7th Sea & Martian Chess

Saturday, 18 December 1999

Today Lisa ran the first non-playtest session of 7th Sea. This was the second module in The Erebus Cross series for Josh, Matt, Fred, and me. It seemed a little less absurdly rail-roadish then the first part, but that may just have been Lisa loosening up because we weren't in playtest mode. The first part was terrible about forcing the PCs to follow the path the writer had written even if it was out of character for them to do so. This seems to be a flaw of the game in general -- the authors seem to have narrow views of what the appropriate behavior is for characters in the swashbuckling genre. They don't seem to have read The Three Musketeers, in which just about everyone is an immoral scoundrel. (This is a point Lisa brings up in her review of the game.) But we like it anyway. We're probably going to lose the system, though, and switch to a varient of Over the Edge, which is pretty much the all-around favorite game system of our group.

Chris had wanted to organize a group trip to see Toy Story 2 this month, and had decided fairly late (Thursday, I think) that it might be good to try for after today's game session. Not a good idea. Lisa was too tired, and Josh didn't want to go without Lisa, and nobody else but me felt like going, so we bagged the idea and just hung out at Lisa and Josh's place for a while.

While Lisa cleaned up and Matt dozed, Josh suggested playing a game. He has a copy of Icehouse: The Martian Chess Set, and had wanted to play the Ice Traders game. We looked over the rules, and it looks like a great game that I'd love to play sometime, but a bit too complicated to learn right then and there, so we played Zarcana instead. Lots of fun, reminiscent of Cosmic Encounters in some ways. While we were playing, Matt woke up and we talked about dinner and Structuralism. Matt and Lisa went out to buy food (lamb) while the rest of us finished the game (Josh won). While Matt was cooking some very tasty lamb and couscous, we played a few quick hands of Fluxx -- the first two were very quick -- with Josh winning all three games.

We left around 20 after midnight, and I flopped into bed around 1:40 AM.