December 2024 Newsletter

2025 Schedule

Drum roll please. The moment some of you have been waiting for, the schedule of Megagames for 2025!

Click this link for a bigger version.

You’ll notice a couple of gaps. To be fair there’s a lot of time between now and then so anything could change. But you don’t care about those gaps, how are you supposed to be excited about something you have no idea about - and particularly if it’s not even going to happen? We’ll get to the games in a moment, but first, I owe you some information that I hinted at last month.

The survey Results

In the survey results shared last month, i said I’d come back to this one. I didn’t talk through this then because it would’ve given away what games we’ve been looking at. So here we go:

Running someone else’s megagame is challenging. Mainly because most of the game exists only in the head of the designer and the industry as a whole doesn’t do a very good job documenting the games for others to run. So when I put up this post, I included the games I had some familiarity with and/or I was excited to run (and which I wouldn’t mind investing the extra time in to learn). .

So when the results of the genre survey came in and sci-fi won by a clear margin, I decided to do some digging into the games already made which had a space theme.

I narrowed it down to 3 - Crisis in Elysium, Shot heard around the universe and Event Horizon. And honestly, while they all probably play great with the designer present, they all have their issues for someone like me who wants to run it sight-unseen. Either the control documentation is lacking, they’re extremely complex and require a lot of study, or they’re very control heavy (or a combination of all 3). But the people have spoken (all 36 of you) and so out of the three I’m going with Event Horizon.

Obviously Event Horizon was on the original list, so I have my own excitement for it already and if I’m going to invest any time into learning a new game, it has to be something I’m passionate about. My understanding is that the game has been run at least a dozen times (which is crazy for a megagame) and has been iterated on every time by the designer Johan Olofsson. He’s also spent a good amount of time putting the package together for other people to run so he’s included some significant control documentation. Also included in the price are some conversations with Johan so it’ll help to have the designer on-hand for any questions that arise.

I’ll write more about Event Horizon in the future but if you’re familiar with the movie, you’ll have an idea of what the game is about. Johan has also been interviewed on various megagame podcasts too if you want to listen to him speak. Most recently he was on The Great Game podcast which you can listen to here.

Spaceship 13

Which leads me here. Spaceship 13 is my new design I’ve which been working on for the past 6 months or so. And what a coinkidink that it’s also sci-fi themed!

Where Event Horizon is a serious, horror-adjacent sci-fi game, SS13 will be one of whimsey and idiocy. Drawing inspiration from an old video game called Spacestation 13, Among us (the relatively new video game), Paranoia (the TTRPG), Nemesis (the board game) and Star Trek lower decks (the show). Again, I’ll be sharing more about this in the future but for now, know that I’ll be doing a large playtest in March. The plan is to only invite people that have played in one of our games before - something of a thank you, but also because I need your expertise. I’ve been developing this in a vacuum for a while now and though I’ve done some smaller playtests for this, it needs a big one. I know more-or-less what it’s going to look like, but I don’t know how long it’ll take to play. It could be a 6-hour game, but it’s more likely going to be shorter than that, where we can reset the game and play again with a different role.

I won’t be advertising this playtest to the wider audience (across Facebook and such), but only via these emails and through the discord channel. And I wont be charging full price for it. Just enough to offset some of the costs of the room rental and components (it has a LOT of cards). Tickets will probably $20 or so. And I’ll throw in pizza lunch for it too.

More details coming soon.

Happy Holidays

I love AI! I generated half a dozen geeky, Happy Holidays banners and this was my favorite.

From all of us at the Dukes, we wish you and your loved ones a very happy, stress-free holiday season. May you eat too many mince pies and drink too much sherry. Maybe that’s just what I’ll be doing.

I’ll see you in 2025!

~Tony