Watch The Skies: The Idea
A little background; I played WTS at Gencon 2018 as the Deputy Head of State and I’ve played Den of Wolves at Gencon 2019 - both events run by the MegaGame coalition (you can read my after action report for DoW here). I’ve also designed and run three 20-player Murder Mystery party games so when I decided to redesign and run WTS, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting myself in for.
A couple of years ago, fully intending to run WTS in Louisville, KY, I purchased the original WTS version from the Megagame Makers in the UK and followed that up with a purchase of the version I played at Gencon. After absorbing myself in the rules for a couple of weeks, I came away from it a little disappointed in the absence of instructions for running it and general holes in rules documentation. In my opinion, neither set of rules were fully comprehensive (at least not for a brand new game-runner). Maybe it’s my own fault for never having run a MegaGame but it put me off running my own version.
More recently, I decided that I had procrastinated enough and it was time to think a little more seriously about running WTS again. I knew that the #1 roadblock I’d face was a full and complete understanding of the rules, and if I was going to have to design rules to fill in the gaps, I might as well redesign the parts I didn’t like while I’m at it. Also, if I recruited some friends to help with design challenges, it’d make me more likely to follow through, knowing that it wasn't just my time and effort wasted if I gave up. In addition, recruiting different friends to help me design different elements would lead to an easy sell to convince them to be my control team as they’d already be invested!
My second perceived roadblock (and one of the reasons I’d procrastinated so long), is I’m not sure how easy/hard it’s going to be to get enough players. Therefore, a redesign of the game allows me to strip down the number of players I’m going to need. From the very beginning of my design reboot I’ve decided to make nations 4-man teams and remove all corporations. The added bonus of this of course is I don’t have to redesign those game elements.
-Tony