York Board Games Convention

Yesterday I went to the York Board Games Convention, a lovely little con held at St Peter's Junior School, not far from the centre of York. This is its second year, and I hope it has many more.

Although it’s a three-day con, I went only on Friday. (I only found out a few weeks earlier, and life admin stuff meant I couldn’t go all three days.)

The convention starts at 9 am – which is the same time as the first ttrpg slot that I was booked into. Since I had no idea how busy it would be, I arrived around 8:45 and found three or four gamers waiting to go in. One of the organisers said we could go in as the café was ready to serve, so I had a cup of tea and a bacon butty while I waited. Perfect.

DIE RPG

As it was, one of our players ran late, and we didn’t start until after 9:30 a.m…

I wasn’t disappointed by the delay; it gave us time to get to know Tom, the GM, and the other players. I didn’t know Tom, but it turns out that he had also been at Furnace. 

Anyway, DIE RPG is the game of the comic of the same name – which I haven’t read. But the conceit is that a group of ttrpgers become the heroes of their own nightmarish ttrpg. (It’s wonderfully meta.)

And TL;DR – this was probably the best ttrpg session I played in all year.

The GM played James, the DM who TPK’d our group all those years ago. But James had been provoked, his crush had turned him down, and his other friends had stolen from him. And me? I played his bullied younger brother – and I smashed his prize Warhammer model.

So we spent about half an hour building our “players”- fleshing them out and figuring out their dysfunctional relationships with James and their screwed-up lives. 

The game starts with James inviting us back for “one last game”, and before we know it we are magically transported into a nightmarish fantasy world where we must fight for survival. But first we turn into our characters – I was the Rage Knight, a warrior with anger management issues (focused on James, of course).

Then we had a short but extremely satisfying, emotionally draining dungeon that ended with us finally defeating James and deciding to return home rather than stay to live in the fantasy.

It was so good (and draining) that I struggle to imagine how you’d play DIE for much longer.

The Window

After finishing DIE, I perused the rest of the con and saw a “looking for players” beacon at a table where they were playtesting The Window. So I settled down for a game.

According to the site:

The Window is a dramatic football transfers board game for 2-4 players.

You are the manager of a club fighting to survive in the top division, and the transfer window is only open for another week. Scout players, outbid your rivals, hijack deals at the worst possible moment, and get your signings over the line before the window slams shut.

Anyway, it’s an auction game where you build your squad by bidding on players. The theme didn’t inspire me (I’m not a football fan), but I enjoyed the game. Obviously, I didn’t stand a chance – I was playing against the designers. I came fourth, unable to keep my team from relegation. 

The game itself is fairly easy to understand – but the strategies aren’t so clear.

After that, I did look around to see if there were other games I could join. I could have taken something out of the library and tried to find players, but I was tired (and still drained from DIE), so I headed home.

Some thoughts about the convention generally

The location is lovely. The café is nice, and having individual rooms for the ttrpgs is lovely. I was there on a Friday, when it was quiet. I imagine the weekend is much busier. (I wonder what they will do when they need to expand.)

As mentioned above, they might want to review the scheduling for the ttrpgs.

Communications isn’t great. I think there must be a mailing list or something somewhere, but I can’t find a link to it on the website. When I first learned about the con, there didn’t appear to be a way to sign up to the ttrpgs. It turns out you do that through the app – which appeared randomly on the site one day. I’m sure there was an announcement somewhere...

(Now I've bought a ticket, I may well be on the mailing list...)

They have a Facebook group, and while it has some useful announcements, it’s not a place for the community to post reviews or photos. (So I couldn’t work out if anyone was arranging games, for example.)

I hope it’s a success, and maybe next year I will run something.

Yorkshire Tabletop Gamers: A bigger project than expected

So this turned out to be a bigger project than I originally expected…

Where are all the gamers?

So I’ve wondered this for a while, but it’s annoying that there’s no one place to find other gamers.

