ASTG

I joined the Art of Story Through Gaming meetup towards the end of 2015, in time for a general get together at a comic shop on Melrose that included an awesome game of Cthulhu Wars (a Risk, Diplomacy, and Cthulhu mashup).

Since then I ran my Lego Star Frontiers one-shot for a few members (Aaron and Wale), but have been too busy to get anything going with any regularity. Hopefully that's about to change. I just started, and plan to run an Indie RPG night once/month... hopefully with regularity.

What games? I've got a list that I want to play, but also leave it currently open to discussion or desires by the participants. Also, more than one has mentioned they'd be happy to run things, so we'll see how it all plays out.

A Quiet Year

Starting with something light and fun, I ran The Quiet Year for friends Harry and Lucas. We went with a dry, arid environment. The resources chosen? 1. Sunshine. 2. Cactus fields. 3. Shoes. Of course shoes ends up being in abundance, as there is a large cargo truck, overturned, full of shoes.

During the game we had an abundance of Fuel, which helped us cause some various problems, more than anything. We had a sinkhole which turned into an fire ant hill. We had shoe armor. We had evil scholars from the local library. We had lots of man-eating coyotes.

All-in-all, we had a good time, but a full game of The Quiet Year does end up running around 4 hours, and by the end I think we were all a bit fried.

We agreed that to play more regularly, you'd probably want to go with the "fleeting" version of the Quiet Year, which has you remove 3 cards from each suit. This would mix up things and prevent something which would start to feel repetitive with the game.

That, or it would be excellent to have alternate question cards. Anyone working on that? I've thought of doing something that would be more little kid-friendly (not necessarily in theme, more in the scope of the questions and wording).