Everypony was There (Cups turns 7)

Warning: This is kind of a mommy-blog post about my daughter’s birthday, so if you don’t want to read the details of some stranger’s kid’s party skip this post.  There’s no roleplaying or board gaming in it – except we did play a round of Seven Wonders while the kids tried to kill the pillow slalom with swords.   It’s mostly just me laying out what we did because somebody else might be able to use it.

I’m still adapting to the idea of having a seven-year-old, but there she is, all seven years of dress-wearing pink-loving makeup-requesting her.  And this year, in addition to makeup (makeup? seriously, where is she going to wear lipstick and eyeshadow?  To first grade?) she wanted a My Little Pony party.  This may or may not have been triggered by the Pinkie Pie piñata we found at Wal-Mart, but there’s something about throwing a party for my seven-year-old with a My Little Pony theme that appeals to my inner seven-year-old.

So My Little Pony it was.  And operating on the guiding principle (evidence-based even) that money is best spent on experiences rather than stuff, party planning began.  The problem was that Cups wanted to invite Friends that Are Boys, and first grade involves the awkward stage of gender differentiation where it’s So Not Cool for boys to do Girl Things.  If we’d waited a few years for this theme then we could have invoked the Brony Principle, but seven-year-old boys are pretty clear on the whole Girl Stuff problem.  We didn’t want them to feel unwelcome, so we had to balance the Girl Stuff out with All Kid Stuff. 

Spoiler: These things work out in the end, if you feed them enough sugar and leave the hair chalk out where they can get to it. Also, my husband rocks the blue glitter nail polish.

We decided on a lunch party, mostly because we like to feed people and it served as a nice opening period for people to drift in.   We scheduled it for Saturday at noon and on Friday night the snow and wind started to hit.   Saturday morning I took a test spin, noted the plows were out and the town roads weren’t really that bad so we called everyone to tell them the party was on and started food prep around 9:30.  At 10:30 AM I got the text message that the county had gone to a red alert (a Snow Emergency, where it’s technically illegal to be on the roads) so we called everyone again and told them the party was delayed to Sunday.  Then we put the food in the 22 degree garage and tried to console Cups. 

Sunday morning at 8 I went out for a test spin on the roads (hey, I’m a doctor, I get to drive to the hospital for rounds in a red alert) and noted that the city roads were bare asphalt without any snow or ice.  We live in a rural town, so county roads by report were still really bad, but the city was normal driving conditions. I called M and we decided that we would go forward with the party and let people use their own judgment about whether to come.  At about 10 the county was downgraded to orange, so it was no longer technically illegal to come to Cups’s party and 13 kids showed up – most of them with their parents. 

We are going to be cleaning up this house for weeks.

I am a consummate scavenger of Other People’s Ideas on Pinterest, and I’m going to try to give credit where credit is due in the following breakdown of the party:

Lunch and Nibbles:

I bought some placecard templates from Irrelephant Designs on Etsy, which were charming (if a little small, margins were adjusted to get them to print on our postcard cutouts) and paired excellently with the personalized chevron favor boxes I found at a reasonable custom print price from Shindigz.com (despite the shady name, they delivered a quality product in good time).  We labeled all our food, aiming for one per pony represented on the cards, plus Spike since there was a duplicate pony.   I got the flower trays as a surprise find at Dollar General while hunting for something else entirely.

Rainbow Dash’s Rainbow Fruit Salad: Adapted from Daisy at Home, we went with a flower tray rather than a rainbow design, but same general idea: a rainbow of fruit with marshmallow crème dip in the middle (recipe follows).  Our rainbow’s color sequence gave a little bit to my distaste for melons, so we used strawberries, apples, pineapple, green grapes, blueberries, and red grapes.   We sliced some bananas to put in the rotation but they were too chunky and not asthetically pleasing, so we put them off on the side instead and they really didn’t get eaten (this may be partly because of the 24 hour party delay)

Pinkie Pie’s Flower Bites: Borrowed directly from Life with Moore Babies, we made PB&J and ham and cheese sandwiches on honey wheat bread and then used a flower shaped cookie cutter to cut them into floral shapes.  Lettuce, tomato, and condiments were on the side.   (This is the point where I ask if anyone has a brilliant idea for what to do with the peanut butter and jelly crusts, because I can’t bear to throw them away.  Current plan is to feed the birds this summer with them.)  For scaling purposes, we used the very largest flower cutter that would still make a flower shape from the bread.  I made 16 PB&J and 16 ham and cheese sandwiches total for 13 kids and 11 adults and had about 4 PB&J and 1 ham and cheese left over. 

Princess Celestia’s Celestial Clouds: Okay, so this is one of those times where we used “we’re having a party” as an excuse to buy more kitchen gadgets.   Major purchase for the party was a home cotton candy machine.  We bought the Nostalgia Electrics hard and sugar-free version in order to have the capacity to make sugar-free cotton candy for our diabetic friends as well as the thrill of Life Savers Cotton Candy (it’s super good!), and did the cotton candy in advance over a few days.   Best output on the machine was definitely from commercial floss sugar, but we got some very respectable cotton candy from Life Savers, candy canes, hard crack caramel, and sugar free Werther’s drops.  Best of all, each cone contained less than a tablespoon of sugar and kept kids occupied.    

Applejack’s Down Home Applesauce: From My Crazy Blessed Life, except I try to limit the silverware requirement at any kids’ party to “cake and ice cream only” where possible.  Also, Mott’s tends to put sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup in their applesauce, and I don’t dig it.  So we bought a lot of GoGoSqueez from Amazon and put that out instead.  There were cries of “ooh, GoGoSqueez!”  It got eaten.  No applesauce was spilled.  And we have leftover applesauce for snacks and lunches. 

Rarity’s Fromages du Campagne:  This translates to Rarity’s Country Cheeses, basically. Originally, we were going to make Rarity in charge of the cotton candy, but I had a Princess Celestia food tag and couldn’t think of anything more royal than cotton candy.  Also, I remembered that I had a bag of cheese cubes in the freezer that I really wanted to make disappear, so we went ahead with the gussied-up cheese tray.   It’s all purchased; while I know I can make a cheese ball, they always come out looking like misshapen lumps. 

Fluttershy’s Bunny Munch: What better way to get kids to eat their vegetables than to propose them as pony food?  We went with Cups’s favorites: kalamata olives, broccoli, carrots, celery, and then for the grownups we made a (very mild) pico de gallo and filled the last slot with tortilla strips.  Middle of the tray is Marzetti’s Ranch dressing and off to the side is Tastefully Simple’s Onion Onion dip, which is kind of a staple for us.

Spike’s Dragon-Grilled Chicken Skewers: We have some friends who are gluten intolerant, so sandwiches as a main dish don’t cut it alone.  We hit on doing chicken skewers and were initially going to do long kebabs.  Then I found a couple packages of three inch bamboo forks at Dollar General (never send me shopping alone) and M turned them into charming miniature skewers that were bite sized and easy to handle.   They’re chicken tenderloins, chopped into bites and stuck two to a skewer, then brined in a light salt solution overnight (plus an additional 24 hours for weather delays) and then grilled with an olive oil brushing.  We grabbed a handful of dipping sauces for our condiment table, and the kids really liked them.  The brining leaves the chicken very moist and tender in the middle, even after sitting in the crockpots on warm for hours.  We made 106 and had maybe a dozen left.
Prep note: It took M about an hour to grill all 106 skewers on our indoor range grill, so plan ahead.

