time and the longer they spend in chaos, the better for the game. In fact, in turn two, we hit them again. Really, by this time, they should’ve been prepared to jump but they couldn’t get their crap together. That’s not to say things weren’t happening, the prison ship was attempting to rehabilitate their prisoners so they’d become workers to assist the fleet and the science team had upgraded the refinery. 

Also around turn two, Noah “activated” the wolves. For this game, he selected the captain of the Endeavor (the science ship) and Nicole, the captain of the Icebreaker. I didn’t know the captain of the Endeavor but Nicole was my Japanese UN ambassador in WTS: New Materials and helped control As Thou Commands so she’d been part of every Gencon megagame I was in (i.e.. very experienced). 

The media made some amazing comment about “the Admiral being a psychopath” and his response was simply “we are doing very well”. Or maybe they called him a psychopath because of his ludicrous claim?

Turn 3 they still hadn’t jumped and there were complaints of not enough fuel to which Noah and I thought was ridiculous. Someone was clearly hoarding fuel. So I think we hit them again with another wolf attack. Turn 4 they finally managed to do a small jump so we give them some respite as they’d been hit pretty hard and the admiral is quoted saying “I am not a psychopath”. 

I want to talk about the battle map a little. In my previous 2 games, I hadn’t even seen the battle map in my role so I had to learn it from scratch. After some pre-game coaching and a few rapid succession wolf-attacks under my belt, I felt like I was getting the swing of things. What I learned is that the players can be mostly self-sufficient. Once I plop down the wolf fighters, they determine attack order, roll to attack, remove dead units, and mark spent units. All I do is roll to attack and point at who is attacking - the players can even be in charge of taking the right damage cards. It’s extremely smooth once people get familiar with it. 

The battle map in full attack mode!

Third 2

At around turn 6 or so, things got wild. The admiral and his cronies marched over to the Lucas and threatened to throw the captain in prison for misuse of goods and shuttles. He wasn’t having any of it and a battle almost erupted on the Lucas between security forces. The president got involved and it was eventually decided to hold a trial. While waiting for the trail, he was brigged on the Aegis and sat there very sulkyish, listening in on Aegis conversations (I think that’s the only reason he agreed - so he could eavesdrop). 

The Admiral gets a talking to by the President (in green)

A turn later, Noah arranged for a trail. The captain got a defending lawyer and the admiral got a prosecutor to resolve 2 charges - misuse of a fleet shuttle (charging for its use) and mishandling of resources (I think). The fleet captains were the jury and they ended up with a not guilty charge and a guilty charge, resulting in mandatory inspections. This event led to a resolution to be passed in the council called the “Transparency bill”. 

Also around this time, a shuttle was captured with a cryo-frozen, supposed wolf. This was delivered to the science team for analysis. 

There were also significant quantities of drugs being created but just like other MegaGames, control doesn’t know everything that’s happening so I’m not sure about this story. 

I do know that the prison ship was abducting people off the “streets” to continue to feed their rehabilitation program. I enjoyed leaking that to the press. 

For the wolf attacks, Nicole would feed me where she wanted the majority of the wolf attacks to go based on the layout of the fleet on the battle map. She’d pick the most poorly defended region which meant the Aegis took the most damage. The other players soon realized that the randomness of the attacks had definitely ended - they knew something was amiss, they just had no idea who it was orchestrating. 

Third 3

A wolf detector had finally been developed by the chief scientist. It was decided that it worked once per turn in a single location but everyone in that location would be tested simultaneously. I asked Noah about this and he said it was very common for these to be developed (though I had never seen one in my games). I would estimate that it got used 3-4 times towards the end of the game. What I learned was that Noah had been talking to Nicole because she had spent all game putting wolf devices on as many ships as she could manage. Noah said that those devices would adversely affect the wolf detector, giving false negatives and false positives. There were some tense moments where the chief scientist got a hit on a member of the Aegis and he ended up in the brig, only to be released later when a second test was run, revealing different results! 

I love this picture of Noah (center picture, black shirt, blue jeans). Just taking all the shenanigans in his stride.

On turn 8, the icebreaker missed a jump due to lack of fuel (wonder how that happened?!?) and was forced to take injuries to catch up with the rest of the fleet. 

The science wolf agent asked Noah and I what it would take to make a bomb, so we told him some material and fuel requirements. A couple of turns later, on his orders, we delivered a shuttle to the Ages with a nasty surprise. 

That pesky prison ship was still up to its regular mischief: Now they were employing the local crime families to steal building supplies from residents. I definitely leaked this to the press team also - not the source, just that thugs were stealing for unknown reasons. Then I marched over to the Ages (who were pretty beat up by this point) and handed them 5 materials with a wink and said “ask no questions where this came from” and walked away. 

After another turn or two of shenanigans, Noah called for the game to end.

Post-game thoughts

After the official end-of-game call, I got my “favorite part of the game” - Noah announced that the Endeavour had altered course, put on full thrusters and smashed into the Aegis in a suicide mission. The chief scientist turned to look at her captain and saw the sh*t-eating grin on his face. She threw down her papers and “stormed off”, cursing his name etc. In the post-game wrap up, she comes to the microphone to tell us that they are newly-weds and this was part of their honeymoon. And that she had run the wolf detector everywhere EXCEPT her own ship! I asked her about it later and she said she had an amazing time and the reveal at the end was the cherry on the top. 

In my other favorite part of the game, the Admiral comes to the microphone and looks at us all sheepishly and said neither he nor the crew of the Aegis had ever played a megagame before and were a bit lost! He got a massive round of applause and everyone had a good laugh.

Finally, one more interesting note, the girl that played the president was my co-conspirator in the first DoW I played, which you can read about here. Look how far she’s come! :)