The tenth annual Gathering of Friends- the invitation-only week-long gaming event run by Alan Moon- is over. I’ve given detailed descriptions of the event in the past, and rather than retread old ground I’ll merely direct you to your undoubtedly complete set of TGR back issues.
My feelings are oddly mixed. It was great as always to see old friends and meet new ones, and there were scads of new and interesting games and prototypes to try out this year. Unexpectedly, however, I found that I enjoyed this year’s event the least of the six Gatherings I’ve attended. This feeling took me by surprise considering this was the first year that three local friends also went along, about which I was rather excited. I’m not certain why this year’s event came up short for me, but I’ve got some ideas.
I was responsible for this year’s treasure hunt. For months leading up to the Gathering, including nearly every free moment during the six weeks immediately prior to the event, I worked on creating a series of physical and mental puzzles which would combine into a cohesive, entertaining hunt. I wound up with about 20 paper puzzles and about half a dozen physical puzzles. That may not sound like much, but it represents hundreds of hours of development work. And most of those puzzles are pretty darn good. Some of them needed to be created on-site after I arrived at the hotel, and of course many things needed to be installed at the nth hour to prevent early discovery or removal by over-zealous hotel cleaning crews.
With so much time invested in the hunt, I wanted it to go well. And no matter how much I might have pushed it into the background during the week, that pressure still weighed on me. The spectre of the hunt cast a shadow on everything else I did during the week. I quite enjoyed creating the hunt, but when I volunteered to do it I hadn’t reckoned on the psychological cost. I’d like to do it again sometime, learning from this year‘s mistakes, but certainly not next year. And probably not alone again.
This year’s Gathering saw an astounding number of new games making their debut, both in published and prototype form- more, I’m certain, than at any previous Gathering. And I felt pressured to play them all. An entirely internal pressure, to be sure, but real nonetheless. In my ultimately futile quest to play them all, I missed the chance to play a number of other things I’d hoped to play. I never played Die Macher this year, traditionally a must-do for me. Incredibly, I never played a single game of Celebrities. Even among the new games, I missed opportunities I’d been looking forward to. I never got into a game of Dry Gulch. I didn’t even hear about Bruno Faidutti’s Citadels prototype, which apparently was terrific, and I never got to play Al Newman’s Toy Soldiers prototype. So much time and so little to do! Stop. Strike that. Reverse it.
The net result was that I felt less free to just enjoy myself. No time to indulge in personal whims- there are new things to be tried! Past years with fewer novelties seemed more relaxed and congenial.
Opening Days was something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it enabled me to relaz a bit and take things more slowly at the outset. It was during this period that I actually played what new games I did. I can’t imagine how frenzied I’d have felt if I’d arrived on Wednesday. On the other hand, by the time Saturday rolled around I was exhausted despite my best intentions and was approaching game overload. Lack of sleep, excess of fast food, and compression of time does take its toll. There’s something to be said for the 5-day sprint rather than the 9-day marathon.
Perhaps the simplest explanation for my feelings is that the bloom is off the rose. After six Gatherings, it's no longer the Disneyland it once seemed to be. I love seeing old friends and meeting new ones, but I don't get the same rush I got in the first couple of years simply by showing up. The slack-jawed awe at the prize table, the kid-in-the-candy-shop feeling surveying the hundreds of games available to be played- it’s all gone now, replaced by a jaded ennui of familiarity. At my first Gathering I was a neophyte to the world of European games. Now it’s probably safe to call myself an expert. And I wish I could turn back the clock.
Enough introspection. I can’t touch on everything I played at the Gathering, and many of the new games are already profiled briefly in this issue’s Gray Matter. Watch for full reviews of many of them next time. Meanwhile, let me report on some of the unique Gathering events.
The treasure hunt was a bit of a disappointment from my perspective. None of the teams solved the final meta-puzzle, which means I failed to do my job properly. It wasn’t that the game was too hard- three of the fifteen teams got all sixteen answers and all five meta-clues- but rather that there was too much of it. I think that if the game had continued for 30-45 more minutes, at least one team would have cracked it. The lesson learned for next time is to design the hunt so that puzzles can be removed easily during testing. Too short is better than too long, and though after playtesting I did what I could to shorten it, ultimately I couldn’t shorted it enough. On the other hand, the vast majority of players seemed to have a great time. Most loved the puzzles, and a few people approached me later to say it was one of the best things they’d ever done. So, from that perspective, a clear success.
Three puzzles were particularly popular. In 22 Friends, players faced a 6x7 grid of images, most of which were faces of famous people. This was a visual word search in which the full names of 22 Gathering attendees were hidden. For example, one diagonal had pictures of Alec Guinness as Ben Kenobi; Lucille Ball; and Tony Danza. Stringing them together yielded Ben Baldanza (who also reviews some games in this issue). Many images were used in multiple names, sometimes interpreted differently (as with Guinness, used as both Ben and Alec). The only two images not used in names, Winnie the Pooh and Yoyo Ma, combined to form the answer: puma.
In Gametoons, players had to identify about 30 games represented as visual puns in a cartoon montage. A giant Bruce Springsteen represented Big Boss; a big capital L wearing a sombrero was El Grande; a metal steed was Iron Horse. Letters plucked from the right answers yielded an instruction.
For the Musical Maze, players entered a hotel room to find a grid of letters and a looping audio tape of song clips. The center space of the grid was marked BEGIN. Many teams spent valuable time identifying the artists and song titles of the clips, but that turned out to be completely unnecessary. If you listened closely, you noticed that each clip contained the word UP, DOWN, LEFT, or RIGHT in the lyrics, which told you which way to move in the grid. The correct path spelled out an instruction to call a phone number, which yielded a meta-clue.
Brandon Brylawski ran his Philosopher’s Stone game again, as well as a new information trading game he wrote called Inferno. In the latter players raced to identify technology discovered on an alien base on Mercury, seeking a way to save themselves from the solar flare about to fry them to a radioactive crisp. Three paths to victory existed, each obtainable by trading information with other teams and then making intuitive leaps to determine how various gadgets could work together to accomplish your goals. A neural network model, for example, provided a way to mimic the function of a human brain, and a scanning device allowed the complete contents of a human brain to be digitized. Now if you could only find a storage medium capable of holding all that data…
I enjoyed Inferno more than I had the Philosopher’s Stone. In the latter, part of the puzzle lay in deciphering each bit of information, leading many players to feel lost at the outset. Inferno dispensed with this step. We generally knew what we had, and as in computer adventure games the problem was to figure out what the hell to do with it. This, combined with the delightfully evocative prose of each bit of information, made the game both more approachable and entertaining. I hope Brandon takes these games further, as it’d be a shame if more people couldn’t play them. With some reworking they could succeed as puzzle books akin to more sophisticated versions of juvenile choose-your-own-adventure novels. Brandon, by the way, is designing an online role playing game called the Gryphon Tapestry.
The surprise hit of the Gathering for me was Ricardo Sedan’s poker tournament. Forty-two players started with equal (fictitious) stakes, and through a system of structured betting over the course of many timed rounds, the group gradually dwindled down to a single survivor. This was the only poker game I’ve participated in which succeeded without using real money. The tournament format imbued the chips with real value, so there was no “It’s not real money, so what the heck? I call.” problem. Mandatory bets increased every round, providing pressure to win pots lest the stakes rise too high for your bankroll. Absolutely terrific, with the feel of a high-stakes game without the monetary risk. I can’t wait to try again next year.