Metatopia is almost like a reverse convention. Instead of having a ton of people wandering around looking at displays and booths, the designers have a table (or sometimes a room) and attendees sign up to play their games. If a game allows for 4 players, there is a sign up sheet with 4 slots. And then at the set time, that game starts. No real wandering or browsing, just focused, mostly-planned game events.

Dice Defense is a semi-cooperative, dice-building, alien-butt-kicking, tower defense game. You and the other leaders of this moon colony need to build and improve your pool of dice to build and activate a network of towers to defend against a sudden alien invasion. While you will work together to build the most efficient defensive systems, only one of you will come out ahead as the strongest defender and win the respect of the colonists.

It's the height of the Renaissance and change is flowing like never before. You are the leaders of various factions secretly vying for control of the city-state amongst the chaos. Deploy your agents - and manipulate your opponent's agents - to advance your agendas in a series of clandestine plots.

The Resistance: Avalon pits the forces of Good and Evil in a battle to control the future of civilization. Arthur represents the future of Britain, a promise of prosperity and honor, yet hidden among his brave warriors are Mordred's unscrupulous minions. These forces of evil are few in number but have knowledge of each other and remain hidden from all but one of Arthur's servants. Merlin alone knows the agents of evil, but he must speak of this only in riddles. If his true identity is discovered, all will be lost.

An Hour With Jason Morningstar

Join Guest of Honor Jason Morningstar for a conversation on the topic of authority in tabletop and live action roleplaying games - how it is formulated in rules texts, models of distribution, and common challenges to both traditional and unorthodox approaches to handling authority on a practical level.

Hearing that Jason Morningstar (designer of Fiasco) was going to be there was a huge highlight for me. At the time, I still hadn't played Fiasco, but I read all about it, watched videos, bought the game. downloaded additional supplements, and felt like I've played it for years. I'm not a huge RPG player, but the concept of a GM-less, one session game is ideal for me. 

And Jason's panel focused mostly on exactly that, GM-less RPGs. What is the role of a GM? And what do they offer? And in which ways can RPGs remove that GM-role? Very informative, yet informal, and the most inspiring panel that I attended at Metatopia.

After this, I was part of my final panel. "Prototypes For Your Game" along with Tim Rodriguez (designer of Ghost Pirates) & Geoff Bottone. With about 10-12 boxes from The Game Crafter on hand, I was ready to show established and up and coming designers what they had to offer for their prototype solutions. This was a really fun panel, and each of us shared our terrible paper prototype practices (which didn't vary too much from person to person).

The Cave - Playtest by Stronghold Games

Stronghold Games had a whole arsenal of games to test, and I blindly signed up to see what they had planned. I'm a huge fan of their reprint of Survive, as well as their business model. Steven Buonocore single handedly curates and produces very high quality versions of older games and now new ones as well. So it was a safe bet that I'd be sitting down for a good time.

The game that I tested was The Cave. A game by K2 designer Adam Kałuża. I believe it has only been published in Poland, and Stronghold was checking it out.

The Cave is an "action point allowance" game. That sounds extremely stiff and boring, but simply means you have X amount of actions per turn, and choose which ones you would like to execute. 

In Action Point (AP) Allowance System games, each player is alloted a certain amount of points per round. These points can be spent on available actions, until the player does not have enough remaining to "purchase" any more actions. This method grants the player greater freedom over how to execute his or her options.

In The Cave, the actions you perform help you dig deeper into a cave, photographing wonders, gathering water samples, and camping. While doing all of this you are using up your supplies and filling up your backpack. There is a risk of straying far from your camp, or even digging deep, because you might run out of supplies, rendering your character fairly useless as you slowly eek your way back to the top.

It was a very interesting game, where each player would lay tiles as they dug their holes. We all started out on different paths and eventually merged in the end. Player interaction was light, mostly only in the race to get items, and in the placement of tiles.

Overall, we all enjoyed it, but felt like the Action Points allowed a ton of options (see player tableau below), but there was mostly an obvious choice. Some turns seemed to play themselves, especially in the first half. The tension builds in the end when all players must get out of the cave or they will lose the game.

