Joshua, Judson, Stacy and I conducted the third playtest of Palace Gates earlier this week. That same night we played Subversive Words for the second time, with Jim taking Stacy’s place. The two games are from my series Heads of State: nine short games about tyrants

** O'm looking for outside playtesters- game drafts available at http://www.headsofstate.net/?page_id=6

Palace Gates

Since most of our earlier playtests had been set in Latin American bananas republics or small Carpathian monarchies, we wanted to set down in a more far-flung region. Someone suggested Indonesia and we decided to feature long-serving dictator General Suharto, without having to hew to his real history. My character was an Indonesian soldier visiting the capital during leave. Judson’s was an Australian security consultant who had been hired to upgrade motion detectors in the palace. Joshua was an American tourist who wanted to grab a souvenir (to sell on ebay of course). Stacy’s character was employed at the site as a groundskeeper.

We each provided a visible feature of the palace or a rumor about what it was like inside:
• Located on an island connected to the capital by a causeway
• Most of the palace is located underground
• Suharto has a disturbed brother who was kept hidden within
• Palace looks like a mosque

Players take turns rolling for an object found in the dictators residence and describe how it was found, then weave a story about the Tyrant inspired by the item. Other players can propose amendments to the story, offering tokens as inducements for the speaking player to accept the changes. Some of the objects/stories included:

• Scene two: prosthetic leg = the mistress had lost her leg from the knee down when her parent’s house was bombed. Amendment: the mistress didn’t lose her leg in an explosion, Suharto had it cut off. Second amendment: you’re slandering our leader- the mistresses’ father lost his leg in an accident and the general generously paid for the prosthetic (as he did for many of the nations’ poor), then after dad died, the mistress kept it as a momento. (Josh also got a bonus token for referencing the mistress I introduced in scene one).
Scene four: Brail new testament = a library containing just bibles in all the world’s languages because the general is devout. Amendment: he’s a devout muslim so the bibles had all been confiscated from missionaries.
•

For the second round we added two additional story elements to each scene (chosen by the players to the left and right of the narrating player. The two categories were literary devices and images/art.

• Scene five: jar of skin whitening cream + foreshadowing + cherry blossoms = the dictator suffered from cancer and used to sit in a robe (gift of the Japanese ambassador) before a mirror after treatment so attendants could mask his skin lesions with cream.
Scene seven: caged automata of a bird + anomonopeia + Picasso’s Guernica = Suharto was in Spain during civil war and took the automata from a house damaged by the ‘bang’ of a bombing raid as a symbol of how a forceful leader can bring order to his nation.
•

Stacy and Judson ended the game tied with the most tokens so they got to collaborate on a final scene revealing how the tyrant died.

Unit of blood = the characters find Suharto’s corpse, a unit of blood still hooked up to his arm. The autopsy reveals that while he was in the late stages of cancer, he had succumbed to poison planted in his face whitening cream.

As in earlier playtests, players were able to spin some neat stories and it’s fun being challenged by objects/elements. Suggesting amendments added an interesting spin to some of the stories although it wasn’t high pressure one-upmanship like Baron Munschausen for example.

Design notes:

• Josh noted that the currency of tokens/amendments is a problem because you have an incentive to keep your starting tokens and never offer amendments to other players’ stories. A decent solution is to not count your starting tokens towards your final score- so you don’t have an incentive to hoard them. Perhaps there should be an incentive to offer them (beyond interest in the story).
• The current rules give each player one starting token per other player. Have a set number of starting tokens per player or a total starting number regardless of how many players there are (otherwise in games with a lot of players, there will be too many tokens and a tendency to drag out scenes)
• Probably better to transition in one story element at a time: just object, then object + 1 element, etc.

Subversive words

SW has two sides: events in the life of a dissident writer (or other creative person), and the story they are creating in a new work in progress on the theme of the tyrant. We kept this game in the same setting as palace gates so we needed to create a dissident/underground creative type as the main character for half of the game. We chose an elderly female muralist/street artist, best known for a salt painting of imperial occupation and oppression. Because the work could also be interpreted as an allegory of the Suharto regime, the painting had been erased after a week and only 6 photographs of it exist. The artist’s current work is a triptych of three street murals that she was planning to paint in three separate neighborhoods of Jakarta. (We chose three to set the length of the game: three scenes in the artist’s life and three inside the world of her artwork.)

