Conquest 2024

We attended for the first two days (29-30th March), and welcomed folks with a colourful table filled with games, trinkets, and a secret-unlockable mini game that would win you a free badge. 

All games were GM-less, and two were solo-experiences. 

Worryingly, people were keen to play detectives uncovering a Murder Mystery in Lucienne Impala's game Murder! Divining A Mystery. 

This short story game uses a chatterbox (those who went to school probably remember this little device) as it's core prompt mechanic. 

In this game, players are detectives who are uncovering a murder using a chatterbox as a divination tool. 

I, as an ancient millennial, had forgotten the arcane art of making chatterboxes and had to race to YouTube to relearn the skill. Lucienne does provide visual folding instructions, but it was a bit easier for me to have someone show me.

The instructions are very simple, having a total word count of 11. Yes, you read that correctly, the instructions for this game are just 11 words. 

In my interpretation of the rules, players took turns holding the chatterbox and asking other players to pick prompts from it. The innermost core of the chatterbox features images such as a teacup, flowers, the moon, and more. These images were used to 'divine' the answers we were seeking - such as: what was the motive for the murder? What was the method? 

I played many games of this and they included the CEO of a perfume company being murdered over unethical practices, a wealthy person meeting their end after being delivered a suspicious bouquet of flowers and many more stories.

We also played games of The Traveller's Tale - a game of old adventurers telling tall tales about the good old days. In this game, by Into the Weird Yonder, players take turns relating a story of their character's deeds. At any point, others may interrupt and suggest a complication. 

The active player then rolls a d6 to see whether they succeed, succeed with another complication, or fail spectacularly. Characters also have 3 traits that they can invoke once for a free reroll. Although, in my experience whenever I invoked a reroll, I rolled another failure. But that's my luck 😅.

It's very well suited to those who like improvisational storytelling and chaos monkeys who like tossing a wrench into other people's plans. 

We had inventors slighted by the king, back-stabbing bards trying build their fashion empire, shape-changing witches and more. In one particularly chaotic game, a party known as the Muk Rakers stopped a wedding between a vampire and victim by accidentally setting things on fire. Some survived the session of reminiscing, others did not.

A compact game, the rules fit on a business card (although I printed them A5 for easier reading). The minor hiccup I encountered playing this game during the convention was the sequencing of the rules for the "ghost" twist. As it's currently written, it isn't super clear how this works at the table.

I had a chat with the designer, and in their mind, they'd intended for the ghost character to emergy organically during play. However, the nature of the way turns are taken, for tension, you'd want the last person to tell their part of the tale to be the one who shuffles off this mortal coil. But I had a fun variant where an NPC victim of the party's antics came back to take revenge on the party, and the two of us playing took turns describing the NPCs words and actions.

The Secret Mini Game - Hi [Name], I'm Dad!

The secret mini-game was Hi [Name], I'm Dad! a lyric game by Logan Timmins. (If you want to know more about lyric games, the Lyrical Ludology podcast is a great place to start).

People unlocked this mini-game by simply introducing themselves. 

I'd respond with "Hi, [Name], I'm Dad!" and then roll on a d6 table which includes wholesome follow-ups such as asking them, "what excites you right now?" and then nodding enthusiastically as they answer.

People who unlocked this mini-game got a free badge!

I was going to be giving away badges for free and not locked behind a game, but due to a human error (hi, it's me, I'm the human error, it's me), I did not order the right-sized parts for the badge-making machine, so I had a very limited number of badges on offer.