 Twilight Sparkle’s Magical Color Changing Punch: Another nod to Daisy at Home for this one: This is a fantastic idea and the kids really had a blast with it.   It’d be excellent for a science party as well, since the indicator is so easy to make and the color change in lemonade is so dramatic.  We used a simple syrup (1:1 water and sugar) boiled with chopped red cabbage in it.  This gave our indicator a really nice deep blue color and also masked some of the cabbage taste to the juice (but not the smell and not all of the taste, oh no, not all, so if you are looking for a really sweet cabbage juice this is what you want).  The original recipe calls for lemonade, but I am never satisfied with lemonade as a drink (I make it with lemon juice and water, and no sugar, but nobody but me drinks it like that so I always feel like it’s too sweet) so we went to work trying to come up with a punch that had some flavor and enough acidity to turn the indicator colors. 

We started with Sprite, which turns a brilliant pink but is undrinkable with cabbage juice in it.  We tried a multitude of things but finally settled on a tropical pineapple-orange punch (recipe follows) that if you add enough indicator turns from yellow-orange to a sort of ruby grapefruit color (I did not get a picture).   This also proves that if you make it fun, kids will drink anything.  They added far more cabbage juice than I could stomach, just to see it change, and then drank the stuff without hesitation.

During the lunch period, we set up the dining room table with some color-your-own ponies from Oriental Trading Company (I am trying to move away from buying cheap stuff there and doing more on Etsy etc but I still run up a bill every time we have a birthday), markers and glitter glue pens.   Kids really got into that, and I will be scraping glitter glue off the table for a while.  It was nice to keep them occupied while the slower eaters were coaxed into another few bites of sandwich. 

Then we took everyone downstairs for the wearing-them-out portion of the festivities. 

Party Games:

Pony Dressup: I am reasonably certain that if M never sees another set of pony wings come out of my sewing machine, it will be too soon.  I have a thing about handcrafted party favors, and the only thing I could think of for this party was pony wear, so pony wear it was.   I sourced a pattern for wings, horns, and ears from Sugar Tart Crafts, but I am Lazy and I hate stuffing things so I substituted a thick layer of craft interfacing for the stuffing on the wings.   I also put buttonholes on the bottoms of the horns and on the ears (dear Light if there is something more annoying than sewing 8mm buttonholes in pony ears I hope I never have to do it) and threaded them onto headbands for the kids to wear.   We made more than we needed, of course, so everyone got their choice of colors.  
As far as tails go, I went with the good old-fashioned yarn hank tail (wrap yarn around your arm from palm to elbow until you have a bunch of yarn.  Tie one end around a belt or piece of twine.  Cut the other end.  Repeat twenty-five times) and tied them onto the kids.   Participation was excellent in this and I noticed that the boys (we had four total) picked up the purple (“no, it’s not lavender”) sets with some enthusiasm.  I had expected them to go for blue or black. 

Rarity’s Boutique: Idea from Daisy at Home yet again, and quite possibly the part of this party I was most nervous about.  We set up a table with nail polish and nail stickers on one end, and hair chalk (we got two kinds: Hot Huez and Crayola Hair Stix and I would hands down do the Hair Stix over the Hot Huez – not only were the sticks cheaper and colors brighter, they outperformed the Huez compacts in ease of use, staying power, and sturdiness of applicator) at the other end.  I hung some glittery hair clips and some odd spiral beaded hair extensions on bobby pins (Dollar General again) on the sign, and we painted nails and chalked hair for nine little girls who all wanted it done. 

We picked up some new polish on our outing for this (I do not normally do nail polish, so we don’t keep much on hand) and I have to say Good Things about a product for a moment.  Piggy Paint is not cheap (Walmart has tiny bottles in 3-packs for $3.85) but it is extremely low odor, nontoxic, and removes with ethyl alcohol.   It covers well and dries fast.   I don’t know for durability, but I am really impressed with this stuff so far and most particularly with the part where I didn’t feel like I needed a smoke machine and lasers after helping paint four sets of nails.

This was the Girl Stuff moment that I was really concerned about. So concerned, in fact, that we had a simultaneous Pony Beading station for making bead necklaces and bracelets in case the boys wouldn’t buy into the hair chalking.  Also, M did his nails with blue glitter before the party, in order to be a Positive Role Model for the body decorating.    They were kind of standoffish at first (“what’s that?”) so we ran them through the obstacle course first to break the ice.  Later, the youngest of them came over to me and asked about the hair chalk.   I obliged, putting blue stripes in his hair.  And his brothers.  And then I just got up and left the chalk in plain sight, and they giggled and chalked among themselves.  Someone got his nails painted (we had blue and black and green, just in case).  They even got into the photobooth.

Photobooth: The photobooth was an absolute must after the mad success of Captain’s party.  We set up the camera with an Eye-Fi card and linked it into a computer with automatic photo printing software (I am cheap, I used an evaluation copy) hooked to one of our old printers.  Snap – print.  I’m not ecstatic about the photo quality (at least in part due to not setting up the camera with a tight enough zoom) but it made the kids happy and they all made sure to pick up a picture before leaving. 

This is the second photobooth frame I’ve made, and I’m pretty happy with the process.  We use a large sheet of foamboard and cut a square out of the middle.  Then I design my header in Word using an appropriately-themed typeface, set it to outline mode, and print it out big enough to cover the top.   I lay the paper on the foamboard and use a blunt pencil to trace the letters with lots of pressure.  This leaves an indented letter guide on the foamboard, which I trace and fill with paint markers.    It’s not perfect and it takes some work to get the indents to show (hint: strongly angled bright light) but it means I have great kerning and the typeface is usually much more consistent than my own lettering. 

For the bottom, we come up with a selection of appropriate taglines (“Most sparkle”, “120% cooler”, “Super Awesomest”, etc) and print each one on a half-sheet of paper.  Laminate (I just switched from my Xyron cold laminator to a Staples brand heat/cold laminator and I am really digging the heat lamination) and attach Velcro to the back of each tagline.   Attach Velcro to the middle of the photobooth and you have an instantly changeable sign.   Kids dig customization. 

Pony Beads: We bought some bracelet forms and beads (Colorful beads! Metallic beads! Star shaped beads!) from Oriental Trading, then added some stretchy plastic cording for longer projects.  I figured beading was something that Even Boys Do and it got some interest.  By far this was the least popular of the activities (although the younger kids enjoyed it and a lot of bracelets got made), something I attribute in part to the really obnoxiously un-tieable plastic cording and the way the beads fell off if you opened the bracelets wrong.  On the other hand, we have a whole lot of shiny metallic beads for projects. 

Cutie Marks:  Absolutely necessary for ponies are the cutie marks.  This is another area where we put some thought into the Boys Attending problem, as the main characters in MLP are all female.  I considered face paint and then I considered my drawing ability, all the other places my skills would be needed and the amount of time painting faces requires.  So we went with option 2: temporary tattoos.   For the record, if you want the actual cutie mark temporary tattoos, Hot Topic is your store of choice.  Alternatively, you can buy the temporary tattoo cards (was this a collecting thing?) on Amazon for like a dollar a tattoo.  We originally anticipated 18-20 kids so we were looking for a higher quantity and variety.   We settled on printing our own. 