This came home to me recently when I discovered a three-day board games convention in York (about 10 miles away, as the crow flies) happening at the end of the month. And I didn’t know about it!

So I decided to use Blogger to create a directory of gaming groups/events in Yorkshire, and I called it Yorkshire Tabletop Gamers. Each club or event is a separate entry, and you can use the labels to filter them.

How hard can that be?

So many groups…

So I started with the easy stuff – Furnace and North Star and Demon’s Wake and the East Leeds group. Events and groups that I already knew about. But as I searched, I found more and more groups…

I had underestimated two things. First, how many clubs and events there are in Yorkshire – and how big Yorkshire actually is!

What is a tabletop game?

One of my early decisions was what to include. I originally included larps (and have added the BOX Larp Festival), but although they’re adjacent, they aren’t tabletop games, so I didn’t include them.

And (at the moment), I’m not including chess clubs. Perhaps I should, but for now, no.

So by a tabletop gamer I’m looking at board games, ttrpgs, wargames and social deduction games.

And then I found Boardgameclubs.org

Then I discovered Boardgameclubs.org, a map-enabled site that makes mine pretty redundant. Or it would, if it were more complete. It has filters for ttrpgs, but it’s clearly aimed at board game gamers.

And it covers the world, rather than focusing just on Yorkshire. So I’m not giving up.

Shops and stores

I haven’t decided what to do about shops and stores yet. I will probably include them, as it’s nice to visit somewhere and know where you can buy board games and ttrpgs. It’s harder to support them if you don’t know they exist.

And many game shops host game nights, so that’s a good reason to include them.

Status: now

So right now, I’ve pretty much exhausted all the cons and events that I could find in my immediate part of Yorkshire. 

I still have clubs to add that are on boardgames.org, and I’ll work my way through them. And I also need to share the project so that others can find me. And, of course, add the shops.

Yorkshire Tabletop Gamers.

Furnace 2026

It’s a mid-October weekend; therefore it’s my annual pilgrimage to Furnace, Sheffield's ttrpg convention.

Here’s what I played.

Saturday

Fiasco (Folly and Fortune)

I started my weekend by bringing Fiasco (second edition). I let the players choose the playset, and they chose the Jane Austen-y Folly and Fortune deck. (Hmm, last year I ran Good Society at Furnace. Am I being typecast?)

I pitched Fiasco because, when it was time to decide what to offer at Furnace, I felt burned out and couldn’t face preparing anything. Fiasco requires no preparation – it can be played straight from the box. And of course, I really like Fiasco – and I get to play as well.

I was slightly worried, as one of the few times Fiasco hasn’t worked was when I played the Fame and Fortune playset at another convention. But I needn’t have worried…

I played Lydia Pembroke, who started the game engaged to Sir Edward Henry St John-Hill (played by Daniel), who painted poodles. Sir Edward was secretly engaged to Elizabeth (played by Fergus) and, during the game, proposed to Samuel (Camille) and Harriet (Becky) as well. 

It was a crazy, hilarious game. I ended up married to Samuel (a double wedding with Elizabeth, who married my father), and Samuel ended up trying to murder Sir Henry using an exotic man-eating flytrap.

Mothership (The B Team)

After lunch, I joined a game of Mothership run by James. I played Lt Rook, the old hand, and the rest of the squad was Lt Sutter (Tony), PFC Bridge (Laurence), and PFC Voss (Ric). 

The scenario was a simple rescue mission: rescue a scientist (who we accidentally blew up with a grenade; I’m not putting that in my report), deactivate the comms (because bad things were going on), and set the reactor to safe mode (which we failed to do).

(On Sunday, James ran another team through the situation as we had left it – I don’t know what they did, but hopefully they sorted the reactor out.)

Although Mothership is supposed to be deadly, we didn’t have any PC deaths – although it was extremely close at the end. I survived without a scratch by being in charge and sending the others in first.

