June 2024 Newsletter
Happy Pride Month!
If there’s anything The Dukes can be proud of (outside of putting on awesome games), is that it’s being a safe space for our LGBQTIA+ friends.
I have several close family members and family friends who identify as LGBT and while I don’t identify as such, I am an ally. I recognize how difficult your situations often are and so I offer love and support to each and every one of you. It’s hard for me to completely understand but I’m keen to learn and be supportive however I can. And that extends to the Dukes too.
If you feel unwelcome in any way, or if you think we can do something better, I’m all ears. I’ll take your suggestions and feedback very seriously and will try to do better.
The first thing you can do is review our code of conduct and see if there’s any changes we can make to be more inclusive and loving. :) Ha, now I’m just using you!
But seriously, with us you are loved and accepted and we’re glad you’re here.
It belongs in a museum
This past Saturday marked the North American debut of It belongs in a museum. It was another amazing event and the feedback we got was all really good. I’m not going to lie, the control team and I were a little nervous going into this one. For those of you who joined us, you can probably tell how complicated this one was from a game runner perspective. The game from the player side was pretty simple - get a brief, go on an adventure, play the minigame, get the reward and hand it over to the museum at the end. But it’s just so content heavy it is very difficult to make sure everything is where it needs to be and make sure the stories all run nicely on from each other.
Well it was awesome, and we’re going to run it again at Gen Con at full capacity - at 45 players. If you’ll be joining us for that, I’m looking forward to seeing you and having you experience it.
There are a load more pictures from the recent game over on our Instagram page here.
Gen Con 2024
Gen Con is fast approaching and we’re making final preparations. This past week I played the meta-game called “assigning volunteers to games” where I had the impossible task of trying to match 60 players to their preferences for the 17 games we’re offering (as an entire Megagame Coalition). I had the good problem to have in that we had more volunteers than spots to fill, which is so much better than be short-staffed as it means we can have a higher control-player ratio. I deepest apologies to anyone reading this who didn’t get exactly what they wanted, I did my best!
^This is the floor plan for the main MGC room as it’ll be setup on Wednesday evening. It came from the skies is the first game being ran here so I’ll need to make a few minor tweaks to the room layout when I get in there.
There’s still plenty of things left to organize - Hotels being the largest one. We have rooms and people requesting rooms but we still haven’t been allocated our complementary rooms from Gen Con so it’s hard to do final assignments on something with incomplete information.
Old Newsletters & Blog posts
If you weren’t aware, every single one of these newsletters ends up on the blog for you to read after the initial email. So if you’re new to the Dukes or a long-timer who just missed a newsletter, there’s plenty of information to catch up on over there. Obviously, the newsletters are a snapshot in time so not all of it will still be valid (advertising games etc.) but there’s still plenty of content that will be applicable.
There’s also a handful of other, non-newsletter posts on there that may be an interesting read:
Cancelling an event is a sad thing but something that has happened (and probably will again).
Thinking about running games at Gen Con is no longer valid for this year, but it certainly will be applicable for next year if you’re interested.
There are several after-action reports (AAR) for you to read like this one on Gods of the Ancient World at last years Gen Con and this one on First Contact, the 200-person game I played in London last year.
Why Megagames are better than LARPs was my rebuttal at a cheeky blog post where the author attempted to argue that LARPs were better than Megagames on a Megagame site!
future games
Coming up in September: It came from… The Skies!!! - our version of the classic Watch the Skies megagame of world leaders wondering what to do about the UFOs that suddenly appear over the skies.
If you’ve been with the Dukes since the beginning, you’ll recognize many of the gameplay elements here but with a completely new overarching story to keep you on your toes. We’ve learned a lot over the past few years and all that experience is going into this game to make it better than ever. If you played in our March 2022 run of WTS and want to play this one, we’ll make sure you get preference on roles. If you didn’t play in that game with us (or the Gen Con 2022 duplicate), but you’ve played another version of WTS before, you’ll see a lot of new and interesting mechanics, including tech trees and auction houses. If you’ve never played any sort of WTS megagame before, you’re in for a treat; This is the classic formula that got many of us started in the hobby.
So what are we videogames?
Like most of the video game world, the Dukes have been DIVING and delivering Democracy to bugs and robutts in Helldivers 2. I’m leery to hype this one up too much because the formula is pretty basic and honestly, without a group of friends to do it with, it’s probably no where near as good. I’m lucky enough to have a group of gamer friends who play videogames regularly and Helldivers 2 has really hooked us. It’s a perfect Deep Rock Galactic “sequel” with many of the same elements that made us fall in love with DRG a few years ago. It helps that it’s tongue in cheek and I think if it were a serious game, we probably would’ve bounced off it fairly quickly.
And one more - I’ve been playing through the amazing Escape Simulator with a buddy of mine. It’s basically “Escape Room - The Game”. It doesn’t try to do anything fancy, it keeps the formula simple but has some really nice aesthetics and nice puzzles where both of us feel smart after finishing a level.
So what are we televisioning?
As a child of the 80s, I enjoyed the heck out of the X-Men cartoon so watching X-Men ‘97 feels like coming home. Saying that, whilst the aesthetics are cool and the storylines rich, I think I’m getting a little old because I felt rushed through the whole experience. It’s still worth a watch though.
See you next month!
-Tony