We got the images from the My Little Pony Wikia which has a gallery of cutie mark images (both official and fan-created in the MLP games).  It was an exhaustive fit of downloading, and of paying attention to what we were getting (still thinking of the Boys at the Party), which meant that we wound up with Bacon, Skulls, Dumbbells, and Tornadoes as well as more traditional marks.   I will note that there was a big argument over the Bacon cutie mark, and one of our little girl guests wound up wearing it home.  We printed them (using the Contact Sheet layout for 35 images to a page) on home-print temporary tattoo paper (no I do not own a Silhouette cutter, which is probably to my disadvantage) and ran them through the laminator on cold phase to apply the adhesive. 

Everyone wanted a cutie mark. Two or three or ten.  We had enough for everyone to have several, and a number of kids tucked some extras into their favor boxes to take home.  It set us back $18 (we got extras in case of errors) for 70 tattoos and we got to design what we wanted.  I think it was worth it.  I will note, however, that these temporary tattoos apply just like the traditional kind but when on they’re more like stickers – the adhesive is a flexible plastic film, so they will peel off more easily.  A Silhouette or other cutting machine would reduce this film issue. I will leave the judgment as to whether this is a positive or negative to the reader.  

Obstacle Course:

If there is one thing I have learned as a parent it’s that the secret to crowd control in large groups of children is motion.   Keep them moving from one activity to another and make sure there’s a reward at the end of it.  This will make sure nobody gets distracted and will also put some competition into the problem.   While I was painting nails and chalking hair, M was leading groups of kids through the obstacle course (did I mention we have a really big basement?) We did most of the following activities with a stopwatch in hand.   The actual function of the stopwatch was to lend a sense of urgency.  

We put up a sign at each station with a little rhyme about the station and some instructions, but still found that shepherding the kids through the stations in small groups to work cooperatively where possible produced the best results.  Each station had a themed completion token (small square of cardstock with appropriate clip art on it) to record times on for each kid.

Rainbow Dash’s Cloud Slalom: We are packrats (hence: big basement) and don’t throw things away until we can no longer find any use for them at all.  This led to our having at home in the basement seven extra pillows that were in use only for occasional guest bedding.   I bought some cheap pillow protectors with zipper tops and installed grommets in each corner, then suspended them from the ceiling using a staple gun on the rafters.  We duct-taped arrows onto the free-swinging pillows to make a slalom and timed kids going through.  It’s amazing how dizzy they get when dodging pillows left and right. 

Fluttershy’s Forest Friends: This station would have been easier to make if it had been “Fluttershy’s Undersea Adventure” or “Fluttershy’s Cretaceous Rumble”, given our selection of stuffed animals, but we made it work. We hid seven stuffed forest creatures (loosely defined) around the room (including a magnetic bat attached to the support I-beam) and had the kids hunt down all of the creatures.  We provided a list of animals, just in case there were problems, but working as a team the kids didn’t have much trouble.

Applejack’s Apple Stand: This one went through a bunch of iterations.  I knew I wanted it to be a “find the bad apples” puzzle, but we couldn’t settle on what kind of apples to use.  Real ones seemed wasteful and fake ones were either too expensive or too tiny – plus, what do you do with a bunch of fake fruit after the party? Then we found an apple sorting toy that looked educational and appropriate for our needs, so we bought a set of Attribute Apples and made them part of the present loot.  They come in a little cardboard bushel basket and suited our purpose perfectly: nine of the apples (one of each size and color) have a little worm sticking out.  The kids worked together to find the bad apples and save the apple stand, and we have a new educational toy for the Cap’n.

Rarity’s Fashion Fiasco: Dollar General provided a large quantity of ribbons for this project, and in doing so (they’re sold in 9-yard spools) decided the length of ribbon to work with.   I threw in a few spare ribbons from my craft remnants as confounders and taped everything to the heating duct (large flat ceiling surface that holds tape, don’t judge).  The kids had to find three matching ribbons, pull them down, and make a braid for Rarity’s high couture.   Turns out seven year olds aren’t good at braiding.  Also, for the older kids, three feet of ribbon takes a while to braid.  We modified this on the fly to “find three ribbons that match”.   Prep note: confounders are really important, as is having more sets than kids.  We had fifteen sets or so and the pickings were pretty easy for the last few.

Twilight Sparkle’s Library Emergency: Grab ten books of varying sizes and scatter on the floor. Ask the kids to sort by size.  Largest book has the token.  Be prepared to answer the question: “Largest like tallest? Or widest? Or Fattest?”  Also, maybe next time don’t let the seven year old choose the books.  Some of them were the same size.

Pinkie Pie’s Party Pop: This one was quite possibly the second favorite (after the slalom), owing to the fact that you can only pop balloons once per balloon.   We stuck the completion tokens in balloons (prep tip: round the corners, they go in better) and blew up the balloons, then told the kids they had to pop the balloons without using their hands.   Most of them got the hang of sitting on the balloon and bouncing against the concrete floor pretty quickly.  Apparently, popping balloons is something kids like to do.

Everyone who finished the obstacle course (that’s everyone) got a mystery pony package.  We wound up ordering these direct from Hasbro Toys since Walmart wanted enough for them individually that we were already going to be spending the cost of a case on our anticipated kid load.   We also bought a blank pony for decorating as a present and got the free shipping discount, since we were close and the pony was less than shipping.  The kids really liked the surprise ponies, and I think there was some trading going on.  I know one of the boys got Flam, and was really excited to have “a pony with a ‘stache”. 

The piñata:   

In true party tradition, we hoisted up a piñata (shaped like Pinkie Pie) and handed the kids an aluminum practice baseball bat to attack it with.  Kids over six got a blindfold.  I am sort of amused and sort of appalled by the fact that our piñata came with eight ribbon attached to the bottom and instructions for playing “the piñata game” – this involves pulling on the ribbons one at a time until one of them triggers the hidden trap door and the candy comes out.   I understand that this is safer and less violent than hitting Pinkie Pie repeatedly with a bat, but then we would miss out on the savagery of young children. 

To wit: As we hoisted the piñata, seven year old Cups yells out “we’re all murdering pony beaters!”  There were cheers from the child audience.   Vicious attacks were employed with the blindfold or without.  At one point there were half a dozen kids on the steps chanting “Kill. Kill. Kill.”   When the hanger gave way (taking the mane with it), the last few kids brutalized the carcass on the ground anyway, just to get their hits in.  And then, by the end of the party, in a move worthy of The Godfather, the kids got hold of the piñata’s remains, removed the head, and went running around with it.  I think someone took it home, against his father’s wishes. 

I am unsure whether to be appalled or fascinated by this behavior, but it renders the imagery of Lord of the Flies at once more horrific and less distant. I can only hope that we can instill in Cups a strong moral code and an awareness of the difference between a piñata and another child.

The Cake:

We finished up with cake and ice cream and present opening, and I’m just putting this part in because I want to show off the cake.  This is Rainbow Dash and the Sonic Rainboom.   It’s done in marshmallow with a fondant pony and rainbow, and my amazing sister in law made it for us.  This is the kind of birthday gift I can get behind.

