Adept Play
These posts include any socio-political content, regardless of how fantastically or realistically presented, however direct or indirect, which factors directly into the events and experiences of play. Disclosure: I do not credit any claim to “non-political” content.
I got to play Dialect at IndieCON, although only one of the three phases of play, so these thoughts are certainly tentative. I haven’t read the rules either. “It’s the game about the rise and fall of a language!” True as far as it goes, but that’s a stalking horse, good at drawing people in…
One of the sessions I played at IndieCON was for Edoardo Cremaschi’s Marks on the Skin (you may remember him from Little Katy’s Tea Party in Consulting). I am wondering whether it is really good for a person to play several Cremaschi and Pettersson games in a short span of time, as each designer quite…
We’ve been playing Sorcerer for two months! Five meetings and four sessions of play so far, and ongoing. This is with Laura and Grégory, both located in France, and thus set in Marseille. I was nonplussed to discover that neither had ever set a game they’d played in their own country. I went a little…
This was my first scheduled consult session at Lucca. As usual, I had no expectations, but if I did, they would have been challenged by the degree that people came prepared. Francesco brought a deck of cards that looked ready to print. The title in English is “The Trench,” so my first question, as I’m…
When I finally got to the Indie Palace area at Lucca, in the Palace Hotel, Beatrice Da Vela and Filippo Zolesi, the latter a.k.a. our very own Pippo Jedi at the Patreon, came to see me with their game Quella Volta Che. It’s not funny or cute, but head-on, headlong into the thick of sexual…
Francesco Zani is busy with lots of game designs, as you’ll see in the videos of my consulting sessions at Lucca. Dictat is a joint effort among him, Davide Cavadni, and Francesco Rugerford Sedda, whom (the latter) I met at Modena Play early last year. Dictat’s a card game that relies on LARP-like subroutines, “oh…
Stefano first talked with me about this game about a year and a half ago, at Modena Play. At the time, he was anxious about how it might be received, about whether or how one might be designated unsuited or ineligible for authoring such a thing, and about representation in general. Dozens of playtests later,…
My other Gauntlet game! Unlike the Cosmic Zap session, running Champions of any stripe in a convention setting is no picnic for prep. But the hardest part is not the character construction … it’s the fact that the players will not have the necessary buy-in and sense of “let’s do this” per interesting item or…
I guess it won’t surprise anyone that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been tapped again for a Hunted. This time there’s no supervillain component, it’s just (“just”) the agency, so in looking for villains to create, and seeing the Crusader on the Curator’s sheet, I focused on the “trapped between two worlds” feature that both…