La Venise Du Nord - Playtest by Z-man Games

This one was a pleasant surprise. I had a small gap in my schedule and sat in on a 3 person playtest of an unreleased game with Zev of Z-Man Games. 

Bruges, 1452 – you are a wealthy bourgeois controlling a prestigious neighborhood of the city. You establish craftsmen, who produce lace, luxury clothes and jewelery. Will you sell those items for a good price inside the town central market, or would you rather export them through the city harbors? You will also be able to hire builders and architects to build the most beautiful and prestigious bridges above the canals of the "Venice of the North".

Each turn in La Venise du Nord, players throw two dice; one will be used to move the bourgeois pawn, the other to activate the tile he ends his movement on. The modular board ensures replayability and allows for fast play, while requiring players to plan ahead and make good choices. Three different commodities can produce three different goods, each having prices that change depending on supply and demand. Buying and selling at the best times and understanding the other players' interests will be key. Of course, each tile allows a different power, making cautious planning mandatory!

La Venise Du Nord is an economic game like no other that I've ever played. (Note: I haven't played a ton). The concept was fairly simple, but the way that you achieved it was very different. Players roll 2 dice each turn, and can use them in different ways. You will use one die to move and can place the other die on a location to secure your placement at that location (only if unoccupied, or a lower die roll than an existing die at that location). If you cannot secure your placement, you can use the die just to receive rewards based on that location. That's a little confusing, but it makes a lot of sense. When a location pays out, anyone who is in control of that location will also get paid out with the rewards based on their die. 

There are various rewards, which include cards (which help you eventually make and then sell goods), goods, and spaces that allow you to sell your goods. Bridges and boats (which allow faster movement) make it more interesting, and the movement itself can get very tricky. A player cannot move off of a space and back onto it within the same turn. 

In the end, this game kept me thinking. It was unique and non-cenventional in its execution of a few really nice mechanics. I'd be very curious to try this again sometime soon.

Movie Plotz - by Alex Strang

I closed my Metatopia experience with a few sessions of Alex Strang's 15 card creative party game Movie Plotz.

Express your Inner Hollywood Producer and create hilarious blockbuster movie plotlines with this fun brainstorming game that puts players in the screenwriter's seat! Movie Plotz teaches practical (and fun!) brainstorming techniques that can be applied to any creative development exercise. The game mixes storytelling skills with out-of-the-box thinking to help players make up the most outlandish (and possibly believable) big screen plots ever!

Now I've played Movie Plotz before, but this was pretty epic. We had 10 people all packed around a big table, late Saturday night. We had all seen better days, as we've just been through about 30 hours of gaming (with a few hours of sleep somewhere in the middle. I had 3 hours total.) And of course, those delirious times bring out the best in creative gaming.

In Movie Plotz, each player will add to an existing storyline started by the first player. Their addition will be sparked by the card that they draw ("Add a soap opera twist", "Make the story more action-packed"). It usually turns into ridiculousness by the 3rd round. We were playing a 12 card round, so the plot thickened, thinned out, twisted around, and by the end it was pretty much insanity. I could recap the stories that we made up here, but it's more of one of those experiences where you just had to be there, with the right people, and in the right mindset.

I will let the photos speak for themselves.

And to close out my Metatopia experience, here are a few other photos that didn't fit into the other categories:

Alex Strang's Dungeon Freakout

A pretty hilarious session of Sad & Miserable: The Secret Lives of Stand-Up Comics" by Robert Bohl. With Tim Rodriguez and Alex Strang.

Kevin Kulp playtests an epic session of Pig-Pen with Cardboard Edison.

A glance at the fancy Kickstarter prototype of City Hall by Michael Keller.

Next year... if you are a game designer and you're somewhere near the east coast, and there isn't an awful hurricane, you will need to go to Metatopia. Full attendance would have made this one of the best gaming events I've ever been to.

No long lines, big crowds, or expensive purchases. This was 100% about playing/playtesting games and learning about the industry from creative and fun people. It's almost like game designer summer camp, but over a weekend that isn't in the summer.

Special thanks to The Game Crafter for sending me out there, as well as all of my new and old friends at the event. I had a blast thanks to all of you.