AAR1: How it went
This report will be mostly spoiler free.
I am exhausted! Good exhausted, but exhausted. We started the day at 8am. Registration was to begin at 10:15 and I was prepared to start at 9am but my team convinced me we needed an extra hour - I’m so glad they did!
Naturally, the first couple of hours were set up. I had components and documentation extremely well organized but the hardest part of the setup was the movable walls. The church basement where we held it had these amazing walls that rolled round which we wanted to use to set up specific rooms - one for the military map, one for the science symposium and another for the HoS map (we already had rooms for the UN and Aliens). We were warned by the church facilities manager that it’d be a challenge (having not done it before) but it was something we really wanted. I’d say that alone took half the control team an hour to get right - they were very fiddly. We also set up tables and chairs, drinks, signs, pandemic precautions and the components.
Doors opened at approximately 10:15 and folks started trickling in. By the time time ticked 10:45 (official start time), we were missing the entire Russia team! Luckily they turned up 5 minutes into my intro but they had me a little nervous.
Out of the 41 players, only about 5 folks had played a MegaGame before so I made a real effort to explain how player-driven MegaGames are. Even so, I’d say most people (including myself), don’t understand the open-endedness of a MegaGame until they’ve played at least one.
<- UN rules review
I gave extra time during turn 1 to give folks a chance to learn the systems and fumble through the first turn and it was definitely needed. Things went really smooth through the first 3 turns and we broke for lunch. I attribute the smooth sailing 100% to playtests. We play tested everything multiple times and it was the lessons learned from those that made everything go so smoothly.
Right before turn 3 ended, the Pizza turned up (on time). I had built in plenty of time for everyone to take a break for lunch and to stretch their legs. Almost immediately when we broke up I had a couple of players approach me with some ideas for game play and I very kindly told them to “go away” as I also needed a break! I think they completely understood. Self-preservation is very important when you’re running ragged the entire time. It’s not like I was unavailable - during the game play I had lots of opportunity to circulate and ask all the players how their day was going, if they knew what their objectives were, if they had any ideas for out-the-box things they wanted to achieve etc. I made myself very available to folks.
The next few turns started to ramp up. The Head of State control was feeling a little overwhelmed with the number of agent requests he was getting so I stepped in several times to help him out. The biggest problem we faced around this time was that we ran out of money! We had to write on the fake banknotes and update them from $1M to $5M and we even had some $10M notes in circulation by the end of the game. I attempted to mitigate this with a few techniques: When the terror track hit a milestone, I dropped everyone’s income level by 2. I hit several teams with PR negatives for actions in the war room and some other bits and pieces. Despite all this, Nations had more money than they knew what to do with. This is something I definitely need to rebalance next time I run it. One of the reasons for this is that the military game was very cordial for a significant portion of the game. They were not very aggressive and so did not spend much money moving troops around.
Turns 6 and 7 were pretty smooth too. By this time, the extra helpers we had brought along with us to help with organization ran out of things to do and were getting a bit bored.
Turns 8 and 9 were pretty typical of MegaGames - last turn madness kicked in!
We didn’t tell players when the last turn was even though some of them were asking. This was on purpose because we wanted last turn madness to be much more organic, particularly because the vast majority of the players were new.
Knowing that everything the UN did was done a turn later, we had a special event for the UN on the last turn so we basically built a small element of last-turn-madness into their game. And it wasn’t until we got to the end of turn 8 that our science control mentioned that the science game fell into the same category. He had some great ideas for their own special event so we implemented that on the fly.
For future playthroughs, we also need to tweak a couple of the super techs for the aliens as they were a little overpowered but it was nothing that broke our game.
After the media made their last statements, I announced the ramifications of the final actions of the game. Honestly, my adrenaline was running so high and knowing that the last 6 months of work had come to its conclusion that I got a little emotional. As I’ve said before, running a MegaGame is NOT for everyone, it’s a huge commitment and you need someone at the helm with the time, resources and passion to pull it off.
After I talked through the final housekeeping stuff, folks left for the after-party. Most of the control team stayed behind to clean up but a couple went to the after-party to make sure everyone was OK there.
The afterparty
If you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll be posting a recap of the story here on the website (my After-Action Report or AAR), at least from my perspective. It definitely will not be all inclusive and I’ll probably get elements of it wrong but that’s the nature of a MegaGame. Photos and other player’s AARs will be posted in the near future also.
Thanks again to everyone that helped make it a success - the control team, the 2 non-control helpers, the players and the MegaGame community as a whole.
2 more thank-yous: Jim Walman, the original designer of Watch The Skies, of which this version was based on. And the guys from ShutUpAndSitDown, who without which I never would have heard about MegaGames.
The control team