[What Remains] Status Report & Playtest Session

Hey everyone!

So work on What Remains has been slow-to-nonexistant, as most of my spare game-thinkin’ time has been going into reading all the top 8 (and Team Omega) games and fruitlessly attempting to start conversations about them on the GC boards.

But then this last Sunday, two members of the local gaming community were like ‘hey, let’s playtest your game this Tuesday!’ And we did. The session was pretty revealing, both in terms of what was working and what was decidedly not; some known issues were confirmed, and some others were raised. Here’s a point-form rundown of what worked and didn’t:

Pros

* The basic premise of play worked very well: laying out the landscape, describing objects, and building memories together into a single life.

* I really liked the way the ‘I’ voice moved around the room. I mean, it was supposed to work that way on paper, but it was still gratifying to see it actually happen.

* In particular, the Unfolding a Memory phase — where players ask each other follow-up questions to memories — worked very well, at least in terms of the fiction-building. In terms of mechanics and the rotating roles of Questioner/Speaker, not so much.

* The tone of the game seemed to find its way naturally into the elegiac/nostalgic/reflective space I was hoping for. Two of the three players had read the text.

* The basic gameplay produced a fairly cohesive fiction, without a need for additional mechanics (such as links and anchors.) Players had some trouble adjusting to the idea that ‘our character’ wasn’t a particular age, but after awhile we began to add memories from different eras of his life (though he never really got any older than mid-twenties, the starting era, in part because of the landscape we chose.)

* The ‘role’ of scribe/writing-down-guy passed around fairly organically, though not necessarily in accordance with the rules. More importantly, the need for someone to be writing things down did not seem to interfere significantly with the mood of the game.

* The draw-tokens approach to moving the wind worked fairly well, though one player felt that having 8 cardinal points instead of 4 made dealing with edge-of-grid cases unnecessarily thinky.

* We never gave our character a name.

* Rambling in the first person really feels okay, when all you’re trying to do is remember something. I never felt like what I was saying was inadequately artsy or ‘not important enough.’ (though in one case I felt like I had accidentally gotten all cliched indie face-stabby). That said there should also be more advice in the game about ‘knowing when to stop’; in some cases I felt we continued to add more and more stuff, even after we had mostly ‘found’ the core of the memory. Just like the memory-reciting works fine if you don’t know what you’re going to say before you say it, it also works fine if you just stop more or less whenever.

Cons

* Turn order was confusing, even for the person who wrote the game. In particular, the way the roles moved around during the Unfolding phase and then jumped back to a different reference point once the Wind phase started was confusing. The fix we adopted after initial confusion resulted in players recalling/speaking a memory, then immediately having to ask a follow-up question of themselves — I found this very difficult in terms of headspace, since each role requires a very different orientation towards the fiction (speaker v. observer.)

* Managing the physical space was about as much of a nightmare as I feared. Index cards turned out to be too small to contain both touchstone names, touchstone details, and all the memory details we had added — one player commented how the cards looking ‘full’ made him reluctant to re-open or continue to build on an existing memory. We never had more than two touchstones at a given location, and even that made the whole board/play space seem very spread-out.

* The end of the Unfolding/Q&A period seemed more final than expected, which also contributed to players not re-opening memories as much as I had expected.

* The game moved much slower than I thought. At the current rate of pacing, the 3-player game probably would have taken five or six hours to complete — I would like the average game to take around 2 hours, more or less depending on number of players.

* The wind phase was awkward and often felt tacked on. In some cases players would forget it, proceeding directly to the next turn unless reminded. The call & response ritual dialogue for the wind felt stilted, compared to similar dialogues in other parts of the game, which did not feel silly at all. A player suggested nixing the ‘where does the wind blow?’ at a minimum.

* Players tended to describe location & touchstone details in greater detail than I had expected. Not a big deal but it slowed the game a bit, and (maybe more of a concern) it seemed to blur the lines a little between the location/touchstone phase and the memory phase (where rambling and extra details are fine and even encouraged.)

* Nobody used anchors or links, except me (I only used links.) In one case I recorded a link on behalf of someone else (this is how it should work anyways, which is totally not explicit in the rules), in one case I specifically said ‘I’m creating a link’ and marked it down. One player suggested that the crowdedness of the play area discouraged him from bringing in an anchor, because there literally didn’t seem to be anywhere to put it (we were using wh40k figs.)

* We only played to the beginning of round 3, but it wasn’t clear whether the wind was adequately threatening. We started with a 4×4 grid then eventually reduced it to 3×3. We had one memory lost due to clerical error (it should have just been moved), and another was relocated by the wind. (The touchstone, ‘the sky’, ended up in the location, ‘the cellar’, which made me very happy.) The fact that we started out building memories with a larger number of currency tokens than I expected contributed to this, as did starting with such a large grid for so few players.

* Conversely, looking at the board and the lack of anchors/links, I suspect that the wind would have very quickly decimated a large part of the landscape if we had continued to play.

* Adding details to both locations and touchstones kind of felt like too many details, without a lot of reward. Both the other players had expected the actual physical objects to play a stronger role in the game, as had I. This isn’t a Con exactly, since that’s cool, but it was interesting to see that we naturally fell into a much more narrative mode than I had expected. I’m not sure what to do about that if anything — my favourite memory of the evening was a largely disconnected vignette about our daughter getting her mittens-with-string tangled in the jungle gym.

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Anyways, next step is to come up with a To Do list for parts that need rewriting/redesigning — and then hopefully some more playtesting!