As for Mothership as a system, I thought it was fine. I’ve run a lot of ALIEN, so I found myself comparing the two games. My preference is for ALIEN with its D6s and agendas, but I’d happily play Mothership again. (The only thing I really struggled with was the slightly vague setting – it felt ALIEN-esque, but did that mean that motion detectors and smartguns? What about shields or lifeform scanners? And how human are androids? A setting sheet would have gone a long way to help.)

Sunday

Offworlders (Routine Maintenance)

Sunday started with Offworlders, run by Steve. I knew nothing about Offworlders, but it turned out to be a sort of PbtA does Traveller/Firefly. I played a smuggler, Kiva, while around the table were Thwart (a thief played by Simon), Garvin (a fighter played by Andy), Lara (a psychic played by Oliver) and Athena (a hacker played by Tom). Yes, effectively four character classes – fighters, rogues, and two types of wizards (hackers or psychics).

Something about the system didn’t quite work for me, though I’m struggling to explain exactly what I mean. It’s a feeling rather than anything specific, but if I knew it better, I would either get used to it or pinpoint what doesn’t work for me.

Anyway, our ship needed expensive repairs, and we needed lots of money, quickly. So after exploring a couple of options, we found a local crime lord and ran some errands for him. Thanks to a combination of good ideas and good rolls, we succeeded without too many problems. Sometimes a plan really does come together…

Monster of the Week (Red Mask)

Furnace finished with a Korean investigation for Monster of the Week, run by Sue. I played The Divine, and my co-hunters were The Spooky (played by Steve), The Chosen (Elaine), The Expert (Tim) and The Exile (Nox). Our monster-hunting gang were Korean rich kids, with hangers-on. I was one of the hangers-on.

Our mystery involved a creepy Korean urban legend about a red-masked woman terrorising schoolgirls. Our investigation involved meeting and placating toilet goddesses (apparently a real Korean thing), social media and a sad suicide. We put the trouble ghost to rest using Big Money, rather than Big Magic or a Big Fight, which felt appropriate if a little anticlimactic.

Despite the monsters, the scariest part of the investigation was the Korean school system…

As for Monster of the Week, I’ve run it a few times, but I find it’s almost too trad for PbtA. I was interested to see how another GM would run it, but it still seemed more trad than the idea of PbtA I have in my head (which has more inter-player conflict – but that may just be me).

Furnace 2026

And that was Furnace 2026. Good games and of course a chance to catch up with lots of old friends, and make some new ones.

I’m looking forward to 2027, although I have a horrible feeling it will clash with another weekend…

Bad timing

Mrs H has been frowning at me recently because four large parcels have recently arrived – three Kickstarters which arrived within two weeks of each other, and I bought myself something for Mrs H to give to me on my birthday.

Kickstarters

The three Kickstarters were:

Cold City/Hot War 2e

Cold City/Hot War second editions (and the only ttrpgs on this list). I’m prepping a Cold City investigation right now and will hopefully run that in a couple of weeks, when my regular Monday night group completes its current adventure (The Dying Earth).

Having read Cold City, I have Views and there will be a review in due course, followed by an after-action report.

And then I’ll crack open Hot War and run a game of that.

Kavango Lodges

In Kavango, each player has an African conservation reserve and uses card drafting to fill their reserve with animals. It looks gorgeous and plays quickly. Kavango Lodges adds a spatial element the original game lacked.

Since the first edition, the designers have updated almost all the cards, so they created Let’s Go Kavango, a travel version that includes all the new cards but doesn’t use the changed elements. Owners of the original edition can simply swap the LGK cards for their originals, which is a nice idea rather than just having to throw the old cards away.

I like Kavango, but the family don’t like it enough for it to see the table often. It has a solo mode, which means I can scratch my Kavango itch whenever I want. (But that's never as good as playing against a human.)

I’m not sure how often I’ll play Let’s Go Kavango, but we’ll see.

