[Sons of Liberty] Goateed Washington and the Fully Armed and Operational Printin

[Josh Roby]

Prior Posts:
Pre-Alpha Playtest - this thread lays out the basics of the game mechanics; disregard 'Valor'
Tale of Two Toms - Mark's Tory Win
Kickin Ass Tory Style - a slight retooling of Tory Rules

So last night we ran another battle in our campaign playtest of Sons of Liberty.  We were in the Shot Heard Round the World stage and had been since the last battle, when we had our asses handed to us by Mark playing Tory.

Playing were myself (Tory), Judson (Hamilton), Colin (Swamp Fox), and Mark (Washington).  I was happy to see Swamp Fox and Washington used, as I hadn't seen them in action yet; they seemed to work just fine.  I only have a handful of Patriots left that have not seen play (Deborah Sampson, Salem Poor, Abigail Adams, John Adams).  Additionally, the lack of any need for the set of players or set of characters to remain constant battle-to-battle worked again just fine.  It's always strange to discard things that intuitively seem important only to find that they are not at all important and everything works fine without.

Objectives
The objectives came out surprisingly clear and interpretation-light:
Travel: Swamps to Yorktown
Primary: The Sons of Liberty must destroy a British General lest the British forge a Printing House.  (The British were going to subvert American publishing with pirated and edited works supporting the crown.)
Opportune 1: The Sons of Liberty can test an informant before the British replace a brother mason.
Opportune 2: The Sons of Liberty can rescue a street gang after the British defend the Liberty Bell.
Opportune 3: The Sons of Liberty can train a customs house lest the British build an ornithopter.
We again used the 'flesh out the primary, leave the opportunes sketchy' plan, and this worked out really, really well.

I was playing Tory, so I generated the Secret Objective: The Sons of Liberty must hide a tinkerer lest the British take a customs house.  It was my job to seed these elements into the other levels so that I could reveal the objective later (and get a fat currency bonus).  Seeing that there was already a customs house in the other objectives, I figured this would be pretty easy.

Travel Level
Then I started off actual play by forgetting one of my own rules: I framed the Travel Level without it being a fight, a chase, or an explosion.  Instead, I framed this kind of tepid checkpoint with John Enys trying to deny the Sons their freedom of travel.  This really colored the opening level, and it took two or three full turns around the table before things got off the ground.  So, if nothing else, I know that rule is important, now!

Opportune Objectives
Judson got to direct the cut scene and created a town outside of Yorktown where the Liberty Bell was being forged.  The British had seized the foundry and the local populace had the place surrounded by a riot.  Leading the riot was the street gang, who were going to be in over their heads in short order.  This level kicked into action immediately.  I introduced the tinkerer Benjamin Thompson as my new Tory figure (seeding for the Secret Objective -- or trying to) and gave him mechanical scarecrow soldiers to menace the Sons with.  The Swamp Fox responded by turning the mob into a militia and storming the foundry.  The level ended with a shoot-out duel using laser cannons.  At some point, Hamilton had his British citizenship revoked, and in response in the resolution of the level declared himself the First Citizen of America.

Judson then got the next cut scene, too.  Since the British planned to drop leaflet-bombs of their pirated pamphlets by ornithopter, the Sons resolved to subvert the customs house through which the ornithopter parts were moving.  The customs house already had rebels working in it, but it was such a bureaucratic mess that they couldn't properly run things let alone secretly misdirect shipments.  As soon as play began, I introduced Lord Dunmore, Governor of Virginia, and had Hamilton sentenced to work in the customs house since he was an illegal alien.  What then developed was a sort of left-hand-right-hand bureaucratic turf war, with the different players each trying to bend the totally overworked customs house to their wills.  This progressed for most of the level, culminating in goods being smuggled out of the customs house through tunnels and Washington piloting a giant clockwork mole to recover the subterranean escape.  Finally, the Sons of Liberty constructed the ornithopter themselves and set it up in a secret hanger in the back of the warehouse.

Mark now got the cut scene and framed right into the three Sons meeting with their informant -- who turned out to be none other than the British officer in charge of infiltrating the Yorktown Lodge.  Said informant, of course, turns on the Sons and attempts to capture them. (If I was smart, I would have made him John Andre, but that only occurs to me now.)  The ornithopter flies into the scene and madness ensues.  At some point, the Swamp Fox finds the underground cloning vats that the British are planning to use to replace key masons in Yorktown.  Since the objective is 'test an informant' Judson throws down Clever cards and declares that the entire scene so far has been an elaborate set-up, proceeding entirely according to plan, to test the erstwhile informant.  This results in the Sons having been using the cloning vats to impersonate a number of British soldiers and officers.  In the end, the mason-clones were unmasked and defeated, but not before Thompson slunk away with Washington's teeth!

Secret Objective: Evil Clone Washington!
Mark got the cut scene again, but before he did I revealed the Secret Objective.  I had seeded the tinkerer, the customs house, and Thompson's propensity to hide (a fact which Hamilton used to spread terrible stories about him).  So I was standing to gain three Tyranny if the Patriots accepted the Secret Objective, and three more if I won the Secret Level.  I explained that Thompson had used the back-up cloning facility to create an evil George Washington, complete with goatee, and he was going to infiltrate the customs house and ornithopter hanger.

