CLWG December 2015 – What you missed

Alexander leading the Dragon Attack! design session at the December 2015 CLWG meeting.

Today was the CLWG December 2015 meeting. We had a good turnout, 11 present. There were three sessions run, and I will look forward to the onside and offside reports.

CLWG December 2015 Sessions

A design session on the Trade mechanics for Jaap’s Guelphs & Ghibbelines megagame.
The third outing of my Afghan Farmer game The Other Side of the COIN (last run in Jan 2012).
A design & mugger game of Dragon Attack! by Alexander Kemp.

Traditional pointing at the map photo. CLWG December 2015

Trade for Guelphs & Ghibbelines

I was a little late owing to a mixup with trains on the way in. So I missed the start of Jaap’s Guelphs & Ghibbelines session. However I got the gist during the past tryout conversation. Basically Jaap needed a mechanism for feeding money into his megagame. This needed to have relatively straightforward to operate but also have some finesse. It needed to cover supply and demand, and change prices dynamically. It also needed to deal with impact of other game actions (military blockades etc).

The Other Side of the COIN

This is my game of being an Afghan farmer in a small remote valley sometime in the last decade or so. The players are mainly the family heads of a number of farms, with a police captain and an Imam. They’re trying to restore prosperity and have as good a life as they can manage in the circumstances.

I’d brought the folder for this as a backup game just in case. It had been sitting in my game bag since January 2012. I was a little unprepared for running it, but remembered most of it from the previous two outings. I learnt a few things for getting it going more promptly. I’ll do a proper onside report as a stand alone article.

Dragon Attack!

A design session that morphed into a fun game as we went along. Based on an idea by Alexander Kemp the last time he visited CLWG (in April 2014). It was a game about an attack by a dragon and a horde of orcs (and zombies) from beyond the mountains. Heroes appear to fight the dragon, most of whom end up toasted!