We had stipulated the party was going to last until 3, but we finished with cake and ice cream and presents around 2:30, so I told the kids to “go tear down the house”, which got a cheer and a stampede.  They hit the basement, popped the remaining balloons, stuck tattoos to every exposed surface of their bodies, cut the elastic on one set of wings in half, dragged crepe paper through the whole place, and then ran in circles through the slalom until their parents dragged them away.  We sent them home with their costumes, a coloring book (thank you Hasbro downloadables), a whole lot of candy, and a decorated wooden pony.   Also, in one case, a decapitated Pinkie Pie head. 

All in all, it was a success.

Recipes:

Marshmallow Crème Fruit Dip:

Ingredients:
1 13 oz jar of marshmallow crème
2 8 oz packages of softened Neufchatel (note: by softened we mean room temperature and attempting to ooze off your counter soft). 
Vanilla extract to taste (1-3 tsp, depending on how much you like vanilla)
Powdered sugar to taste (approximately 1/4 cup seems to do it)

To make:
Whip the cream cheese with a hand or stand mixer’s whisk attachment until fluffy.  Very important to achieve uniform fluffiness or lumps will remain.  Add marshmallow crème and whip it more.  Whip it real good.  While whipping, add sugar and vanilla.  Taste.  If not satisfied, add more vanilla and/or sugar.

