April 2024 Newsletter

It belongs in a museum

It belongs in a museum - the Megagame about searching the globe for mysterious artifacts and displaying them for the world to see - tickets are now on sale!

This has only been on sale for a couple of weeks, with many weeks left to go and we’ve already sold 16 tickets so I’m fairly confident that it’ll sell out. It’s only got a maximum player count of 43 which is still decent sized but not compared with the 70-player monster of Deephaven (which we sold out).

If you want to learn more about it, definitely read the main event page (the big button above), but don’t miss out on the additional game information under the GAME menu item (here’s a direct link https://www.dukesofhighland.net/games/it-belongs-in-a-museum). There you can find out about the teams and the characters which will give you an idea of how much backstory there is in this game. Basically, the designers have taken pop culture adventurers from all kinds of media and smooshed them together in one huge game.

And if you want to get in the mood for it, go and watch Indiana Jones (Raiders), The Mummy (with Brendan Fraser), Lara Croft Tomb Raider, Tin Tin, Warehouse 13, etc, etc.

2 games in March

We ran a crazy 2 games last month - Deephaven on the 9th in Louisville and then Den of Wolves in Ypsilanti, MI on the 30th. Both fantastic, both very different.

If you’ve ever been to any of our events, we always pester you with a feedback survey after the game. It’s super helpful for us to see if 1) people are having fun, 2) what we can do differently next time, 3) how to advertise better to reach the most people, 4) if our price point is right, etc. But sometimes we just like to look at pretty visuals. Here’s some examples.

There are lots of pictures of both events which you can find on our Instagram page here: https://www.instagram.com/dukesofhighland/

^ The Admiral (left) and the President from Den of Wolves Michigan who were very sassy because they didn’t believe a word the Vulcan captain was saying.

Columbus Den of Wolves Cancelled

This one is a major bummer. I have a lot of thoughts about our first cancellation so I wrote an blog post about it which you can read here: https://www.dukesofhighland.net/blog/cancelling-an-event

Gen Con volunteer signup

As I’ve mentioned before, we, in association with the Megagame Coalition, are going to put on a massive 17 games at Gen Con this year. 17 is the largest number we've ever attempted but it obviously comes with some scaling considerations. Some of those things you don't need to worry about (leave that to us), but we need help to run all those games and that's where you come in. If you've never been a control member before, DO NOT WORRY! We will teach you how. In fact, there's already some information out there for you. In February, I recorded a little video on how to be an effective facilitator (in a general sense). You can find that video here:

The first half is the “training” and the second half will go nicely into what the games are we’re going to run and what perks we offer (though we have tweaked this since).

For more information on the games and the most up-to-date version of the volunteer perks, go to our website: https://megagamecoalition.com/gen-con-2024/. We don’t expect the perks to change much more between now and Gen Con but they may. We also don’t expect the schedule of games to change much more between now and the con but some of it is in the hands of the con organizers and us getting the rooms we need. Also don’t worry that you don’t know those games, the game runners will reach out to their teams a couple of weeks before the convention to do control assignments and full training.

Friends of the Dukes

I wanted to share some other groups you might be interested in:

Lurking Fears

No Frills, Just Frights. We are an open resource of GMs to help organize games at Conventions and and help those who wish to do the same.

We’ve had several players from the Lurking Fears team play with us and they are a huge organization who are looking for GMs at conventions. For some specific games, they will literally pay you to GM for them. Go check them out on Facebook here.

Legends of Nerdvana

Last month I was interviewed by Legends of Nerdvana to talk about megagames but they primarily focus on video reviewing boardgames. Randy has the biggest collection of board games I’ve ever seen, even compared to boardgame libraries at conventions - it’s MASSIVE. You can find their channel on Youtube here, or you can watch a post-mortem of when they played Deephaven with us last month.

So what are we boardgames?

Honestly, with all that’s been going on, I haven’t had a huge amount of time to play tabletop games, though I did recently get Wyrmspan to the table for the first time. It’s a super-cute dragon themed sequel to the impressive medium-weight Wingspan that was released a few years ago.

My in-depth review: It was great! Pretty much what I expected, not super different from the original but the dragon theme I like more than sparrows and seagulls.