John Company 2e

John Company second edition arrived this week. It’s a monstrous game, quite unlike the board games I normally enjoy, as it’s long and “heavy”. But I was fascinated by the review on Shut Up and Sit Down, and the more I looked into the game, the more fascinated I became.

In John Company, players take the role of families running the East India Company. But you don’t really care whether the EIC succeeds or fails – you’re just looking to extract as much wealth as you can from it and then retire to a fabulous stately home. So it’s an extremely contentious subject, and one I’m looking forward to exploring.

Mrs H has already said she doesn’t want to play it (I would have been surprised had she said the opposite), so I hope to play it at clubs and conventions.

Intriguingly, a roleplaying/megagame version of John Company called The Company Archives is being developed.

John Company has a solo mode, so I can learn how to play it.

The gift

Buying presents is a nightmare. The best advice I’ve heard is, “Ask them what they want and get them that.” After all, I have no idea what gardening/patchwork apparatus Mrs H has her eye on, and she obviously has no idea which games I might be interested in. 

So what we do is when we see something we want but can’t really justify it to ourselves, we buy it for the other to give as a present.

Which is how I know I have Sidereal Confluence heading my way in November.

Sidereal Confluence

Sidereal Confluence is a negotiation game for 4-9 players, with simultaneous play, set in space, and asymmetric powers. It sounds right up my street – lots of players haggling over stuff, alien races that each play differently, and simultaneous play so there’s no tedious hanging around waiting for anyone’s turn.

(And this review from No Pun Included helped.)

I can’t imagine playing this too often at home, so I hope to play it at conventions and clubs. It should be easier to get to the table than John Company…

One-in, one-out

To placate Mrs H, I try to follow a one-in, one-out policy.

I recently sold all my Magic: the Gathering cards, so that gives me a few brownie points for John Company. For Kavango Lodges, I put The Crew into the Oxfam pile (but that was then taken out by my daughter, which I think still counts).

I don’t know what I’m going to do about Cold City/Hot War yet, but at least it doesn’t take up much space on the bookshelf. I don’t think she’s noticed.

Re-reading 20th-century science fiction

I’ve been in a retrospective mood lately, and I’ve revisited several old SF novels that have been sitting on my shelf. They’re there because I wanted to re-read them. And now that I have, how do they stack up? And will I keep them?

(I didn’t plan to read one novel from each decade, so that’s a happy coincidence. I even read them in chronological order – also a coincidence.)

Way Station by Clifford D Simak (1963)

Clifford D Simak is famous for his “pastoral SF” – gentle stories about decent people faced with alien mysteries. For me, Way Station is one of his finest.

Way Station is set in 1963 or so and concerns Enoch Wallace, a US Civil War veteran in charge of an alien “way station,” a stopover used by aliens travelling from one place to another. However, Wallace’s unusual longevity has attracted the attention of the US government…

In a modern-day story, attracting the government would be a bad thing – but in Simak’s world, the government merely watches. Wallace has done nothing wrong, so the government just watches. Except it turns out that they haven’t just watched Wallace; they’ve also dug up the mysterious grave (which contains an alien body), and that causes an interstellar crisis.

Anyway, the story also involves teleportation (Simak gets around the teleportation-is-murder problem by giving creatures a “soul”), alien maths that predicts nuclear war on Earth, “ghosts” that Enoch creates to keep himself company, an unruly neighbour who causes trouble, and Lucy with mysterious powers. It also ends on a deus ex machina, which is a shame.

I think there might be a freeform in there somewhere. I certainly like the idea of a game involving a way station, unsuspecting humans, and aliens. So I’m keeping it for now.

(I picked up this copy in a second-hand bookshop somewhere. I am sure I originally read the Methuen paperback with Chris Moore starships (which didn’t suit the story), but I guess I lost that. Instead I have this 1969 US edition with a baffling cover and “80p” scribbled in pencil on the inside cover.)

