Play Journal: May 2019

by Thom Kiraly

June is here and it’s time to stop/collaborate/listen, at least if I’m to believe some marketing guy giving a talk at Nordic Game Conference breaking it down for all the kids. I look back at May with a sense of amazement. I had low periods; days where I did nothing but listen to podcasts and play idle games on my phone. Nevertheless, I managed to find a bucketful of playful stuff to throw myself into. In the interest of not boring myself, I’ve kept a few of these entries to a minimum. If you’re reading this, I hope you June 2019 will be somewhat satisfactory or at least easily forgotten about should it be a disappointment.
 

 

LIVE ACTION

Red Light, Green Light – We don’t call it Red Light, Green Light, but I play it with my kids sometimes. My apartment is not large, but there is a stretch where they can run at me from the kitchen to my bedroom and we use it for all kinds of sneaking/running games.

Sasanel – Celsius Projects are running a series of exhibitions building on Roger Caillois’ four forms of play (Alea, Mimicry, Agon, Ilinx). By adding Magick, the total will be five shows over the course of a year, ending in the spring of 2020. For the Mimicry exhibition, artist Susan Ploetz was invited to host a somatic workshop and magical realist larp called Sasanel. I participated in both the preparatory workshop and the main game on the opening night.

MOTH SEAWEED KINDLING FIRE ORCA ROCK SEASHELL LILAC BLOSSOM SAND TIME ENTROPY

This is the kind of experience that can be described in 5000 words or as “a mindfulness larp where you smell seaweed as part of magic rituals”. With few players, and a short runtime, this became an experience very much shaped by each player’s own preconceptions. We played inhabitants of an island that’s being destroyed by climate change. The people on the island practice a particular form of magic that aims to attune them to the qualities and consciousness of objects around them, ultimately helping them understand or live out their own lives as part of a greater consciousness. The inlanders, then, are the people responsible for climate change, and our characters each had their own ideas and feelings about them. 

In practice, play took place in a closed off part of the exhibition space. There, we built magical objects and took visits from inlanders (exhibition visitors). They were briefed on who the islanders were and brought some object of their own with them to their meeting with us. These objects (dandelions, cork stoppers, old receipts etc) served as ice breakers as well as playthings for the islanders to incorporate into their magic. We tried to figure out what the qualities of the objects were and considered what they might help attune us to. One of my favorite objects was made by four people blowing a dandelion clock’s filaments onto a flat piece of wet clay, thus trapping all the wishes we made in that moment. 

Our wishes

I don’t want to write those 5000 words that I no doubt could so I’ll have to settle on saying that I’m happy I got over how weird I thought the game would be and just played anyway. If I sometime forget this very obvious point, will someone please remind me that: yes, I like weird games and I should go to weird larps.

Malmö Play Club Session – I co-hosted a session of Malmö Play Club at Garaget. Here are some of the games we played: 
One Behind, Name Echo, Snowballs, Bomb and Shield, Count to 20, Screamless, Sausages, Three Frogs Of Enlightenupment, Human Knot, Spiral Hug.
If you’re the rare person that reads this journal AND isn’t me in the future AND would like to join, keep an eye out at the Play Club Facebook page. We’ll do more sessions this summer. It is possible that we will meet somewhere out and about. Stay tuned.

Kubb – It was fun until it wasn’t (i.e. I managed to hit someone’s hand with a stick I was throwing). Then we all went home.

TABLETOP

Animal Crime – The closest I have to a closest anything celebrated a birthday and I got to facilitate our evening of games with the instruction: “some kind of rpg/larp for up to nine people in a tiny apartment”. This means we played Animal Crime because if you ever have a chance to play Animal Crime that’s what you should do. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Animal Crime is 100% animal comedy and 100% film noir detective story. Stupid hijinks and cold-blooded murder. Silly character shticks and fatal indulgence in vice. The Marmot Detective is led through a mystery with the other players acting as suspects in pretty standard freeform roleplay scenes. Before play starts, the Marmot Detective player leaves the room and everyone else comes up with the whodunnit. The Detective then tries to figure out what happens and at the end they either reveal the grisly truth and/or die tragically. In our case, both of those ends come to be at the same time.

