Microscope

After basically getting my friend Tazzy completely addicted to Microscope, I also made a scripted Google sheet to play together online. A lot of fun, and great for expanding on histories of fictional worlds. My main note is that it isn't for everybody - if you're the type who gets bogged down by mechanics, the initial setup phases may prove too exhausting for you to actually get to the role-playing part of the game.That doesn't detract from its value as a system and as a world-building tool. It's fantastic - it's just not something you'll enjoy if you personally prefer a rules-lite approach to role-playing, where I like a mechanics-driven approach.

Sit down with 2 or 3 friends with this and you’ll get some pretty crazy ideas right away. I especially like the menus for the “Yes” and “No” of the world, as you end up running into some funny roadblocks and interesting lore implications pretty quick. I was in a game where lying canonically didn’t exist, and it led to some pretty funny developments. Can’t recommend this enough to writers, improvisers, and ttrpg fans alike.

This game should come with a warning label.The object of the game is to remove barriers to collaborative storytelling, allowing the players to become peers in the shaping of their joint narrative. It achieves this by removing the worst aspect of group world building, what the author calls "nuking Atlantis". This handy phrase describes those occasions when someone in the group has chosen to undo everything the group has created in such a fashion that it is definitively catastrophic to the setting. The mechanics get around this by removing the finality of any, and every, action. Indeed, why nuke Atlantis if you know that the rest of the group will just move to another time and space before or after that happened?In some sense this derails the value of the nuclear option by allowing the group to ignore it while keeping it canonical - as any bully knows their is no payoff in people ignoring you.This game is rife with smart and delicate mechanisms which undermine negative group dynamics but it comes at a cost in terms of traditional game play. Remember when DM's guides had to include in the preface that roleplaying games didn't have winning conditions because nobody knew what that meant? This is just as fundamental of a shift in what it means to play a game - and it should come with a warning label:No Winning ConditionsNo Competitive GameplayDon't expect to win and don't play to compete.

This game is just completely awesome. I hosted a game of this recently at a local games convention (BigBadCon, in Oakland, CA). We went from "what do you guys want to play?" to a detailed epic history of a world in just under 3 hours. We started with a nothing but a stack of blank index cards, and ended up telling the story of a civilization's rise, fall, and rebirth. It all began with a "war in heaven" which caused the fertility goddess and a cosmic dragon to die, creating water on the world. Then over ages and epochs, we described a war between humans and Kaiju. The rise of humanity's saviors and eventual tyrants, the demigods. Then humanity rebelled against the demigods, and finally stormed the gates of the heavens, and wrested the magic of "souls" from the remaining gods.We ran the game with six players, including myself. We had four hours to play, but ended up stopping after three and a half. That was the point where each player had had a chance to be the "Focus" (IE: "First Player" of each round, who gets some special narrative options that round). Three of the other players had read the book, but never played the game. One of the players ran to the dealer’s room during a break and bought a copy of the game, and the other two said they were going to their FLGS tomorrow to buy it.I'm really happy with this game. I'm already trying to figure out a time during the holiday madness to set up a few more sessions of it to show it off to my pals. Looking forward to playing it for many years.I can see tons of potential in this game for world builders and storytellers. Buy it.

Original, imaginitive, but hard to find players for.

I love this game. It's so unique, and very versatile. I haven't played an extended game yet, but it would be easy to continue with the same group for a long time, possibly years, just continuing to build a more and more intricate history.The rules and explanations are written clearly and conversationally. It's not only clear what the rules are, but also why those rules exist, which is great when the game mechanics aren't very rigid. It's important to understand why the game works the way it does--and from the explanations, it's obvious that a lot of thought went into it.I've seen the entire book posted online as a PDF, but it's way nicer in my opinion to be able to thumb through actual pages. Plus, you get to support this awesome game.

By 'interactive,' I mean, you create the history, and you interact with the other players.And by history, I mean the logical, yet incomprehensible story that leads people or places or nations or whatever from one point in time to another. Parts are well understood and well documented. Parts are vague or completely hidden.In this game, you get to decide which parts are which and why, and make a grand tapestry of a story that belongs to you and the other players.The rules are phenomenally well written, making the counterintuitive subject matter easy to understand. The examples are inspirational. The game is fun, and can last as long as you want.

The seller ships with an obnoxious sticker you can't remove less you damage the book.