Who Goes Here? By Bob Shaw (1977)

Oh my, this hasn’t aged well. Bob Shaw was one of the great SF writers of the 70s and 80s, and is probably most famous for 1974’s Orbitsville, which won the British Science Fiction Award for best novel.

He was also a mainstay of the convention scene, with his hilarious SF talks (I managed to see him once at the Brighton Worldcon in 1987). Most of his short story collections contain at least one humorous story.

And Who Goes Here? is his humorous novel, which concerns Space Legion new recruit Warren Peace. Recruits to the Space Legion join the legion to forget – specifically, to have that part of their memories that they are trying to forget removed. And Warren Peace can’t remember anything.

Anyway, it has one good joke (Warren Peace), and I found the rest painful. Apparently there was a sequel in 1993, but I missed it.

My favourite Bob Shaw stories are Other Days, Other Eyes (about slow glass), A Wreath of Stars, and Orbitsville (before it became a trilogy). And I may find Orbitsville a disappointment when I re-read it.

As for Who Goes Here?, it’s destined for Oxfam.

For Love of Mother-Not by Alan Dean Foster (1983)

I was a huge Alan Dean Foster fan in my teens and twenties. I discovered Bloodhype at the school bookshop when I was 12 or so and immediately fell in love with the Humanx Commonwealth, ADF’s mostly-optimistic future.

I picked up this copy of For Love of Mother-Not on a school exchange trip to California – around then it was getting harder to get ADF’s novels in the UK, and I started relying on Forbidden Planet.

For Love of Mother-Not holds up surprisingly well despite struggling with the writing itself (it’s not a punchy, modern style of writing); I kept wanting to read on. I don’t remember my younger self being critical of the writing style, but I’m more alert to it now.

But the ideas in For Love of Mother-Not reminded me why I loved ADF’s Humanx Commonwealth so much. It’s an evocative universe, with colourful worlds, interesting characters, immense creatures and wondrous technology: the Devilope, mudders, skimmers, needlers, duralloy and much more (including mysterious ancient technologies that I just loved, although this novel doesn’t have any of that).

I noted a few uncomfortable topics that are (mostly) glossed over, such as mindwipe and eugenics. And Flinx, the hero, has a lethal pet that occasionally kills – but only in self-defence, so that’s okay. It’s certainly something my younger self didn’t notice.

However, re-reading For Love of Mother-Not has whetted my appetite for more Humanx stories. I’m keeping it for now.

Clarke County, Space by Allen Steele (1990)

The newest book in this (short) list, and only a few pages in, I can tell it’s an easier read. Clarke County, Space is written in a more modern style and is more to my liking.

Set in 2050-ish, Clarke County, Space is set in the first artificial space colony orbiting Earth. It’s the second book in Steele’s “Near Space” series (the others are Orbital Decay, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night, and A King of Infinite Space), which is an optimistic future where we embraced space travel in the 1990s. (So a similar vibe to For All Mankind – without being an alternate history.)

Anyway, Clarke County, Space is a thriller, with a small-town cop, a mob assassin, a mysterious hacker, Elvis Presley’s reincarnation, and a nuclear warhead. Everything is eventually resolved, if a bit messily and with a high body count.

Inevitably, something set in the near future feels more dated than the other novels. There are videotapes, diskettes – and, of course, no internet.

I imagine the Near Space series will be good inspiration for Mongoose’s upcoming Pioneer game. But if you’re going to do that, I would start with Lunar Descent, which is my favourite of the series.

Am I keeping it? No, I don’t think so. While I found it arguably better written than the other books here, there’s not enough in it for me to keep it.

Tyrannical hobbies

Earlier in the year, Mrs H complained to me about her “tyrannical” hobbies. She likes gardening and has an allotment, but at certain times of the year (notably spring), the garden and allotment become very demanding. If you don’t stay on top of them, then the weeds run wild, and the seedlings wither and die.

At the moment, for me, it feels like freeform larps have become tyrannical and are squeezing out ttrpgs.