We started in the artist’s life. The system in this half of the game is that players spend tokens (scrabble pieces) to move a game piece around a wheel of 16 emotions and have to narrate events that would cause the artist character to experience that emotion. For example, the first such scene progressed from:
Anticipation = the artist gathered her chalk and set out towards the site she has chosen for her first mural in the series
Optimism = she stops by her son’s house along the way and is happy and hopeful to play with her grandson for a while
Disappointment = reaching the location for her first mural (her grandson’s school) she finds that a ceremony is underway in the school yard and she cannot start her work
Surprise = why are there so many soldiers here at the school?
Fear = the soldiers start going through the gathered crowd, asking for id papers

We jumped into the world of the mural. We had picked a group of characters to feature in the mural half of the game: a solider, a young woman, a farmer, and a demon. In this half of the game, players choose scrabble pieces from their hand, pick a key word that starts with the chosen letter, and then narrate based on the key word. I assumed that we would be recounting what happened to the characters in the art almost in the same way as if they were characters in a book. But the other three players steered us in a much better direction, describing the actual physical mural in terms of colors and location in the image. For example, the first scene ‘inside’ the art was:
D = demon = a red demonic figure looms at top of the mural
M = marriage = below, the soldier and girl stand hand in hand
P = paint = an undercoat of orange paint gives everything in the mural an energetic glow
T = treeline = the demon sets fire to the forest, it spreads towards the couple
A = an angelic figure deflects the fire with its sword
R = run = the couple flees from the conflagration
G = group = a group of torchbearing figures cut off the couple’s escape
L = a blue lake blocks their only other route to safety
S = steam from the fire reaching the lakeshore obscures a bridge over the water

In the second scene in the artist’s life, she is interrogated by a soldier, flees to a slum area of the capital to paint the second mural and comes to terms with the fact that few art lovers will come there to see her work.

In the second scene inside the mural, hundreds of children are menaced by a surreal military marching band (Josh only had an X scrabble piece and went for xylophone as the key word), the couple look on in horror and flee cowardly as the backdrop of the mural changes from the surrounding slums to the government buildings of the capital to a vast mausoleum.

In the final scene in the artist’s life, she wanders randomly through the city, regretting that she will probably die soon and that her work has had little impact, then she looks up in surprise and sees the vast white walls of the tyrant’s palace, but never gets to start her final mural there, succumbing to a heart attack when a soldier accosts her.

The final mural is never painted but the soldier who stopped her looks through her sketchbooks and sees her plans for it. Bombs (inscribed with images of western bankers) explode in the background as the demon removes its mask to reveal a young Suharto. The woman in the mural is here dressed as a nun, and her face is the face of the artist as a young lady. Her soldier lover is shown with his face blank- in the sketchbook there are many attempts at drawing him, but the artist apparently never got it right.

Once again, this game worked well at producing an inside/outside story of sorts. The letters and emotion are nice as inspirations/creative constraints. The rules for spending and laying down pieces to move round the emotional wheel in the artist’s life section are still not great. The modification we tried half way through, with pieces seeded on each emotion you move through, has promise and I will fiddle with it.

Design notes:

• The first player picks a starting location on the wheel and the rest should get to put a tile on their choice of one emotion to pre-seed the wheel.
• System should promote motion and reversals of emotion but it would also be nice to tend to have each scene cluster in a band of emotions rather than use them all willy nilly.
• When you move, place one tile in each emotion you pass through, not on the one you end up in. Then if you or another player later moves to one of the seeded spaces, they take the tiles there.
• Still costs three to reverse across the wheel
• Maybe when you run out of tiles in the art world, you don’t get to draw a new hand of 6, you only get one at a time, so you really have an incentive to collect good ones in the artist’s world. Keep tiles face up on the wheel so players try to get good letters?
• Along same lines, maybe you should not be able to have more than 6-7 in your hand so you have incentive to move around and dump crappy letters in the wheel
• Or maybe the currency of the tiles isn’t really important since the choice of letters and emotions is what the game is and should be about, not collecting the right tiles
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Both games are amazing (I got to see a little of Palace Gates), but I really like the Subversive Art game... very smart. My fear about Palace Gates is the literary cues, which may stymie creativity more than inspire it. But when I described this game to people they loved the premise.

Another thing to consider on the "scrabble" wheel, Mark... is either color-coding, a roulette kind of device with a 0 and a 00, and/or an odd number of locations.