The Sons predictably leapt to action, packaging up (NPC) Benjamin Franklin in a box so he could deactivate Goateed Washington.  Said box was subjected to a great deal of abuse throughout the level, with Franklin's arms and legs popping out and the Sons covering it up.   The level culminated in the two Washingtons trading smack-talk back and forth about which one could and would father children with Martha Washington.  Goateed Washington distracted, Franklin (still in the box) threw himself at the evil-twin Washington, hitting the false tooth that deactivated him.  In the resolution of this level, Mark narrated Franklin giving Washington a set of giant clockwork teeth.

By fulfilling the Secret Objective, the Patriots unlocked the next stage of the Revolution.  Lafayette and Sampson will be available in the next Battle, and all the Patriots will have their full suite of circumstances.

Round about here, Colin asks me if the Tory player ever wins (since they'd just wiped the floor with me four times).  I talked about how I was actually a terrible Tory player, since I enjoyed watching my game work more than I enjoyed playing it.

Primary Objective
Colin got the last cut-scene to the final objective, and apparently decided that things had not been crazy enough thus far.  He took the Sons to the construction site of the British pirate printing house and revealed that this was no regular printing house, but a printing house built into a giant clockwork mech.  Or, to paraphrase Colin: "It's like a fucking Voltron printing house, tromping across the country spewing pamphlets out of its mouth."

Colin had Swamp Fox lead a band of indian ninjas into the under-construction printing mech as his first play.  I responded immediately with my first play, saying, "And you find General Clinton in the command center in the big chair looking out the round viewport.  He looks up at you and says, 'Now you will face the wrath of this fully armed and functional printing house!'"  Hamilton then got into a saber-duel with Enys, with Mark playing cards to have Washington's voice echoing in Hamilton's head to "Alex, remember your training: use your cleverness!"  Washington himself, meanwhile, convened Congress to fight the giant mech-printing house and then led the charge into the guts of the thing and set the self-destruct timer on his teeth.

Round about that point, I used Thompson to steal a club from the table, getting my third face card, and called the question.  With my whopping four Tyranny, my score came out to 37.  The Patriot score was 39.  They had barely made it.  The timer on Washington's teeth went off, and the clockwork teeth launched themselves at Clinton, with the mech destroyed as it crashed into the ground.

Conclusions
Afterwards, we reflected on how tired you feel after playing Sons of Liberty.  There is so much shouting and laughing and adrenaline, once it's over you really sink back into your chair and feel the effects.

The good news is that the latest version of the Tyranny currency held out.  With my opening budget of 10 Tyranny, I spent three in each Opportune Objective, actually played about five of those nine, and had four in the last level, and played three of those.  The score came out razor-thin, which is immensely gratifying.

The 'bad' news, or at least the lesson that I'm really taking away from this playtest, is that I really need to get a functional Tory Sheet listing off the available figures and what they do.  Right now all I have is an unstyled text document, and picking out the different figures' abilities is more than difficult.  I ended up jotting down notations in the margins in red pen (Lock 8, Steal Club), and this helped a great deal.  I just need to do up the whole list on one sheet, along with space of the Secret Objective, which I don't think will be that difficult.

Once I do that, though, and write up the Patriot figures in full, I think this game is ready to go to beta playtest.

The lingering concern for the day is in the different stages of Campaign Mode.  As it is, there are three (actually four) stages: Stamp Acts, Shot Heard Round the World, Fires of Adversity, and the Final Battle.  As each stage is unlocked (by fulfilling the Secret Objective), new Figures and Circumstances are unlocked.  So, for instance, Lafayette isn't in the war until 1779, so he is only available once you get to the Fires of Adversity.  Additionally, each figure has more circumstances in each stage.  Washington gains "with Lafayette" in Fires of Adversity; Fanny Campbell goes from a mutineer in Stamp Acts to a privateer in Shot Heard Round the World.  Tory Figures unlock, as well: Clinton is only available in Fires of Adversity.

In play, each stage has some guidelines as to what does and does not happen in battles in that stage.  So in Stamp Acts, nobody gets killed.  Everything is about sneaking around, gaining trust and connections, embarassing the British, cutting and establishing supply lines, and so on.  People don't start dying until the Boston Massacre and the Shot Heard Round the World stage.  In the Shot Heard Round the World, the Patriots should be showing off, trying to display that independence is even possible.  In Fires of Adversity, it's all about hunkering down and making sure the British don't win (because the Patriots don't have to win; they just need to make sure the British lose).  The thing of it is, all this stuff I outlined in this paragraph -- these are all guidelines, with no mechanical support in how the game functions.  I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with that, or if guidelines will be 'enough' to make each stage of the game actually feel different.  At the same time, I don't want to impact the rules of the game too much, because there's already enough for players to keep track of without crazy rules changes thrown in, to boot.