This is all self-inflicted, of course. But here we are.

So these are my tyrannical freeforms.

The Highgate Club

As I recently wrote, I ran The Highgate Club at Continuum. It went well, but it’s not a case of just printing out a freeform and running it. There were a few other steps:

• Printing the game and stuffing 14 character packets.
• Creating a casting questionnaire and then sending it to the players and waiting for them to complete it. And nagging those who didn’t.
• Casting the game.
• Populating individual player folders on Google Drive with their character information and then sending it to them so they can read their characters in advance. (I use the YAMM mailmerge programme, which is pretty nifty and lets me track whether everyone has seen the emails.)
• Dealing with player queries. (Fortunately, there weren’t any this time.)

Then I ran the game.

I could have left it there, but during the game I realised there were a few improvements I could make, so I did. (And I also decided to try ChatGPT as an editor, and it picked up dozens of inconsistencies. So that was useful, but obviously more work for me.)

I’ve now re-pdfed The Highgate Club, so at least that is out of my head.

The Deadly Library

The Deadly Library is a game I’ve been preparing for Freeform Games. It’s pretty close to being ready for publication, and we’re in playtesting (by our customers). So that means getting the files ready for playtesting – and then updating them as comments come in.

Megan and her friends playtested The Deadly Library a few days ago, which was great but meant going through much of the pre-game rigmarole described above. (Although I didn’t cast in advance, so there was that.)

Following the game, I had plenty of edits to make – and that meant informing the other playtesters as well.

Playtesting is due to finish at the end of September, so that’s going to drag on for a while.

(By the way, if you are interested in playtesting one of our games, we advertise playtesting opportunities in our newsletter.)

The Enigma Machines

The Enigma Machines is episode seven of my series of SF first-contact freeforms. I spent the first half of 2026 writing it, and now I’m running it online next week and then again at Consequences in November.

So for the online game, I don’t need to print and stuff envelopes; I have all the casting and populating folders to do. Plus I also have to promote it and get players to sign up. (I really hate that bit; it’s the main reason I’ve never tried to form a Leeds larp club or a local board games/ttrpg club.)

With the game a few days away, there are a few things I need to sort out:

• Send an email to the players reminding them of the game (it wouldn’t be the first time that players have forgotten about an online game…)
• Deal with any last-minute dropouts
• Redecorate my Discord server for the game
• Prepare my notes and make sure I’m ready

Plus, as ever, there will be amendments. And in September, I need to think about getting it ready for Consequences (which means repeating the steps I did for The Highgate Club).

Read about the series here.

Assassination in Space

Assassination in Space is a 24-player murder mystery for Freeform Games. It’s the next game I’m working on, and I’m slowly working through the characters and providing feedback to the author.

Once The Deadly Library is published, Assassination in Space will be my focus for Freeform Games.

Café Casablanca

Café Casablanca is a 75-player weekend freeform larp that I’m helping to GM. It was written about 35-40 years ago, and it shows. It was last run in 2014, and it needs a bit of TLC to get it into shape.

There are seven of us working on this, so it’s not all on my shoulders. That’s fortunate. Anyway, right now I am in charge of sorting out relationship abilities for every character.

We are running Café Casablanca in February 2027. As we approach that date, I expect it will demand more and more attention.

(Register here – there’s a good chance you’ll get a place.)

So what?

So all this freeform activity leaves me with less headspace to do some of the other things I want to do.

Such as…

• Write a Traveller scenario. I have ideas, but I need time to figure out the details. (I had hoped to run this at Furnace – but not this year.)
• Finish a partly-written Other London investigation.
• Finish updating my Good Society one-shot based on my notes from Continuum.
• Revisit Hillfolk.
• Run other ttrpgs – I have Urban Shadows burning a hole on my shelf, and Cold City/Hot War are expected to land soon. Plus I have other games I’d love to run.

But not until I put those tyrannical freeforms to bed.

