A few days after Big Bad Con, and I knew a Story Game Glendale meeting was coming right up. Helps with the little downer that I was expecting coming from such a non-stop story high during the last weekend.
We met up at Game Haus Cafe again, which so far is working pretty well. The disadvantage is the cost, but man, those advantages: 1000 board games. Great tables. Good food and coffee. A decent environment regarding background volume.
I carpooled there with my fried Lucas. We chatted, and played two rounds of Lost Cities.
David showed up with a friend Mark, and we dived into it. Did a few pitches, and ended up going with Roguish, which I had played the prior weekend. This is a very rules light, story game that emulates the dungeon crawl of Rogue, the old ASCII game from the early '80s.
Things that worked well:
- We used my little Lego head pieces of different colors as our avatars. (Don't forget the little head icon is exactly what your character looked like in Rogue... bonus!)
- This matched the colored index cards we used for our characters, which made it super easy to identify who was who.
- There was some confusion when people had gone their turn, and when they could or couldn't come to "aid" another... I got to use my customized spotlight cards (based on some others... I'll link to it when I find them!) Although these were made for other RPGs such as Dungeon World, I found these worked really well for this game.
- Everyone was very open to the open-ended narrative structure (or I should really say non-structure) of the game, and brought cute little stories, conflicts, and individualized cards for the game.
What didn't work well:
- The game is so very story-ish... I think most folks want a little mechanics there. Talking to Lucas on the way home, this was exactly the problem. Even if that mechanic was uber-light, and just let you track the 5 hit points you have, or something. In fact, this would more accurately emulate the original games, perhaps.
Mark had to go, and it was getting late. We could've probably fit in something small, but decided to go with a game of Splendor instead. One of the advantages of Game Haus!
A game of roguish.
Four characters into the dungeon depths.
The final fight! Legendary Wicked Forks with their pair of rabid rats! Our friend the werefish bard getting some Air Piranha groupies. A character death. Epic ending.