April 2018 Newsletter

 Whoa!

It’s April already, and we’ve been slowing up on what we’ve been making because our time has been so compressed. Both of our jobs got incredibly busy, but it’s all clearing out soon and there’s only going to be Apex Content from here on out through the year. Thanks for bearing with us!

We’ll finish posting out Observer let’s play this month (you can see the first three videos here). We finished up Throne of Bhaal and started on Planescape: Torment in Mages and Murderdads. We’ve also started to post up some of our stream archives on YouTube, and we will figure out a schedule for that soon (you can see some of Danni playing Bloodborne from a couple months ago).

We’ve been streaming more often over on our Twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/rangedtouch), and if you’re into seeing what we’re up to you can follow us over there.

This is, perhaps obviously, CMRN writing the update this month, and I wanted to write a little bit about my mission this year to read all of William Gibson’s novels. I started by reading his collection of short stories Burning Chrome. I’ve said as much over on Twitter, but I honestly think that it might contain some of the best work in the short story format. Period. “Hinterlands” (readable here) is a truly weird proto-cyberpunk story about space travel and psychological damage, and the title story, “Burning Chrome,” feels like a practice run for Neuromancer. You can see him spinning up toward something great in these stories. I’m already onto Neuromancer now, so I am sure that I will have opinions about that in the next newsletter.

Danni’s Boardgame Review Corner:

Spyfall & Chameleon

Spyfall and Chameleon are kind of mirror images of the asymmetrical social games of Werewolf or Resistance. In Resistance an informed minority is pitted against an uninformed majority. What results is bluster, shouting, tempers, and chaos. I really like Resistance - I love the double bluff gambits, the throw-your-fellow-spy-under-the-bus play and the cold hard deduction that can be done to win a game. What Spyfall and Chameleon do is *in best Owen Wilson voice* presuppose that it was all flipped around.

In both Spyfall and Chameleon, there is only one spy. That spy knows one thing: that they are the spy. All other players know a certain piece of information. The spy is deprived that information. The task of the other players is to determine who the spy is by providing or requesting information that would either clear themselves or incriminate the spy, but without revealing the information. The objective for the spy is to discern that information before the spy is caught.

Wow - writing that made me realize just how sterile these games are when stripped of the specificity of their mechanics. Let’s get to the nitty-gritty and discuss the differences between the two games.

In Spyfall you select a deck of cards in a little ziplock bag. The decks will consist of a number of location cards equal to the group you are playing with minus one and one Spy card. There are 24 possible locations - varying from a crusader camp to an arctic research facility. The spy card says nothing. The non-spies have 8 minutes to guess who the spy is, and the spy has that amount of time to guess the location based on the questions and answers. The spy can stop the game at any time and reveal that they are the spy and attempt to guess. Likewise, a non-spy can stop the clock to call a vote for formally accuse someone - votes must be unanimous, and if wrong, the spy wins.

In Chameleon, instead of location cards there is a 8x6 grid with a random assortment of letters and numbers, and instead of a Spy there is a Chameleon. These correspond to a public reference card. One example reference card could be “Sitcoms” listing shows like Friends or Full House. Each one of these sitcoms corresponds to a code on the 8x6 grid. An eight-sided die and six-sided die are thrown to generate which code will be the clue - in the case of our “Sitcoms” card, which show is selected. Only the players with the grid know, unless the spy has memorized all the possible codes. (Don’t play with anyone willing to do this.) At this point, each player has only a few second to give a one word clue that attempts to show the other non-Chameleons that they know the show or vegetable or what-have-you, whereas the Chameleon attempts to give a clue vague enough to pass or gives a clue based on what the other players before her gave. Tabletalk is allowed only after everyone has given their one-word clue.

Each game has its own unique flair. In Chameleon, the creative and deceptive aspects of the game are back-loaded into the tabletalk, post-clue-giving phase. Often you are put on the spot and have to give a substandard clue. In Spyfall, the creative aspects are in the interrogation - laying traps, asking non-sequitur questions. In one game I was the spy and thought for sure that I was on a cruise. The non-spies were actually on a train. One player asked a pretty brazen question of me: “have you been swimming yet?” It was too specific - in too few locations would swimming even be possible. The table was silent and I scrunched up my face “swimming? That sounds pretty dangerous, given the circumstances.”

Resistance is about lying loudly. Chameleon and Spyfall are about doing so as softly as possible.