The Orc Stomp is a 5k allegedly fun run, which I, and a fair number of others, walk. I did it with Mini & Frank a few years back, found that I oddly enjoyed it, and so kept doing it; There’s a charity element, so I can pretend that it’s not completely about me, and because it’s exercise I can also pretend that it offsets some of the terrible dietary decisions I’m no doubt going to make, or may have already made, during the con.
CHEW was the first game of the day.
The award-winning Image comic book series and New York Times Best Seller, CHEW, is cooking for a game table near you! The foodie dark comedy about cops, crooks, cooks, cannibals, and clairvoyants.
Set in a world where chicken is illegal after a catastrophic outbreak of the bird flu killed over 100 million people, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration is now the most powerful law enforcement agency on the planet.
https://www.imagininggames.com
As a member of the Special Crimes Division, it’s your job to investigate food crimes like chicken trafficking, egg dealing, and putting food-powered criminals behind bars.
This is a Forged In The Dark game (uses the system/engine behind the game Blades In The Dark), and I presume that I found it by looking for events using that system; I’ve heard about it, but never used it.
It’s a lot of fun, and extremely Gonzo.
Probably the most unusual mechanic of the game is that you are building up one of those conspiracy/crime board things with the note cards & string (or in this case post it notes and dry erase marker) to keep track of the crime as you are investigating it. At the end it’s much less about whether you correctly solved the crime and much more about whatever lunatic case you put together turning out to be true.
Or at least that’s how I understand it. I haven’t read the game yet. But it was a ton of fun, and I think is my second equal for “best games I played this year”.
Stealing Stories For The Devil, sadly, wasn’t as good.
It wasn’t a bad game, but it wasn’t as good as many of the others, in part because the guy running it really wanted it to be a weird & zany game, so … that’s what happened.
It’s one thing to claim that you’re just feeding off what the players are doing, though if you claim that a lot, it tends to sound like an excuse. But when you talk about the room full of alternative versions of Mike Tyson in a previous session, and there are multiple alternative versions of people in this session too … Kind of sounds like it’s coming from you.
It was enjoyable enough, and I’ll probably get the game at some point just to understand the complex high-concept backstory, but I do not have good luck with this game at Gen Con.