getting out of the rut: story games

Lately I've been hanging out with a couple of people from the Story Games Seattle meetup & we've been test-driving story games. Thanks to yearly events like GameChef, the landscape of free titles in indie gaming is strewn with titles in their first revision, with only a handful of playtests under their belt. Some of these games go on to do great things, but most of them languish. (the titles available for sale are sometimes higher-quality, but there are no guarantees!)

I'm not temperamentally suited to writing my own games. When I'm engaged in a creative endeavor, I subconsciously expect the step where I show other people what I'm working on to be at the *end*. That's not a good match for, y'know, playtesting? I find I lose interest right around the same time everybody else does (and maybe for the same reason). I get maybe one more version past the first round of playtesting, and then I'm bored. So I can't fault all those v0.1 or 0.2 games out there -- I do the same thing, except I'm too shy to put my efforts up on the internet.  I think I'm going to enjoy playing a bunch of other peoples' unedited works than I would creating my own. 

I'd like to write up a bit about my thoughts on the games we've played -- at the very least, now that we're past three, I keep finding myself missing one whenever I try to make a list of what we've played so far. These commentaries may end up pretty shallow -- for one, they're solely from my perspective. I may see if I can get my co-conspirators to weigh in, but this is primarily an exercise in keeping my thoughts organized.

Anyway, watch this space. No, I'm serious this time, I'm actually going to post something!

Story games: playing Faust and Friends

(see previous post on test-driving story games.)

So, starting with the one we didn't finish:  Faust & Friends, by Mendel Schmiedekamp.  Schmiedekamp writes chewy game theory articles and comes out with at least one game a year that seems designed to highlight some particular aspect of gameplay/game design.  This one's clearly about relationships.

( my experience playing the game )