As promised, we had three full games this week!

World-wandering rock star Malcolm Craig facilitated a game of Contenders for Eric and myself. I had a really good time (and in fact, just wrote up some thoughts on the game on me blog). We had two tragic and one semi-sad tales of hardscrabble life in Depression-era Colorado.

Jon indeed ran some Giger Counter for a host of folks, which ended earlier than we did, so I have no idea how it went.

Finally, there was much fun to be overheard from the folks playing Spirit of the Exalted. Every so often I’d hear “Well, of COURSE I banish her with the Thousand Whirling Winds technique” or “I begin by exploding the island.” Richard seems to be turning into “The SotC guy” at SGBoston, which is neat.

I’ll be missing next week, what with Gen Con and all, but I’m sure much fun will continue to be had!

An exciting night, with special guests! Clint Krause, of Roanoke fame, was in town and joined us; though he offered up some Roanoke action, he ended up playing alongside me in a playtest of Jared Sorensen and Jason Robert’s Darkpages. I played The Fifth Son, an immigrant of pure Aztec blood cast adrift in the depths of the Glassworks. Clint played Deathmask, a disembodied ghost; we were joined by William Waters the Spirit Talker and another whose character name I don’t remember, but he was a master of the body via his knowledge of the humours. It was cool taking the game for a spin, and I think it generated some good feedback for the designers.

Jon Walton continued a serial version of his playtest of Vincent Bakers Afraid. They played long into the night, and it sounded like a good time as well.

See you next Wednesday!

Wow…we are BAD at keeping up.

In any case, I beleive that the worst of the holiday scheduling grossness is behind us, and we are off to a rocking start in the new year! Last night we had some SURPRISE GUESTS (Mr. Luke Crane all the way from the N-Y-C, the first appearance of Ben Lehman in his new haunts and Jared Sorenson decided to drop by as well), and we ended up with two very full tables.

I ran the first of a three-session series for Tim Kleinarts The Mountain Witch, with a total of 7 players! It went very well, and everyone seems pumped to continue more craaazy samurai tragic action. The trust is building, but the inevitable betrayals are starting to be seeded. Now we need only wrangle two more times that all 8 of us can meet, and it will the first medium-term game for SGBoston to get off the ground! Jon and Eben have nice things to say about the game so far.

Dev ran Crime & Punishment for a full table as well (5 players? 6?), and I heard it was weird but fun. I overheard lots of bullet-riddling and window-falling. Someday, Dev and myself will play in the same game. Some day.

Rocking time was had by all. I played in a game of Primetime Adventures, called “Reckless.” As per usual, we all declared that we would watch this show if it was on TV. Jon ran a game of Roanoke, a Wushu-derived horror game. He seemed pretty pumped about it. A good night, all in all! Now if only Tyler can get some of these games on the shelves…it’s not like they won’t sell, yo!

I missed writing about last week, so here’s some catchup:

On the 11th… I finally got a new copy of Once Upon a Time, a very cool story-telling card game. The game is a easy and a lot of fun, making it a great warmup / intro game.

Later, Jared Sorensen was nice enough to run his experimental headtrip of a game Lacuna. Meanwhile, Jonathan took the director’s chair for Primetime Adventures, a game about creating TV-style dramas. Our new hit series: SuperCrooks! a comic drama about low-powered superheroes trying to pull off a big heist.

(Expect heists to be a recurring theme. Hopefully we’ll have John O’B. back in the future to try out Caper!, a “host a heist” game.)

On the 18th… We had a smaller group, so we tried some lighter fare, some of us got their dungeonhack on with Dungeoneer, while others went back to Once Upon a Time, trying out some house rules and experiments to see what would happen.

This week, we used Wushu to play out an adventure in the campy style of classic fighting games such as “Mortal Combat”. In our story, the mysterious EnSyn Corporation summons the world’s greatest fighters to square off for the ultimate prize. A motley crew of fighters (including a Korean schoolboy/gangster, a Russian professional wrestler, and the secret Princess of Madagascar) basically levelled the entire fighting arena through the power of their action movie cliches.

Wushu is a fun and highly improvisational storygame; on the other hand, the level of on-the-fly description required can be outright exhausting. (But in a good way!)

I also wanted to mention that we’re thinking of having a special themed night for the 25th, to celebrate (the Wednesday before) Halloween! Hopefully we can cook up some spooky storygames for the night. Got any suggestions?

We wrapped up our third session – and we’re still seeing new faces. That’s very cool.

We again split into groups, with some continuing Hero’s Banner while Robert ran a game combining the rules of In Space! with a humorous fantasy setup, where the players were the monsters trying to keep nosy adventurers out of their dungeon. How’s that for a switch-up?

Also: construction of curtains for the Pandemonium basement space is well under way! Expect a more luxurious experience in the future.

We’re always looking for more folks willing to run a game or play in one. Leave a comment if you have some ideas for the future.

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Haha…I wrote a whole post before I saw that Dev did. I is smart, but here’s some more wrap-up info – N
Some returnee’s and at least one new face! Eight seems to be our magic number. Pandemonium’s increased drink selection was much appreciated, by me at least. We split into two groups, with Dev finishing up (I think) the game of Hero’s Banner, while Robert ran a humorous fantasy version of Greg Stolze’s In Spaaace! (info) (download) called Stink-Net Hollow for the rest of us.

I was the leader of a tribe of Salamanders (fire-lizards), and a totally neat situation-generation system of Robert’s devising put me into conflict with Jonathon’s Dire Ape’s over who owned which part of Stink-Nut Hollow, and led to the fact that Ebon’s insectasoid Myrmidon was betrothed to my daughter in order to unite our kin (even though she ended up falling for Todd’s Kobold in the end). It was good times, even though we went kind of designer-happy on him at the end of the game.

Start thinking about JiffyCon 2, in Western Mass, on November 11th! Also, if there’s something you wanna run, prep it and bring it in!

See y’all next week.

It was great to see that we had full couches with only a few repeaters from last week! Hopefully, some of you will come back in future weeks, though…

Anyway, with all the new faces we started out again with a round of Baron Munchausen. We started with discovering the south pole, and ended with escaping Venusian cyborgs. Ah, good times, good times.

We then split into two small groups. Jon Walton ran Agon, a game of greek heroism. We drove off some dirty Persians, and then brought the pain to a coven of lizardmen underneath the Labyrinth at Crete. Dev ran Hero’s Banner, a game of heroism and hard choices. I am given to understand that it went well, as well.

So, it seems like the interest is out there for this event, which is great! For the upcoming meetings, we wanted to emphasize that anyone should feel free to prepare a game for the night. We all want to play games, as well as run them! Various people have mentioned everything from the Rune RPG to straight-up D&D to The Pool. So, if you want, bring a game next time.

We’ll see you next Wednesday!

Our first meeting was a marked success, in my opinion! We had a total of eight folks for the evening, with one switch between games, so seven players per game. We first played The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchhausen first, with much telling of tales of derring-do badassery. Jon Walton won the game with his story how how his manservents plugged the hole in the dyke with his severed arm, which had been bitten off by flying Dutch sharks, saving Holland.

Our second game was InSpectres, in which we were joined by the inimicable Jared Sorenson himself. The franchise, run out of an old frat house in Cambridge, ended the game by billing the city of Boston for the complete destruction of Fanuil Hall (from the combined forces of an exploding vat of pressurized ectoplasm and the wave of phlem from the sneeze of some gargantuan underground creature). Good times.
We hope to see you all next week!