Our birthday bae played the Marmot Detective while everyone else played the suspects. Animal Crime doesn’t have enough archetypes to support nine players plus the Detective though, so I was the facilitator/GM/director responsible for making sure the game got going at all and then kept chugging along nicely. Two players also teamed up to play the same archetype together (the cop) and it worked out great. The group included veteran roleplayers as well as complete beginners and somehow we managed to make it fun for everyone (or at least so it seemed to me, looking in at the game “from the outside”). My role as facilitator was a fun little game in itself. I got to cut scenes, play supporting characters, throw curveballs, and instigate a dramatic final scene of the game that saw the murderer gun down the Marmot Detective just as the coin finally dropped.

No one wants to hear a lot about other people’s RPG-sessions, but one highlight was having the Marmot hit a spell of bad luck (missed rolls) only to indulge in vice (replenishing lost ability scores) over and over to no avail. It’s really fun all the ways the Marmot Detective can be a total loser in Animal Crime while also being the only one fighting for truth and justice.

The Marmot Detective (left), surrounded by the suspects (everyone else)

Snakes & Ladders – I’m still blessed with a young child learning to play boardgames. When I say learning, I really mean the basics: rolling, counting steps out, waiting their turn etc. I’m also learning. For example, being the first to reach square 90 doesn’t mean you’ll be the first to 100. You could actually just end up in a loop of sliding down snakes and climbing up ladders until everyone else calls it quits out of boredom. Not saying that’s what happened, but if it happened it happened exactly like that.

Apocalypse World: Opal Castle – Life continues at the abandoned mall in the swamplands of what probably used to be Louisiana. In our second session, I got to start in on my Threats, complete with custom moves and everything. Turns out the warlord known as East Harrow believes his “property” has taken refuge under the wings of Uncle (the Hardholder). Frog (the Faceless paid him a visit at the slave auction, not knowing that that’s what she was walking into. I think I’ve said enough for a lifetime about why I like Apocalypse World so much, but: it’s soooo good, ya’ll. Things just… happen! I have very little planned and I’m amazed every time by what we, as a little group of weirdos, come up with. I get to be creepy, pathetic, earnest, and the conversation moves seamlessly between all the layers of fiction and tabletalk. Straight up, the game I’ll play as soon as someone says the word (hint, hint!)

Unnamed Boardgame Prototype – I helped a designer from my class out and took my kids to playtest a game he’s designing for an organization working with kids that have asthma and/or allergies. It’s a funny position to be in, both a playtester and a parent. I want my kids to get what’s going on and “do well” but I also want to leave room for failure because I know that’ll help the design in the long run. Regardless, it’s fun to see how clearly a playtest helps shape and focus a design. I’m not saying everyone has to playtest their game designs. I’m saying ALMOST everyone must do it, and early too. 

COMPUTER GAMES
A veritable explosion of computer gaming this month!

Local multiplayer afterparty games – After the birthday party where I played Animal Crime, a few people stayed late to try out local multiplayer games. My catalogue isn’t the most up-to-date, but these games fail to disappoint: Stickfight, Regular Human Basketball, Starwhal, Super Pole Riders.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins – I finally subscribed to Humble Monthly for the worst reason: I feel I missed out on the previous month’s games. In any case, I got to try an Assassin’s Creed game for the first time in many years. My overall reaction is kinda meh. I still think it’s fun to explore but I absolutely don’t care about the story. I want to sneak and climb and doing flying attacks. After claiming maybe ten hours, I put down the controller after I cleared the lighthouse of Alexandria of guards only to suddenly jump off the building halfway up due to a stupid misclick. When I respawned, all guards were back and all sense of a fun challenge was gone. Funny how that works.