Serve with fruit and a spoon.  Keep out of reach of small children, unless you like it when your plates are attached to the wall.

~~~

Magical Color-Changing Punch:

Indicator:
Chop half a head of red cabbage coarsely.  Place in a mixture of 1 part sugar to 1 part water (volume as you choose).   Boil until you like the color.  Strain through a very fine strainer to remove cabbage.   You should have a blue liquid.
This will change to a pinkish-red color in the presence of acid.  Lemonade is your best bet for a drink.

Punch:
2 cans Welch’s Tropical Passion Fruit Juice Concentrate (sold in the non-frozen juice section)
1 46 ounce can of pineapple juice (this is a little shy of 1.5 liters if you measure that way)
45 ounces or so of pulp-free orange juice (we used half a “family sized” jug of Simply Orange)
4 liters of your favorite Lemon-Lime soda. 

You can, by adding equal parts indicator and punch, get a ruby grapefruit color to this.   Only your kids will drink it at this point, and it smells of cabbage so buy noseplugs.  And Beano.  Just saying.

With Great Power…

Friday morning at Games on Demand, I’m sorting dice out for a round of Hollowpoint and my first two players sit down.  They’re a couple, looking fresh and well rested.  There’s a Star Wars T-shirt involved. I give them my great big GM grin and say “Hi! Here for Hollowpoint?” 

“We sure are,” one of them says.

“We’ve never done this before,”  the other one says.

“Never played Hollowpoint?”  Most of my players have never played Hollowpoint, although some of them have read the book; occasionally a whole table or most of a table has read the book and that is what led yesterday to a demand to “Play it straight, like maybe Cold War era?”  and some frantic Wikipedia searching before running an impromptu setting of Berlin: 1988 in which the E Street Band was rescued from the Russians.

( I love my players very much for bearing with me when I did not know off the top of my head that a Sig Sauer was a Swiss gun and entirely inappropriate for the KGB, and thank you to the substitution of a Makarov.  You are what makes this game worth running. )

“We’ve never played an RPG at all,” he says.

“We’re tabletop virgins,” she says.   They’re both wearing smiles on their faces and they look excited and they are sitting at my Hollowpoint table and inside my mind the Imposter Syndrome reel started running a countdown.  Cue the sound of an LP going in reverse. 

Holy shit these folks are sitting at my table and they’ve never played a roleplaying game before and they want to play Hollowpoint.  What are they going to think?  I almost asked them if they were sure they wanted to start here.  Now.  On Friday morning with me.  On this particular game.  Maybe they should grab a GM who was good at explaining things.

And then I took a deep breath and told the Imposter Syndrome reel to Fuck You.  And what I said was “You’re going to need some dice.  About 5-10 six siders.  I’ve got loaners if you need them.  And a pencil.  Which I also have if you need one.”

They needed dice.  I handed them a couple little boxes of spare dice.  He complimented my dice.  I complimented her shirt.  We made small talk – they’re getting married soon and want to put some geekery in it; my sister in law made edible D6’s for my daughter’s birthday cake out of gummi bears which was awesome – and the table filled up around us.

I handed out place cards.  I asked if anyone had played Hollowpoint.  Nobody had.   I introduced the gaming newbies.  I gave the ten-second talk on what roleplaying games are ("When we were kids, we played games with other kids.  I said ‘I shoot you’ and you said ‘No you didn’t, you missed’.  Now we have dice to help us decide who misses).  I said “I will be helpful.  I want you to understand this game.  I will not be gentle.  My job is to attempt to kill you.  Repeatedly.  Please don’t hesitate to ask for help.”

Everyone laughed.   I brought out the X-card as part of the introduction to Hollowpoint: “This is a game about doing bad things.  There will be blood.  There will be moral bankruptcy.  There will be violent.  If something is getting too intense or killing your action movie buzz, or if you just really hate spiders and the game isn’t fun with spiders, this is an X-card.  Tap it or lift it, draw our attention to it.  We’ll take out the spiders and go around the problem, no questions asked.”  No big deal.  No pressure at all.  Fuck you, That Girl GM Syndrome. 

I didn’t play it, but I brought it up again in character creation: “If you ask me ‘Hey Nykki, do we have pineapple grenades?’ I will say ‘I don’t know, do you have pineapple grenades?’  If you ask me ‘Hey Nykki, do we have flying dragons?’ I will X-card you.”  Everyone laughed.

I threw out a handful of settings, including last year’s Film Noir – Magic Kingdom, and that’s what they voted to play.  I had a brief flash of Imposter Syndrome at that as well – here you are, and your first con game ever is a dark humor setup about a bloodbath in Disneyland – and then I remembered how well it had gone last year.  How well it always goes. 

I have my Hollowpoint con game down to a pretty solid 90-minute run: I can add or subtract encounters as need be on the fly, but normally we get in four encounters and some skill checks, as well as some solid roleplaying, and hit the Principal scene at the 30 minute light flashing.  The newbies, as Steve Segedy so aptly predicted during our warmup, were fantastic.  It took them only a few minutes to get into the swing of things, and by the time Tinkerbell ditched them at a mud puddle in the woods (“Youse guys, you get inna throne room, you say ‘Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo’, I’ll be there.  Bam.  I’ll get you the money.”) there was no stopping them.

We ended on time.  Everyone was laughing.  Ink was flowing (what, you expected blood from a Toon?) and the Magic Kingdom was saved.   We wrapped up (“That’s Hollowpoint, everyone, at the IPR booth #1310 in the exhibit hall along with Many Other Awesome Indie Games) and I made sure to tell the newbies to come back and play something else.  Try them all! 

“We’ll be back,” she said. 

“Sure thing,” he said. 

It was a great game.  I hope they came back. I didn’t get your names, anonymous couple who used the color of your markers for your character names and started a trend that went around the whole table, but thank you.  Seriously.   Because you made my GenCon a little more awesome. 

The X-Card

There's this really awesome idea that I first heard about from an interview with +John Stavropoulos: the X-card.

His explanation is probably the best, so I'll link to it (linky!) and just summarize it here: The X-card is left on the table as a go-to place for anyone in the game to use when content makes them uncomfortable. You just tap or lift the card, the group edits the content to get past or around whatever is problematic, and the game moves forward. John even includes a pretty awesome little intro speech (with choreography!) that you can use to introduce the X-cards into your game.

This year, for GenCon, I am saying a great big "I can't hear you" to my Imposter syndrome and volunteering as a GM for Games on Demand once again. I'm going to be offering two games: +Brad Murray and +C. W. Marshall's spectacular Hollowpoint, which is a game about bad people killing bad people for bad reasons, and Magpie Games' Our Last Best Hope, which is a game about classic disaster movies, focusing on personal sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds.

These are games (like every other roleplaying game I've ever played) that have the potential to take a hard ninety-degree turn into the darkness. These are games where having an X-card is not only potentially beneficial but where it might be almost a necessity. I have GM'd Hollowpoint with strangers before -- last year at GenCon -- with men and women and one older teenager with his parents. I didn't know about X-cards, but I knew about checking in with the table in advance, asking about language and "grown-up themes" and trying to watch my players. Even then, I encountered situations where I wasn't sure if we were still telling a story or if we were just trying to see who blinked first.

The problem is this: I'm a woman running a hyper-violent roleplaying game at a major gaming convention. (One day, I was a woman in a Buttercup costume running a hyper-violent roleplaying game at a major gaming convention). I'm constantly concerned that if I mess this game up, it's not going to be because I made a mistake: it's going to be because I'm a Girl GM.

Yeah, this is that post about being a woman in a traditionally male-dominated enterprise. It's about feeling like I'm not representing just me -- because, really, nobody is going to remember my name if I screw up one two-hour gaming session -- but they're going to remember that That Girl GM couldn't keep her NPCs straight. They're going to remember that That Girl GM failed to deliver two hours of rollercoaster entertainment. And they're going to remember that That Girl GM threw the X-card.

You see, John suggests that as the GM, you close out with “…and usually I’m the one who ends up using the X card to protect myself from you all!” and follow up by throwing the X-card on yourself early on. If it gets gory, or scary, or whatever, you laugh, and X-card yourself, to show it's no big deal.

I'm totally behind this concept -- as the GM, it's my responsibility to set the bar. When I GM a game I'm going to influence its tone, its pacing, and the direction of the plot -- even in GM-less games like Our Last Best Hope it's my table, and that means something. I want everyone to be comfortable, and have an awesome time, and go away telling stories about all of the amazing things that happened at Nykki B's table.

But when I'm throwing an X-card I'm afraid I'm not going to be Nykki B. I'm going to be Nykki B That Girl GM who couldn't cut it. And that's exactly what I'm supposed to be preventing by setting the example, aren't I? I'm supposed to be the one who makes it no big deal. And John, he's awesome, but he's never going to be That Girl GM, and I don't know if I can explain what it feels like, being aware that what I do isn't just about me.

It's just a con. It's a really big con that sells out the entire downtown hotel block of a major midwestern capital city, but it's just a con. And I'm just a GM and a woman and a gamer and a geek, and I'm not responsible for shouldering the entire con experience of women in gaming.

