What did I do for By The Stars in the last week? I playtested it with eight folks who had never heard of it before at Camp Nerdly in Triangle, Virginia. We had a wide gamut of experience with LARPs, gaming, and Star Wars. How did that go? Not as well as I was hoping, … Read more
Lot of prep to do for Camp Nerdly this weekend. And every minute I’m typing this us is a minute I ain’t prepping. I will, at some point, be making a version of By The Stars available as a collaborative Google Document. If you’d like to be able to comment on the document, I think … Read more
The “Myth of Planet Earth” playtest was extremely instructive. I took out the rules for being out-bid by your own Aspect tokens and the game ran way short and suffered for it. This is great! I now know that those particular rules are vitally important for both pacing and excitement. Perhaps the best part to … Read more
Here’s a confession for ya: When I’ve got a really tough problem, I talk to myself. So late last week I turned off the radio on my drive home and thought I’d talk about what wasn’t working in By The Stars. As last week’s entry indicated, I figured I would be discussing “Big Board” solutions … Read more
Due to the holiday and some particularly horrid days at work, there was not much concrete progress on BTS this week. However, I have been jotting notes on the game’s biggest single weakness: Lack of a cohesive, structured story with a sense of dramatic pacing. Many of my ideas currently revolve around a large central … Read more
This past Saturday, I went to Policon, a small, annual, private convention run by Don Corcoran. This year it was at Don’s home in Philly. Kat and I were only able to attend for one day, so I had planned to run With Great Power… and she had planned to run Serial. On Thursday, Don … Read more
Stefan, our intrepid pilot, posted a fantastic actual play report about our Sunday game. Thanks, Stefan!
We did it! We playtested By The Stars for the first time yesterday. My most heartfelt thanks to Kat, Bruce, Bill, Michele, Stefan, Don, and Jo for taking a chance, helping me out, and having a fun time in the process. Yes, that’s right. Not only did the playtest happen, and not only was it … Read more
My playtest is in six days and I’m not ready. It’s going to be extremely rough and my little panic-voice is screaming “Cancel the whole thing and take up something simple, like gardening or photography.” But I shall persevere. No matter how rough the game is this Sunday, WE WILL PLAYTEST. One of the bits … Read more
It’s Monday morning and I should be recovering from a too-full day of too-much gaming fun at NYC’s RECESS yesterday. Instead, I’m recovering from a nasty stomach flu that filched most of my weekend from me. I’m frustrated for not being able to go to RECESS, confer w/ the NYC nerds, actually play some games. … Read more