More Microscope

Yesterday, we got together with the majority of our gaming group and played a second game of Microscope. This time out is was me, Britt, Peter, James, and Megan.

[For a refresher on how Microscope works check out my previous post about the game.]

We met at Panera Bread on the south side of Rockford which was busier and noisier than Meg’s Daily Grind but still seemed to work out okay as play spot. We pushed a few tables together and I broke out my newly acquired half-sized (2.5×3) index cards to make a go of things.

Our concept this time around was: “A magical world that is hidden from the mundane.” This is a little vague and lacks a built-in time component but we rolled with it used our start and end points as a reasonable crutch.

We started the timeline off with Wizard War 2, a dark period, and ended it with Magic Goes Public, a light period. In the yes column of our Palette we had: fae and flying broomsticks. In the no column there was: time-travel, dimensional travel (with the addendum that this was alternate dimensions, not co-existent dimensions like Faerie), dragons, mass mind-control, and undead.

Once we got set-up, Peter led off the game as our first Lens with the focus of “interactions with the Otherworlds” and the timeline started to fill in. We made it through that round and a good part of the way through a second with James as the focus before the not-unexpected pumpkin-ing of Blythe (James and Megan’s near two year old) required Megan and Blythe to return home.

Overall, despite several hurdles this time around (me being a little cranky, keeping an eye on Blythe, attentions wandering, and a noisy environment), I feel that we did reasonably well with the game.

James and Megan both said that they found it interesting and wanted to give it a try again later and, afterward, we discussed using Microscope to create our next campaign setting again.

In the (hopefully near) future, Britt and I intend to give Microscope a try with just the two of us. When that happens, I’m sure that you’ll hear about it.

Tags: microscope

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 7:02 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.