So yes I am going to bring the X-cards and I'm going to copy down all of John's awesome speech about using them, even the bit about protecting myself from my players, because fuck you imposter syndrome I am a good GM and I owe the best game I can possibly run to my players.

And I run a damn good game of Hollowpoint. Even if sometimes it means I blink first.

A Confession about GenCon

This year, as Nykki mentioned in her previous post, we decided relatively last-minute to be GMs at Games on Demand through Indie Games Explosion.. Thursday night, I got there late because I was being chauffeur for our youngest, missing my scheduled block. I helped at the table for about an hour and then ran a session of Hollowpoint at 8.

The next day, we got there for our 10 am sessions after running the youngest back to daycare. There's a line already out the door by the time we're there. I sorted out our prep materials when I heard Nykki calling over to me asking if I'm up for running Dungeon World. I said sure, as apparently there were already multiple tables for it filling up. I grabbed my materials and head over to my assigned table, diving right into a game. I ended up running it for the rest of my sessions at GenCon.

I loved how easily Dungeon World runs. I have played and run Dungeons and Dragons since high school in its various incarnations (2nd ed, Skills and Powers, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, Pathfinder). I have a lot of experience in the genre, which I'm sure helped me out. Even so, the system and its inclusion of the players in the creation of the world really opened up new ways of playing. I have become enamored. That said, I have something of a confession to make.

Before my 10 am Friday session at GenCon, I had never run or played in a Dungeon World game.

Even finding the system is a bit of a set of random circumstances. It all started from Nykki's Kickstarter trawling. To be fair, I don't think she just randomly searched for Kickstarters to back, yet there have been a number of them that I have no idea how she found. Sometime in the last year or so, we backed Monsterhearts. It's a RPG/story game about monsters in high school using the system from Apocalypse World. I think it was the setting that got us to back Monsterhearts, originally. The Kickstarter had finished, we'd gotten the softcover, and it was put up on the shelf with other small-publisher RPGs, likely to be read when one of us had the time.

I am a PhD student. This leaves me with virtually no time for extra reading during the fall and spring semesters, but my summers are far less structured. At some point this summer, I decided to take a break from academic reading and pulled down some of the games. It took one read through of Monsterhearts and I was sold on the system. The group character gen, the far more spontaneous GM'ing, the ability for players to interact with the world in ways not done in D&D/Pathfinder; all of these fascinated me. However, we don't exactly have a very regular gaming group, so play-testing was likely not very likely. I put it on the list of games to run at the annual New Year's gaming party we go to, which is where we usually break in small-publisher systems.

Meanwhile, several of the gamers in my G+ stream had been pushing this Kickstarter for Dungeon World. All I had seen on it was that it was "old school style and modern rules," but hadn't really explored what this "modern system" was. After I had read the Monsterhearts book and poked around a bit with the Apocalypse World site, one of these Dungeon World posts wandered by and something clicked in my head. I went poking around the Dungeon World site. Oh, it's that system, my brain thought. Boom. Kickstartered. And I started trolling the Dungeon World forums (discovering the dozens of different hacks out there).

I had no idea how many games I might be called upon to run at GenCon, so I started prepping something in every system I had that wasn't 4.0 or Pathfinder: Hollowpoint, Homcidal Transients, Hollow Earth, Monsterhearts. Dungeon World was on the list I planned to prep, but I didn't have much of a scenario in mind (which is OK, since the book tells me not to prep too much for the first session). But I still hadn't played it or Monsterhearts.

One night, the week before GenCon, our online weekly group offered to hold off on running our actual Pathfinder Adventure Path and I could run something. We ended up with Monsterhearts. I got them through character creation and about an hour or so of them role-playing home room before it was time for several of us to go to bed, due to it being Thursday night. But, I had a lot of good feedback on teaching the system and character creation (mostly: pre-gen them), so I thought I had a handle on the game/system.

And then it was GenCon.

The players were all awesome. The groups worked well together. The biggest problem I ran into was keeping track of 6 players when there were 11 other tables running in the same room. (Which means that the biggest problem was the success of Games on Demand, so I'm not really complaining here.) There was such demand for Dungeon World that I would finish one game and I'd have a new table waiting in the wings. The system drew the players in very early in and there was very minimal need to explain the rules. The players very quickly got interested in what was going on, which in turn got me even more invested in the game. I'm glad I could get some exposure for this great game out into the gaming world. I am very pleased with the game and am eagerly awaiting the actual finalized book/pdf to show up.

GenCon 2012: Nykki GM’s with GoD

I don't remember who started it.  

Either Angel or I at some point said "Hey, why don't we run some games at GenCon this year with Indie Games on Demand?"  And the other person said "Sure, that sounds like fun."  So we emailed the Games on Demand folks (who are awesome), and after some back and forth we were given the opportunity to trade up to GM badges for running just 7 2-hour sessions each.   In a fit of "We've got two whole days without the kids" we said sure, why not? 

About twenty-four hours later I realized that I'd just signed up to spend fourteen hours running games for people I'd never met before at a Gaming Con, and I nearly had a nervous breakdown.  But I'd said I would do it, and I'm always super excited about running Hollowpoint, and I had a pretty good handle on Homicidal Transients (it's not a complicated system), so I buckled down and got to work dreaming up some scenarios that I thought I could play out in ninety minutes (reserving half an hour for character generation, rules explanation, and getting people rounded up).  And all the while the imposter syndrome reel was playing out in my head: What makes you think you're going to be any good at this?  You’re not ready to deal with the jerk players who try to break things. Your narrative is going to fall flat.  Do you really know the rules that well?

I've been playing RPG's since I was rather awkwardly introduced to the concept with a D&D 2e Skills and Powers campaign in college (I was the awkward one), playing a twinked-out bow ranger with a pacifist hangup.  I've run D&D from second ed through fourth and abandoned it for Pathfinder in mid-campaign, and my players always come back.  I know in my mind that I'm a decent GM, or at least the kind of GM that gets repeat players – at least, in a fantasy setting with rules for everything that everyone has to look up that I've been playing for fifteen years.   And the imposter syndrome reel continues to play.

I've run fast-paced con-style games every year at a New Year's party we frequent, but it's in the company of friends and a number of folks who only game once a year, and it's always been B-Movie, (which qualifies as an Indie RPG in the small-publisher sense, but not so much in the "you can buy it and support small publisher" sense, since after I bought the game and three adventures in 2002 I've never seen another peep out of Guildhall Press ever).  So I didn't feel like I could bring B-Movie, and the scenarios I use there really aren't the sort of thing I wanted to bring to a con.  I've run Hollowpoint more than once before to general success – generally always with the same steampunk Western scenario, although once at a party in a drunken haze I did try to run a Star Wars ripoff that never got off the ground.

Maybe it was just the memory of that Star Wars attempt that haunted me, but the imposter syndrome reel is a hard thing to ignore: it taints everything with hints of defeatism, and I probably had a hundred good ideas that never got past the "what if I..." phase before the voice-over cut in with "and then everyone will wonder how they got the Worst Game Ever".  It took exhaustion and desperation combined with a particularly tedious work-related conference lecture after a night of hard drinking to shut the whole thing up long enough to whip out two simple Hollowpoint scenarios that I wrote down (in pen, in a notebook I was taking home) before they could get discarded too.  I showed them to Angel, without telling him that I was pretty sure they were going to be the Worst Ideas Ever, and he started chuckling before I'd gotten past the first encounter.

Hollowpoint is supposed to involve about half an hour of referee prep, and under normal circumstances that's about right; for me it involved two weeks of intense self-doubt and soul-searching followed by half an hour of referee prep and ten sessions of revising my referee prep until I wound up with exactly the same thing I started with.  Also, I was growing steadily more terrified of running this game at GenCon for total strangers who were, I was completely convinced, going to think I was the Worst GM Ever.   I had dreams about standing up in front of a group of players and forgetting how to play.

I had dreams about being That Girl GM.  I had dreams about having my qualifications challenged and I had dreams about coming to the table and being ignored and I had dreams about being the one who reinforces every stereotype someone has ever heard about women in gaming (I got into RPG's because of a boy, whom I later married).  And the imposter syndrome reel, in the background, got nominated for an Oscar and I apologized to Steve from Indie Games for being late to the GM party and having to move the schedule (I made Angel write that note) because we couldn't both take a Saturday slot at the same time because Someone Has to Watch the Kids!  And all the time I watched people around me on Google+ and Facebook and blogs talking about gaming and running games and getting excited while I was waiting – getting emotionally prepared – to fail.