A Short Hike – My subscription to Humble Monthly brought with it access to the Humble Trove. After a quick glance at howlongtobeat.com I found one of the shortest games and tried it. Good choice. I wish game developers had more opportunities to make small games, playable in an hour or two. A short games can still have a lot of heart. Not only is A Short Hike a safe, inviting and sincere game, they’ve also managed the core movements beautifully. Flying/climbing/jumping/gliding fit so well together and feel liberating and playfully risky in a way I frankly didn’t expect. 

Fez – For many years, my dirty film secret was that I’d never seen any of the Alien movies. Then I sat down and watched the four that existed before something weird happened and flutes were played or whatnot. Fez is a bit like that. I’ve had it on my humble account since it was released but I never actually sat down to play it. I knew it was a puzzle platformer of some kind but I think I underestimated the puzzle aspect. I don’t mind puzzles as long as I can have fun learning how to solve them. Fez has puzzles like this, no doubt, but it also has a straight up secret cypher alphabet that I had no interest in trying to figure out on my own. That’s what the online intertubes are for, it turns out. Apart from that, I liked playing around and with the the world of Fez. I see what all the hype was about.

Unrelated picture, taken after the boardgame playtest mentioned earlier.

Kopanito All-Stars Soccer – Looking into FIFA’19 made me weary of making a purchase, so in the meantime I tried out some alternative soccer titles. This has the same kind of zany and wild quality to it that NES World Cup had for me when I was a kid. Violent tackling, weird super moves, cartoon graphics. Is it on par with the simulation-heavy games like FIFA and PES? No. Is it still fun? Yeah. How much did I pay? €1,5.

Sea of Thieves – A friend roped me into playing a few hours and this is still such a special game. There’s a special kind of chill vibe in Sea of Thieves that I very much appreciate. I go on a quest or two, get attacked by a giant sea monster, climb aboard someone else’s ship and hide for fifteen minutes before helping repair hull breaches. It’s crazy how good it feels to simply sail a ship in Sea of Thieves. Core mechanics done well.

Moon Hunters – I almost forgot to put this on here. That’s how much and many computer games I’ve played this past month. Anyway, personality test RPG with plenty of button mashing delivers on all fronts and then some. It’s great how this game throws you into a world falling apart and let you piece together the mythology as you yourself ascend into the stars to become part of it. Really neat, occasionally beautiful, wonderful co-op experience. Best of all: you can play it in nice, bite-sized chunks of an hour or two an return to it later to keep building the mythology of the world. More. Short. Games! 

Overwatch – Mystery Heroes is a hit with the kids and removes the burden of choosing and being tactical. The Anniversary event and launch of the workshop also brought with it some really fun game modes. I’ve put hours into the Hero Gauntlet, as well as Lucio Surfing, Genji Parkour, Surviving the Highway, Slow Bullets and many more. I think this coming year will be very interesting and I wonder when we’ll see the first mod go stand-alone, Counter Strike style.

MOBILE
I spend more time than I’d be willing to admit playing idle games while listening to podcasts. Other people are apparently very invested in medieval fantasy incest TV. I just listen to shows about that time the Boston police force went on strike. 

Dots Series – Okay, so uninstalling Flipflop Solitaire didn’t mean I stopped just spacing out listening to podcasts playing some idle game. I just replaced that game with a revolving menu of three other games. In terms of matching games, these are pretty good.

Don’t Trip – Still have the high score. Niiiiice. The thing is, once I pick it up to check if I’ve been challenged as the king of Don’t Trip I have to play a few games. Then a few games turn into quite a few. Then on to very much a few. And before I know it it’s a lot.

Nordic Game Conference 2019
I went to the Nordic Game Conference for the first time since 2014 and while much felt different most things were actually the same. Few trade show/conference versions of a game will feel like a fair representation, but here are the four games I managed to try out:
Islabomba, Metamorphosis, Horsepital, Bubumbu.

 

Not a picture from NGC2019