Continuum 2026

 The last weekend of July saw Megan and me at Continuum for a weekend of gaming. Mostly freeforms, with some ttrpgs and a few board games. Plus seeing lots of old friends and talking nonsense all weekend. What’s not to love?

Playing Mycelia in the atrium

TL;DR: We had a great time!

Here’s what we did:

Friday

We arrived mid-afternoon and didn’t do much other than check in, chat to a few friends, and have a bite to eat.

Four Gods and a Funeral

Four Gods and a Funeral is an 18-player fantasy game written and run by Megan Jones. It is set in the world of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Five Gods books, which I’ve not read. Luckily, I didn’t need to know anything about the world as it was all contained in the game materials.

I played Sarlos, the 18-year-old heir to the Vardo empire – and my mother’s puppet. And not just my mother’s puppet – I had been kidnapped twice and used in other players’ machinations. So I was a fairly useless kid and pawn to the real powers.

I was also in love with a queen, and was trying to work out how to marry another character. (Unfortunately, that other character was played by Megan, which made that side of my game somewhat awkward and we just didn’t go there. That was a casting goof by Megan J, but wasn’t a huge problem.)

Anyway, the game was good – political and angsty. There was a whole side of the game (magic) that I didn’t know about and, amazingly, I think I was still the heir to Vardo at the end of the game. That’s probably because I was no real threat to anyone…

Game material reading order

One thing that I noticed when reading my character information was that my character made much more sense after I had read the game background material. It did make me wonder if we ought to spend a little more time thinking about the order in which players read their characters.

For me, most of my games have a “setting and cast list” document which I send to players with the casting questionnaire. That way the overall setting is the first thing they read, and that puts everything else in context.

(Hopefully they haven’t forgotten that when they receive their character – but I do always give them another copy of that initial document.)

Similarly for Freeform Games, the front cover of the character booklet has the same short boilerplate text roughly setting the scene and explaining the setting. Hopefully players read that first.

When a freeform character pack contains several documents, it's not always clear in which order to read them, and I find that can cause some confusion. Anyway, something for me to ruminate on. 

Saturday

After a hearty breakfast, we had nothing scheduled, so Megan went back to bed, and I played a few light board games. After a meal deal from the Co-Op, it was time for our first proper game.

Hades Plan

In Hades Plan (for 12 players and written/run by Ray Hodson and Simon Clark), we were Greek gods who were putting together the third series of a reality TV show that involved lots of puzzles. So while being bickering gods, we had to come up with ideas for a show. (Ray and Simon provided lots of props.)

I was Demeter, the ancient Greek goddess of agriculture, the harvest, and grain. (I’ve just looked that up; I know next to nothing about Greek gods.) We chose the gods pretty much at random, and ironically I ended up being one of Megan’s parents. (Megan was playing Persephone.)

The game was silly and energetic, but not really my cup of tea. It’s the kind of larp where the players bring the game (characters were two paragraphs long). That’s okay, but I have two issues with games like this:

First, they rely on the players having a common understanding of the game world. As already noted, I know next to nothing about Greek gods (or Norse gods or Roman gods for that matter). That’s less of an issue when nobody knows anything about Greek gods, but in this case we had a lot of players who knew a lot about them. So less fun for me.

Second, the games often work on the basis that whoever is loudest gets their way. And I’m not a shouty type.

So it wasn’t really my kind of game, but those for whom it was their kind of fun seemed to have a good time.

With that done, it was time for tea.

The Highgate Club

After tea, I ran The Highgate Club, a game I co-wrote at Peaky back in 2010. I ran it with Alan Paull, one of the authors, who brings the Continuum board games library.

The Highgate Club is a private member’s club filled with weird people – aliens, elves, immortals, zombies, Atlanteans, cyborgs – even an angel. It has lots of crazy plots, and while I expected it to take about two and a half hours, the players were still going strong at three hours in. 

