AAR: Gods of the Ancient World, Gencon 2023

After Action Report (AAR): Gods of the Ancient World, Gencon on 8/3/2023

Gods of the Ancient World is my first full Megagame design. This is the second run of GAW, the first was in June of this year and you can read more about that event by clicking this link.

You can learn more about the game itself by clicking here.

The event

We had a great event space at the Hyatt, granted to us by the Gencon system and due to the relationship we have with Gencon (as a Megagame coalition collective). Essentially it was a large room but with plenty of tables and chairs to position however we wanted. Unfortunately, it was ONLY one room. That meant we had to get a little creative with space for the Gods and how the priests would communicate with them. Took us a couple of turns to iron it out but we got there and the game wasn’t affected negatively in any way as far as I can tell. No fancy tech this time - just a round timer on a projector and a microphone.

Serena letting the Athenians know about some peril coming their way. Also notice the wall of tables we’d erected to keep the Gods separated from the mortals.

The Game

Between the first turn and the ideas that had been sent to me by players before the game even began, I had a list of things to think through on how to implement. These included:

• Building a walled port

• Playing as pirates and remaining anonymous, even from their own faction.

• And one player wanting to kill a God!

The first two seemed like totally reasonable requests. Essentially we came up with some build costs and some mechanics on what happened if someone came to the port that was uninvited. The second item was a little more interesting. We told the players we’d give them black ships and that they could set sail from any port within their faction, as though they were raising the flag as they left port. Then they’d pass their movements on to control and we would move the ships on their behalf to allow them to remain anonymous. Half way through the game the players came to us and said it was a little boring because there weren’t many other ships on the map, so we created some NPC ships and gave them all some cargo so they could chase those ships down and get some loot from them too.

This must’ve been early in the game - there’s no Hole in Dalmatia yet.

Killing a God

This felt like an end-of-game kind of story, where you build up to it all game and pull it off in the last turn so I knew it had to be hard to do. The player that wanted to do it was a younger guy who was the Governor of one of the Greek states. I told him that he’d need a weapon forged by Vulcan, created with pieces of a mythical creature and that such a weapon could only be wielded by a Demigod. I knew that mythical creatures generally only came from the Gods and it’d take a few turns for the first to appear and then a few more to kill the thing and retrieve its body. Demigods were cards given to some mortals by God control so I knew that’d take a few turns too and then he’d have to find one. And having Vulcan create the weapon would be a challenge too as the Gods have a lot to manage across the entire game.

Amazingly, by the halfway mark, he’d 1) become a Demigod himself, 2) got some dragon “parts” from a fellow Greek and 3) Vulcan had crafted it for him! Honestly, it was way faster than I’d anticipated but he’d done it. I even asked the Vulcan player if he knew that a weapon of this magnitude had God-killing powers and he was surprisingly OK with it.

The next few turns were spent with the Greeks trying to get Zeus to come visit their region so he could use the weapon on him.

It was about this time that I discovered that the Greeks who had slayed the mythical creature had never shared the parts with anyone, they were being super protective of it. So we retconned a little and decided that the materials supplied to Vulcan weren’t actually dragon parts, that they were most likely pieces of whale and wouldn’t do the job.

So when the time came, the Demigod took his mighty hammer, hit Zeus with it, and I announced that the blow bounced off him. I informed the player what had happened and whilst he was a little crestfallen, was determined to make it work and wanted to try again. He and his team then came up with a heist involving Greek traitors and eventually ended up with an actual dragon piece within a couple of turns. I told him it needed Vulcan to reforge it so they put it on an altar and sent it back to Mt. Olympus.

Once delivered, I asked Vulcan about it and he said that that player had annoyed so many Gods over the course of the game that they were not giving it back.

Later on in the game, I learned that Vulcan had given it to Ares who had used it to kill Zeus himself. The last turn was spent with Zeus wandering around the mortal realm, impotent, and begging the mortals for prayers so he could regain his Godhood.

Persephone observing the mortals

Building universities

About halfway through the game, I learned that Romans were starting to build universities (not in the game). They were hoping for better weapons and other scientific breakthroughs. After our first run, we had prepared for this eventuality and knew it was a possibility that players would go down this “track”.

After the first one was built, we reduced the number of prayer tokens they received and told the Gods that mortals were leaning away from religion and more towards logic and science.

I believe that one of the Gods took it upon himself to destroy a university with a spiteful power and when the other Romans heard how pissed off the Gods were at this logical/scientific pathway, they built walls around the exits of the last university, trapping in the scholars and calling it a mausoleum.

Zombies?!?

My Demigod friend from earlier ended up visiting the underworld for some reason and after he returned, he asked me if he was undead. I said sure and naturally he asked if he could spread his affliction by biting people. It was near the end of the game and I didn’t think it’d break anything so we told him he could bite one person per turn.

Going into the last turn, he had already “recruited” one other person (some Roman senator) and they had designs to hit the Roman leadership. They also had a Pegasus and asked if they could use it in the game finale to fly down and bite the Roman General. I told them to role for it and the bite was successful.

Also, during the last senate session, the Roman Empress was bitten by her afflicted senator and she announced that Rome was passing a new law to allow the undead to hold political office. And then she hit us with another law that said there were no term limits for Roman leadership (effectively ensuring she could rule as Empress of Rome forever). It was a beautiful thing.

The Gods were huddling near the exit so they could hear the prayers of the priests.

Other interesting story points

Naturally there were so many story points that I can’t possibly know them all, let alone list them all here, but here’s a sampling:

• All game I was passing notes from one of the Romans to “Egypt”. One of the Gods was disguised as Egypt and made friends with the Romans. They didn’t know he was a God until after the game had ended.

• Epirus left the Greek Kingdom and declared independence. They even picked up their table and moved it across the room to cement their rebellion.

• One of the priests sacrificed herself to Hades and the last I head of it, she was appointed as the receptionist of the Underworld.

• Persephone conspired with one of the mortals to “steal” a bunch of famous souls from the Underworld. I think they escorted Jason, Hercules, Theseus and a dozen more out on the last turn of the game.

• Turn 3 the Romans passed a law to give more food to famers so that they’d produce more. It was a clearly broken mechanic as it would’ve produced food endlessly so we decided that a few turns later, the farmers were too fat and lazy to work.

• The Gods created a hole in Dalmatia, upon the request of the Spartans (naturally) so they could kick people down it. Once I realized that it was created by the Gods, we decided to tell the players that it had a connection to the underworld and so things kept crawling out of it.

The united Romans

The second game compared to the first

It went really smooth, but not significantly smoother than the first game, perhaps just a little. When I asked how many people had played a mega game before, about 85% of hands went up which tells me a lot. When you have a lot of experienced mega gamers, you know they can more-or-less take care of themselves. They know how the game is supposed to flow, where they step in to make their own stories and where to let the game play itself out. I had a lot of nice complements from the players saying what a well designed game it was and I think the smooth run shows that.

The players did a great job of “getting” the military map and the resource game mechanics and were able to be self sufficient. That was a big change from the first. In addition, the stories that the players came up with were grander but the players knew how to work with the control team to make it happen, so they all went really smooth too.

As it stands, I don’t plan on making any changes to the gameplay. I plan to add a couple of senances to a couple of the rule books and some to the control documentation but that’s about it.

For more pictures of the day, click this link.