London Indie meet

If you are in London and like story games, game design or independent role playing games, or want to try out some one shot games to see if it’s for you, I strongly suggest you check out London Indie meet. They normally meet 3 times a month - once all day on Saturday, once on a Tuesday evening and once on a Wednesday evening.

Games I played yesterday:

Fiasco (Channel Six News Playset): - For anyone who doesn’t know Fiasco it’s a collaborative storytelling game. Players set up their relationships, create a character, take turns to direct a scene and then everything goes wrong. It’s usually compared to a Coen brothers movie. Our game involved a struggling news channel, a sports reporter faking a scandal, embezzlement, some dubious photos on a laptop, breaking and entering and a sports reporter of the year trophy used as a weapon.

Warrior Poets: We finished early so I jumped in halfway through this fantastic game. It involved warrior poets roaming the land, resolving battles by means of Haiku. A weird mechanic and you had to think on your feet but a great game and change of pace from the other things normally pitched at indie meet. Also a great game for showboating.

Protocol - Nacht Engel: I think this was my favourite game of the day and that was a high bar to set this month. The characters were authors and artists living under an oppressive regime and trying to smuggle their work out to the rest of the world. It was, I think similar to Fiasco but grittier, and semi structured with cards determining goals for your character and what kind of scene would play next (you had a choice of vignette, ensemble, interlude or interrogation) and the setting in which it would occur. It was dramatic with lots of added angst - my favourite type of game and one I am going to buy as soon as I have money!

So if you’re living in London and want to try out this sort of thing you won’t stand out, we have new people every week. Check out the Google plus community here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/10390189401602106210

Or the Facebook Group which is more detailed and has dates of meetups here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/londonindierpg/

Also the people are nice and no one objects when you realise that you’ve been calling them by their character name in the first game you played with them rather than their actual name (ask me how I know)!