It definitely needs two GMs, though. So I’ll update the guidance. (Along with a load of other tweaks – as always, I found lots of little things needed improving.)

Megan told me she enjoyed it, which was a relief as she influences which games I run at Continuum.

The Highgate Club before the players got their hands on it...

Sunday

We had another free morning on Sunday, so Megan and I played Mycelia and Sanctuary, a couple of weightier board games. We preferred the sprouting, fruiting and decaying mushroom fun of Mycelia over the zoo-building fun of Sanctuary.

Good Society

After lunch, I ran a tabletop session of Good Society while Megan played in a horde larp.

For Good Society, I had four players and used the pregenerated playset I talked about here, updated to use the second edition reputation consequences.

My four players were all blokes but had no problem playing female characters. One had run a swashbuckling game of Good Society the day before, and agreed that trying to create a coherent backstory at a convention takes a long time.

As is often the case with Good Society (and Hillfolk), the game took a few scenes to get running, but it didn’t take long before the players were busy creating drama and interfering with each other. Most of the time I just listened, occasionally suggesting scenes between characters or jumping in when I felt that a scene was over. (That last skill is important – players are often so caught up in their characters that they don’t spot the obvious end to a scene.)

I had been slightly hesitant to bring Good Society to Continuum, as it’s very different to many other ttrpgs (and Hillfolk was a bit of a struggle last year). But unlike last year, where I got the impression it was the last choice for at least one player, all my players were keen to play Good Society – and wanted to play it because it was so different from the other games on offer. And as a result, we had a great game.

(Good Society is like Fiasco and Hillfolk in that it is very dependent on the players. With the right group, these games are brilliant. But with more reserved players (or players who expect more direction from a GM), they can struggle.)

A few thoughts

So much going on: With four main characters and eight minor characters, I found it hard to keep on top of everything that was going on in the table. There were main arcs, yes, but there were also a lot of minor things happening that didn’t always get picked up later.

(I couldn’t now, for example, tell you much about what the story – and it’s only 48 hours later as I write this.)

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but worth bearing in mind. I think I’d need to take a lot of notes were I playing a game over several sessions. (My recent online game of Good Society only had three players, which probably made it easier to hold in my head.)

Perhaps I need to figure out a way to take notes.

System doesn’t matter: Once again, I found that we didn’t use many resolve tokens. One or two, perhaps? The game flows brilliantly without needing the tokens, and for most of the game they sat on the table, ignored. (At least with Hillfolk, a drama token is at stake in each scene – even if they don’t really have much use either. Perhaps I should try mashing the two systems together?)

So that was Good Society. While I was doing that, Megan thoroughly enjoyed her larp. We had tea, another game of Mycelia (where Megan thrashed me), and then it was our final game.

Plan 8 from Outer Space

Plan 8 is an eight-player game written by Mike Young and run by Ezzy Pearson and Vikki Sterling. It’s an extremely silly game of aliens completing a post-mortem of their previous plans for dealing with Planet Earth, and preparing their 9th plan.

Broadly, the game consists of being in a ghastly business meeting (it even has a PowerPoint deck), trying NOT to take the blame for the previous plans, and then coming up with daft ideas for the next one.

It’s lots of chaotic fun, with a lot of laughter. It’s not a good game for wallflowers, though – be prepared to be loud and argue your corner.

I played the Head of Marketing, while Megan played the Head of Accounts. Her costume was so much better than mine, but that was true of most games. It was about two hours of frantic fun.

Head of Accounts

(The game takes its name from the legendarily bad movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space. I’ve not seen the movie, so I can’t say if it is in any way relatable.)

Locked in

We had one final bit of excitement on Sunday as the bathroom door handle broke and trapped Megan in the bathroom. Luckily, I was able to get help from reception, and it was sorted, but it could have been serious had I not been around. I don’t know how easy it would be to raise the alarm from inside the bathroom.

Monday

And after breakfast on Monday, we headed home.