AAR: Den of Wolves, Gencon 2023

After Action Report (AAR): Den of Wolves, Gencon on 8/6/2023

This was our second run of Den of Wolves. The first one we ran in March in Louisville which you can read about here. You can learn more about the game here. It was also the third (and last) game of Den of Wolves that the Megagame Coalition as a collective ran through Gencon. We had a nice big space at the Hyatt in downtown Indy for the game.

We had 4 on the control team and approximately less than half of the players had played a megagame before.

The Game

The game went super smooth, so smooth in fact that I was able to give one of my control team a joint role - both as control and as an NPC (non-player character) who we called Tom Zarek (from Battlestar Galactica). Originally, I’d put him in charge of both the science ship and the prison ship, both of which require a little more management, and it just sort of morphed into playing as an NPC because it made sense for the story. It worked really well because it gave us lots of options with the plot interesting.

One of the things I do differently when I run DoW compared with the way it’s written is add a third player to the 3 smaller ships and let them decide how they want to use the third player. In future games, it makes a lot of sense to have a Vulcan, Zarek-type player attend the council and that creates a friction point when the rest of the council are all playing nice with each other.

The trial

We picked 3 traitors for this game and picked similar roles as we have previously - a captain, a council member and someone in a position of power. We activated them over turns 2 and 3 and they set to work. The refinery captain started hoarding resources and refused to abide by the “red-tape” laws the council was passing. This meant that eventually she was apprehended by the military and sent to the Aegis for questionning. We recommended that the council determine her fate because we ddidnt want her sat in the brig all game and the council came up with a bill of rights and a baseline on how to carry out a trial.

The next turn, she found herself on trail in front of the entire council. She had a defense attorney, a prosecutor and a judge and we had ourselves a full-blown trial, with written out consequences if found guilty. Upon completion, the jury was split, 4-4 and she was allowed to walk free.

From left to right - the Admiral (Prosecution), the President (Judge), the Wolf Refinery Captain (Defendant), the Aegis Council (Defense) and the rest of the council sat down (Jury). Media is stood up on the right and the council member with the red beard was also a wolf.

The council

Near the end of the game, the science ship had created a traitor detector. They asked to use it on the entire council so I decided because there were so many people involved, to be truthful but vague. This meant, I gave them a “ping” in the penultimate turn of the game and told her there was definitely a traitor amongst them but it could only be used once per turn.

In response, the Aegis arrested every single council member and we had them frog-marched across the room to the cells of the Vulcan where they had to stay locked up. Hilariously, they kept running council from within their cells and decided that it was time for a vote of no confidence in the President and Admiral and on the last turn they announced a new election would take place.

Also in the last turn, the lead scientist ran the traitor detector on the Vulcan and got another ping, thereby reducing her suspect list (and confirming her suspicions that they had captured a wolf agent).

The Aegis traitor

We picked the comms officer to be the a traitor on the Aegis and he had a great time of it. He started with typical traitor actions - asked how he could create a bomb, created it a couple of turns later, placed in on the refinery and damaged a few stations.

His big play was in the penultimate turn when he commandeered the Aegis and locked everyone else out while they were all busy with other tasks (especially in the council). In the last turn he drove it into the side of the Vulcan (and was very pleased with himself). We had everyone affected roll a d6 - on a 1-3 the player died, on a 4-6 they survived. I think out of about 10 people, only 2 died but it was the last turn of the game so made for a good story with no real gameplay consequences.

Other quick plot points

Again, this was a megagame so lots of things going on that I can’t possibly list them all here but here are a selection I can think of:

• The water ship wanted to make swimming pools out of old shipping containers and some excess water for some little morale boosts.

• Tom Zarek had some special untrained crew working in the fleet that we marked with a Z. I’m not sure we ended up using them but was something we decided he could use if the council didn’t side with him when he demanded it.

• Vulcan no longer recognized their council member (hence why we created Zarek).

• Listening devices all over the place (especially on the council).

• For wolf communications to the main wolf fleet, I gave the media team some coded messages (that they never decoded). That was to tell them that there were agents working on the Aegis and the refinery.

• The wolf refinery captain asked me for coordinates. I gave her some and she distributed them to the fleet as the confidence was waning for the admiral. On the last turn of the game, she convinced one of the other ships to jump and I told them they’d jumped into a massive fleet of wolf ships. Their faces were a picture. So was hers.

The President and the Admiral, hard working and underappreciated.

The second game compared to the first

Den of Wolves is an “easy” game to run. If you have the components, a nice space, a reasonable idea of how the game should flow and the ability to adjudicate on the fly, it’s easy. I also had an experienced control team so I was able to be very hands off with them. My council control had played Den of Wolves multiple times online during the pandemic so probably knew the game better than I did. He proposed altered rules for the council and I just let him at it. They were tried and tested online and he was confident, so I stayed out of it. I’m not even 100% on the new rules but I had confidence in him to pull it off. It’s a big difference in my megagame management style over the past two years - to rely on my control team to do a good job and not micromanage.

The stories that came out of the game were awesome. I loved the council story, I loved the Dione really embracing their luxury lifestyle, I loved that the players had no faith in the Admiral and President, even though they didn’t do much to deserve the lack of trust. It was just a great event.

This is a great game to run in a new place for the first time. Because it’s so easy to run for me now, I can use this to test the waters in a new city and I can put effort into the tougher elements of organizing a megagame - marketing and venue, etc. I have some irons in the fire on running this in some new cities next year.

For more pictures of the day, click this link.