So what actually happened was this:

We dropped our stuff off before Games on Demand opened at 10 am on Thursday and hung around until everyone showed up around 9:45 to get set up.  In the meantime, we unpacked the whiteboard and made a lot of introductions and then played a game of Snapshot:1969, which I may talk about in more detail later, but which has some amazing art and was a lot of fun.  Then we took off and did Con Stuff until Angel had to take off and do Kid Transport, shortly before my first session time.  By this point I had found a set of Agency dice (little yellow dice, because asking for help makes you a Little Yellow Coward), lost my prep cards for my Homicidal Transients setup, frantically made backup plans for Homicidal Transients, talked myself out of reworking Hollowpoint yet again, walked around GenCon all by myself, and the imposter syndrome reel had me so nervous I was practically shaking. 

It didn't help that when Steve asked what I was prepared to run and I said "Hollowpoint or Homicidal Transients", I had the shortest list of games on the board.  It didn't help that some GM's brought an entire list of gaming systems, complete with their cell phones and Twitter handles, and left sheets on the table in case folks wanted to get a pickup game together.  It didn't help that there was a line halfway out the door by a quarter to game time. 

What did help was that when I unabashedly admitted to a woman I'd just met standing behind the table that I was terrified, she said "You're going to be fine.  It's lots of fun."  What really helped was that I told my first group that I'd never GM'd at a convention before and got "That's okay, we've never played at a convention before" from at least three members of the group.  And then I started talking, and we started rolling dice, and wild over-the-top ideas started coming out of people's mouths, and it was Hollowpoint just like it always has been, only this time it was fedoras and Mouseketeers with Tommy guns and a power-hungry tyrant instead of steam-powered flying horses and railroad trains and the Johnson Gang. 

Hollowpoint was up for three ENnies this year, and some people came looking to play specifically.  Some people just showed up to see what games they could get into.  Every Hollowpoint table was full, even when I expanded them to five people solid instead of "four, maybe five".  Everyone seemed to be having fun.  And somewhere on Friday, between the moments where I was frantically making up answers to questions I hadn't expected and inventing complications to take on players who ignored blatant hints in order to go their own way, I forgot about being afraid. 

I gave out coupons for discounts at the Indie Press Revolution booth.  I stopped by IPR – an acronym which makes me think of PBR, and gaming hipsters, and wonder if you can play RPG's ironically – and watched the stack of Hollowpoint books slowly getting shorter and shorter.  And then, Saturday afternoon as I was weaving through a line of prospective players that stretched halfway through the elevators (amazing success for Games on Demand!), I was stopped by a frantically waving man.  "I have to tell you!"  He was obviously excited about something, and I recognized him from Friday's table, so I waited.  "We are still talking about your game!  That was so awesome!"

How much better can it possibly get?

Geeklets: LEGO Travel Adventures

We had an opportunity recently to give our local Children's Museum money – not very much, about the price of a night at the movie theater, with popcorn – in exchange for a special Donor Preview Night at their newest exhibit.  This just so happened to be Lego Travel Adventures, which was an immediate Must-See for both Cups and Daddy, so we ponied up our movie admission and headed out for "Family friendly hors d'oeuvres" and a sneak peek at the exhibit. 

I'd never been to a Donor Preview Event before, but we did go the night $childrens_hospital rented out the museum from 6-9 PM for all of their referring docs and office staff, and that was pretty bruisingly fun, so we were definitely looking forward to it.  Cups was looking forward to it for an entire week, and the car ride was almost intolerable: at some point when she chirruped "I'm so excited!"  I shot back with

"And you just can't hide it?"  Never teach a five-year-old to sing 80's hits, even in jest.  Try as I might, I couldn't get her to wrap her head around the rest of the lyrics.  The rest of the ride was one-line 80's hit night.

Our Children's Museum is a really nice place and they know how to throw a party, including an open wine and beer bar, which is really vitally important when you are shepherding excitable kids through a Lego exhibit between 6:30 and 9 PM.  For the eats there were ciabatta pizza rectangles and fried raviolis and vegetable skewers and ice cream bars and brightly colored Jello rectangles, and the tables all had little frosted glass candle holders full of Legos on them so we could build while we ate.  It was all themed in primary colors and rectangles.  

Just to emphasize how excited Cups was, she built a tower instead of eating her pizza and then scarfed it down in ten seconds flat when told there would be no more Legos until she finished her dinner.  And then, three bites into an ice cream bar, she abandoned it to run upstairs to check out the exhibit.  Let me repeat that: Cups handed me a quarter-eaten ice cream bar and said "I'm done.  Now for the Legos."

I am an old-school Lego Maniac: the kind where there were rectangle pieces and flat pieces and square pieces and wheels.  I am bewildered by all the specialized bits that have come out of the modernization of Legos, and at the same time very excited about angles and slopes and things.   Cups, on the other hand, has always been able to build dinosaurs and Jeeps and languished over the untouchable Vader lurking over Daddy's study desk.  It's just the way Legos are for her.

The exhibit was subdivided: there were Duplo cars to build and race (and a Lego racecar big enough to sit in!) as well as some of the larger building blocks, the kind big enough to build playhouses out of, out among some glass-enclosed model cases with clever themes like "San Francisco" and "Paris".  There were also some interactive computer displays for creating virtual models. 

Cap'n quickly got bored after a few runs of the Duplo car down the track, since he was explicitly banned from either eating it or from sliding himself down in lieu of a wheeled construct, so he and Daddy headed over to one of the other exhibits, which left Cups and I to enter the Building Area.  I am certain that when this particular exhibit is open to the general public that the Building Area will be shoulder-deep in kids, and there will not be room enough to build a two-block tower, let alone the "dream vehicle" they encourage you to make.  But at the Donor Preview there was room, and Cups shouldered her way up to the build tables. 

They were big flat areas to build on with buckets full of disembodied Lego parts, mixed and matched from all the sets.   Scattered over the tables were partially assembled Frankenfigures and half-constructed walls.  Cups grabbed a partial body and started assembling.  It just so happened that the majority of the minifigs on the table were from the Lego Friends set: you know, the creepy friendly new “For Girls” Legos.  They have a size advantage over the original minifigs, as well as being leggier and arm-ier, so maybe that’s why all the kids were building with them, but it was still sort of satisfying.  Cups grabbed a head and a torso and legs and about six different hairs before she found one she liked (blonde, like her), and put a little pink crown on the top of it, and held it up to me.  "This is Princess Leia, Mom." 

All of the pink in the whole world was forgiven in that moment.

Princess Leia had a minimalist spaceship, and a dog, and a console, and we headed over to make a greenscreen copy of it to email to Friends and Family.  I wouldn't call the greenscreen camera a quality lens, but we did render the picture you see here, including Cups with the very strange face, and sent it to ourselves.  And then Princess Leia flew around the volcano for a bit before stopping to let her dog out, and we headed off to more Fun and Adventure. 

Really, there isn't much to a Lego Exhibit except the bits where they show you the awesome stuff people have built and the bits where you get to make your own awesome stuff, but for the Donor Preview the Children's Museum also roped in some other activities. 

One was the Master Build, where a Lego Master Builder was working with all comers to generate a huge Space Shuttle model (hint: if you ever want to do something that's fabulously tedious, get a bunch of kids to do it a little bit at a time), and another was the Girl Scouts, and their First Lego League entry.

I was a Girl Scout once.  I quit because my troop was interested in fashion shows and manicures and etiquette lessions, while I was interested in snakes and computers and science fiction books.  I wish that there had been something like First Lego League in my troop, because I would have loved getting involved in robotics, and I think First Lego League goes about it the right way: they target kids of all stripes, rather than dressing their event up in pink and calling it "for Girls".  And then they make it fun.    The Girl Scouts couldn't stop fiddling with their machine, showing off tasks, correcting each other.  They couldn't stop talking about what they were doing.

I stopped to chat.  We talked about Lego Friends, and the marketing of Legos to girls, and the Girl Scouts volunteered that they didn't particularly want pink Legos, because the ones they had worked just fine.  We talked about First Lego League, and snakes, and about being part of a team and making something; we talked a little bit about engineering and science in a roundabout way, but it was clear to me that the competition wasn't about being Girls in Science to these Girl Scouts.  It was about making something really cool.

That's how I would like science (and, incidentally, Legos) to be marketed to Cups: I'd like it to be as easy and natural as showing girls having fun in the photo array on the top of the First Lego League webpage.  I'd like it to be something that girls do because it looks like a lot of fun, and not because someone tied a pink ribbon on it or made it sparkle.  I'd like to stop playing into the divisive ideal that there are "kids" and there are "girls", because that becomes down the line that there are "people" and there are "women", and leads to some people's accomplishments being prefaced with "female" as if somehow being a "female engineer" is a different thing than being an "engineer".  And that leads to people sitting in think tanks asking how to market Legos to girls, when girls were already playing with them.

