Okay.  So I have just a couple of minutes to scrawl this down.  But if I don't do it now, I'll forget and never do it.

I taught Versus mode over lunch today.  My fellow player has been around RPGs but he isn't really a gamer.  However, he left me a comment on my blog indicating his desire to give it a whirl.  So we did.

We ended up playing with a loose turn structure so that he could get a feel for how the game works, which went well.  And boy did we have a lot of fun.

In this corner, Thomas Paine (played by Jeremy).

In this corner, George Washington (played by Seth).

The issue:  censorship.

The actual issue text:

"In New England farms, the People consider censorship.  Supporters teach correspondence after detractors replace an arms cache!"

Now, oddly enough, I just realized that I completely reversed this in my head when we played.  "Supporter" meant "favored freedom of the press".  Oh well.  It worked out anyways.

I suggested that the issue was that there were still Tories doing nasty Tory things who were being rounded up.  But the new government was suppressing the publication of texts describing the rounding up of these Tories.  Need to protect the security of the nation and all that.  (Any correlation to modern-day events is purely in your head.  Really.)

So Thomas Paine stood to speak against the suppression and George Washington argued for it.

Without replicating the entirety of play, let's just say that things quickly went from bad to worse for Paine.  He tried to implicate Washington as a Tory sympathizer, even producing photographic evidence of secret meetings between Washington and the Tories.  But Congress wasn't paying any attention, and Washington just ran roughshod over Paine.  At one point, Jeremy was locked out of cards after I had a significant base of cards on my own side of the table, so I romped all over him.  Washington had Paine thrown out of Congress and kicked him when no one was looking.  Then he led the troops out to round up the remaining Tories.  Capitalizing on this, he launched a campaign for President, which he won in a landslide.  Then he had Paine imprisoned for the win.

In the final analysis, Paine wrote his memoirs, but he quickly realized that no one would read them.  So, when he was finally released from jail, he retired to the obscurity of private life.  Washington, who was by then the Emperor of the United States, made sure that the few copies of Paine's memoirs were suppressed.  Bad for security, you know.

And all this, even with the slower card play, in about 45 minutes.

So, yay!

A couple of playtest comments:

--Where do you discard your cards?  You can't put them by your deck, because that's where support cards go.  But I couldn't figure any other place for them to be.  Ideas?

--The "calling for cards" ability doesn't seem to be that powerful in Versus mode, since you can always take cards from the support lines.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Just noting.  Which leads to the next point...

--We didn't have many support cards hit the table.  I'm thinking about four.  I don't know if this is just the result of our particular game, but I thought that I'd mention it.

--Our final score was 38 to 12.  So that's not close.  At speed, it might be different.  But you're wanting to know those sorts of things, so there you go.

--Oddly enough, looking back on the game, even though it was over the top, like a good game of Sons of Liberty should be, there was just enough serious political content to make it interesting.

--Jeremy said that it would take him some time to get used to the game, but he could see himself really enjoying it when he got used to it.

Um, any questions that I can answer for you?