October 2024 Newsletter
The Super Survey!
“NOT ANOTHER SURVEY? WHAT THE CRAP TONY?!?” - You probably
As I type this, I literally have no plans set in stone for next year. I have several thoughts and some discussions in the works with partners, but nothing concrete. We’ve come a long way in 3 years and achieved quite a lot in that time. We’ve run 14 games, with 644 players and 92 facilitator positions. Some of you have been with us from the beginning and have played in several of those, and some of you are brand new to us (hello!). To all of you, I’m very grateful. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love it and love the community. You are what make it special. And with that I need your help. What on earth do we do next year?!?
The survey is closed
The button above will take you to a survey I’ve put together to capture information to help me decide what to do next year. Do you prefer sci-fi themes or fantasy? Do you like the more mechanical games or the ones that are closer to a LARP and more freeform? Deephaven is basically “here’s a blank piece of paper - go have fun!”. Is there a game that you missed over the past few years that you’ve heard great things about and are sad to have missed it? Or perhaps you have heard a podcast about a game another group is running and you think it’d be a great hit for us to run?
In the after-game surveys, feedback is generally pretty positive, but it’s also self-selecting. I imagine that players who have no desire to play again are way less likely to fill out the survey, thereby introducing positive bias to the results. So I can’t assume that a 40-player game with 20 positive responses is representative of everyone’s experience.
So please fill out the survey if you have opinions on what you’d like to see next year. It’s about a dozen questions and wont take more than about 5 minutes.
Pictures from “It came from…”
We’ve got lots of pictures to share. They’re all uploaded to Instagram so head over to here to see at least 2 reels/batches/posts/whatever-they’re-called to see the game in action: https://www.instagram.com/dukesofhighland/
Feedback from “It came from…”
Every time you play one of our games, it’s the same old request - “Please fill out a survey so we can be better next time”. I know this can get a bit old but I promise you I read every one and make adjustments for the future. To prove it, I thought I’d respond to some of the comments from our most recent run of It came from the Skies! It’s all kept anonymous but it’s all been pasted directly from our players (or paraphrased for simplicity) - good, bad and ugly.
“Need more reasons for conflict between the countries”
I heard this from several responses and from the afterparty feedback and I couldn’t agree more. In future runs, I’ll be adding more “meat” to the country objectives to make them a little more at odds with each other (both militarily and in the UN). But don’t forget, megagames are player-led and so the option to be super aggressive is always there. Especially with a geopolitical game like this.
“Have the ability to share tech”
This is something I’m not going to change. I get that thematically it makes sense, but from a game balance perspective it’s a nightmare. I can control the quantity of tokens that are in the game which directly lead to the quantity of techs in the game. If sharing is allowed and everyone shares with everyone, the game will be fundamentally broken. The aliens are also limited as to what they can do and I want the humans and aliens to be balanced against each other.
“Be clearer about what the techs do before they’re researched”
I’m torn on this. On one hand I understand that it can fall flat if you research something that’s worthless to your strategy and a little more clarity goes a long way. On the other, not knowing exactly what you’re researching does a couple of key things: It encourages cooperation between teams (sharing information on what they do). It also encourages experimentation. It also diminishes min-maxing - “I’m going up the income track as fast as possible!”. And it’s not like you have no idea what the tech is going to do. If something is on the green military track and it’s called “fleet fuel efficiency” it’s either going to make your ships movement faster or cheaper.
“Cheat sheets for combat and military movement”
I heard that moving through NPC locations was confusing and a quick reference guide to money would be useful. Also ship movement within regions was also miscommunicated. Definitely adding this for the future runs. Good call.
“Clearly define the African Union”
This is another good call. The AU is pretty well defined on their national briefing, but I think 1) it needs tweaking to give them a larger area and 2) it needs defining for the other nations.
Podcasts
Hey we’ve been featured on a podcast again!
As regular readers of the newsletter will know, we do a lot to help organize all the games at Gen Con. In addition to that, I also went around with a microphone and interviewed a bunch of the game runners. I wanted to do some mini, bite-sized interviews to get a feel for the game so that “real” podcasters could do a deeper dive if they had the interest. Anyway, I ended up with about 9 conversations, the first 5 of which have been released to the podsphere in this episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0QkMFGfjUeUplAc31TL30l?si=mpR1fz0gRay-Rprfyl_5QQ
I think it’s pretty good :)
I also think there are lots of little insights to take away and think through a bit more. But you’ll have to listen to find out more.
So what are we reading?
I've just finished book 2 of the Darker Shade of Magic trilogy series by V.E Schwab and looking forward into diving into the finale.
I don’t read as much as I’d like. Too much going on with megagame stuff, board game stuff, video game stuff and oh yeah, family?!?
So it’s taken me a fair while to get to the third in the series, but it’s good enough that I’ve stuck with it. It’s about different versions of London all layered over each other in different dimensions and with a few folks that can jump between them. Each has very different characteristics, some very prosperous where magic is plentiful, some where rulers are vicious and magic is scarce. It’s an interesting concept and not one I had seen before.
So what are we televisioning?
I’ve started watching Slow Horses, a British show about the misfits who couldn’t quite make it into MI5 (the UKs equivalent of the FBI). Gary Oldman plays a piece of crap, washout leader, who’s actually a pretty great agent. So far I’m about 5 episodes in and it’s pretty decent. Certainly keeping my attention, and these days that seems hard to do.
-Tony