Cups knows how.  So do the Girl Scouts I met the other night.  And so does Princess Leia in her minimalist spaceship air vehicle. 

Never Board: Discworld:Ankh-Morpork

I don’t know if you noticed, Albert, but that was a pune, or play on words.  — Death, “Hogfather”

I am one of those people who reads fanfiction only if my friends insist on it, and generally even the best of it is met with a cringing heart.  I am nervous about film adaptations of anything that I have loved, and I feel the same way about board games.  In my experience, once something has become big enough to spawn spinoffs into other genres, those spinoffs tend to fall flat.  Games especially tend to be either so complex in their efforts to replicate the “feel” of the work that even thinking about playing them is a chore (I’m looking at you, Battlestar Galactica), or they have largely irrelevant gameplay designed as a backdrop to “Here’s your favorite characters once again”  (Hello, Star Wars Trouble, Anything-Opoly, Trivial Pursuit Extremely Specialized Nerd Edition, and Risk: with New Characters).

I wanted to be excited about Discworld:Ankh-Morpork, if only because Sir Terry Pratchett has produced a consistently fascinating and varied world with so much stuff in it that I’m never bored with it.  But I was wary – very wary – because getting my hopes up meant risking having them crushed.  I put it on the Christmas Hogswatch list, which is really the best way of getting things that you think you want but are afraid you don’t, and it showed up under the tree in short order.  We broke it out for a two-person game shortly thereafter, and I am happy to say that this game spinoff delivers.

What’s in the box: The instruction booklet is a slender eight-page folio that lays out the rules in a clear and concise manner; the majority of its space is devoted to making sure you know what all of the cards do and how they affect gameplay.  It’s illustrated with examples and accompanied by a set of “cheat sheets", one for each player, that reiterate the meanings of the card symbols, the win conditions for each personality (so important!) and the functions of each city area.  Between these two references I have yet to have an unanswered question.

The gameboard itself is a map of Ankh-Morpork, subdivided into twelve regions that will be familiar to anyone who’s spent much time reading Pratchett’s books; the pieces are sturdy cardboard coins and wooden tokens (the Hogfather did not spring for the deluxe resin pieces for me).  There are also a lot of cards.  I would have liked the map to maybe have a bit more color variation: the sepia toned palette is very pretty and very thematic but it does take some looking at times to find the distinctions between regions.  On the other hand, it is very pretty and not at all garish.

I’d like to take a moment to address the designers of the packaging: this is an injection-molded plastic insert in a large cardboard box, so the actual design of the plastic insert should in theory be infinitely variable.  The package designers chose to make three card deck-sized slots (one with a divot in the middle that is sized to hide the die) and one large featureless rectangle to contain all of the other pieces.  I can deal with fitting the five different decks of cards into three slots (three are very small), but this game contains six houses and twelve minions in each of four different colors, four demon and three troll pawns, and twelve trouble tokens. It also contains a bunch of cardboard coins.  It would have been nice to try to design the box to allow these to be separated at least a little bit.  As it is: get some snack-sized zipper bags or you will be sorting forever.

Gameplay: Discworld:Ankh-Morpork is a game about the constant power plays of Ankh-Morpork’s city politics, and about getting on top of the dung heap for just a moment.  To start the game each player draws at random, an identity which determines that player’s conditions for winning the game.  The three Lords (Selachii, Rust, and de Worde) are trying to control territory; Chrysoprase is trying to raise $50 in cash and property; Lord Vetinari wants to get his spies into everyone else’s business; Dragon King of Arms is causing trouble; and Vimes just wants everyone else to run out of options.  Your personality (and therefore your win conditions) are known only to you, so a very important part of the game is trying to guess who’s trying to win and how – while trying to conceal your plans from everyone else.

The game starts with one minion for each player and one trouble token on the board in three separate areas.  How it goes from there is entirely up to the players themselves.  On your turn, the first thing you do is check to see if you’ve won – all win conditions except Vimes take place at the beginning of your turn – and then you choose a card from your hand, play it, and follow the instructions on the card.  When you’re done, you refill your hand back up to five and play passes to the next player.   That’s the whole game in a nutshell.

The actual gameplay is considerably more complex: each card has from 0 to 4 symbols along the top of the card, which tell you both what you may do and what order you may do it in (yes, 0 symbols mean that The Peeled Nuts is a useless card).  With the exception of the Random Event symbol, executing any action is optional, but you cannot go back – you must play from left to right. There are symbols to place a minion in or adjacent to an area where you already have one (if there is already a minion there, you must also place a trouble token and potentially inch Dragon King of Arms closer to his win condition).  There are symbols to remove someone else’s minion from any area where there is a trouble token (also removing the trouble token).  There are symbols to remove just a trouble token from the board.  There are symbols that let you get paid, interrupt play, and play another card.  There are symbols that let you buy property in an area where you have minions, as long as there are no trouble tokens there.  And then there are the Random Events.

There are actually two decks of cards that combine to form the draw pile: the first half are green-bordered and the second half are brown-bordered.  Initially, this seemed like a needless complexity to me, but after playing several games it became clear that this allows the game to proceed naturally from a setup phase to a strategic phase.  Most of the green-bordered cards deal with placing minions, buildings, and trouble tokens (and getting paid).  With the exception of Rincewind (count on Rincewind to be in the wrong place) there are no Random Event symbols in the green deck.  Once the cards move to the brown deck, there is a lot more moving minions around, whether through assassination or actually moving the tokens, and more manipulation of the board in general.  There are also several other members of the Unseen University faculty in the deck, and every wizard comes with a Random Event.

I have yet to be benefitted by a Random Event: they’re generally bad things that affect players at random, so they can come back to haunt you – things like fire, flood, demons, trolls and dragon attacks.  They destroy minions or buildings or place blocking tokens around the board, which can seriously sabotage even the best-laid plans.  They’re best saved for a desperation move, and once you’ve played a few times you see why you don’t get the option to skip a random event.

Buying property allows you to use the special properties of that particular region: some give you money, some allow you to place or remove trouble tokens, some allow you to buy extra minion placements, some allow you to discard cards.   Additionally, a building counts just like a minion for determining who’s in control of a region; very important for Lords Selachii, Rust, and DeWorde.  I’ve found that the money-earning properties go quickly for everyone (who doesn’t want more money in Ankh-Morpork?) but that there are advantages to each, and none of them are really useless.

Winning: The first player to start his or her turn with their win condition on the board wins.  Alternatively, if you’re Vimes, you win as soon as the deck runs out of cards.  If nobody is Vimes and nobody else wins by the time the deck runs out, then there is a point system to determine who the winner is.  We’ve had to use it once, but under most circumstances someone either gets lucky or careless or both.  It’s hard when you have four people going to keep track of how many areas everyone controls, how many trouble tokens are on the board, how many minions are where, and how much everyone’s cash and property is worth.  And all the while the draw pile is dwindling as cards like Leonard of Quirm allow a draw-4 and owning Unreal Estate lets you draw and discard an extra card a turn.

Overall Impressions:  It’s hard to find a good board game for two people, and since Cap’n just eats the pieces and Cups is still in the Star Wars Trouble age range, we’re condemned to two-person games for now.  Discworld:Ankh-Morpork delivers on the two-person front with interesting gameplay that doesn’t suffer from being scaled down, and the changing winning conditions and strategy involved give it great replayability. 

We took it to a game session over the holidays and got some of our friends involved as well, including some folks who’d never heard of Sir Terry Pratchett.  I’m happy to say that you don’t have to be familiar with the Discworld series to enjoy the game, and while the cards are hilarious if you know the characters involved, they’re still funny if you don’t.  Expanding to four players turns an interesting strategic battle into a game that requires your full attention.   It’s just complex enough with four players that everyone’s going to miss something, which means everyone has a chance to win.

It’s extremely satisfying as the winner to start your turn off by saying “And I win”; there’s a tension involved in wondering if you’ve accounted for everything that keeps it fresh.  We played – and played again – and played again, and at least one of our newcomers left saying “I’ve got to go read these books,” which is the best of all possible tributes I can think of. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a city to infiltrate.