Megagames

[Paul Howarth]

Dear All

I just thought I’d post to raise awareness of a game format which has been around for a while but which I’m currently promoting, particularly in the north of England. Megagaming is a combination of roleplay, board and wargaming, hence posting in General. Genres cover whatever the designer comes up with but characteristics include players working in teams, time-limited turns and a lot of interaction. Game mechanics are kept simple to speed things up and make sure they’re accessible, but using elements such double blind maps in operational games allows for plenty of command and control issues. This means that you can fight an entire campaign or war in a day and get some sort of conclusion, based on team objectives.

I’ve been organising them up north for about 15 months now and to date we’ve run seven. They included two operational (Jena Campaign & Chosin Reservoir), 2 historical (Sengoku-era Japan and Renaissance Italy), a fantasy dungeoncrawl for 70 players, zombie crisis management and a Very British Civil War campaign set in the Pennines.

This year we have another seven games, with a similar mix of genres – more details can be found here: http://www.penninemegagames.co.uk and I’ve started using Youtube to explain some of the rules: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbjUDCB5wyVdE3ZOyNi6Bg

[Guy Farrish]

Very interesting.

I haven’t played in any of these northern based ones but I have played in some of the Megagame makers ones and Paddy Griffith run ones – I can thoroughly recommend the concept.

Definitely worth having  a go, they bring a different perspective and enjoyment to wargames – great fun and good insight into why things go…differently? to how you planned them. All those little lead subordinates suddenly don’t do exactly what you thought when they are having your orders delivered via real people and, depending on the format, when you don’t have a helicopter view of everything.

Hope it continues to go well Paul.

[shelldrake]

Very interesting! I would have loved to have played in some of these games.

[Alexander Wasberg]

Sounds interesting indeed, thanks for sharing that!

http://lasersandbroadswords.blogspot.com My project blog

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