Friday, December 24, 2010

Actual Replay #2: Epiphany: A Christmas Story-Game

I had the opportunity to design and run a brief story-game at Sunday school this month. No, really! There's actually a small cohort of middle and high school boys who play Magic: The Gathering who go to our church, and my wife (who's on a committee) invited me to design and run an "Advent-themed role-play game" (as she says) as part of a whole month's worth of intergenerational Sunday school to bring them into the fold, as it were. Some people did useful stuff like baking cookies or making wooden candelabras--the folks in my group played games. Anyway, we came up with what I thought was a pretty neat idea: the Wise Men in the desert, headed for Bethlehem, with Herod trying to stop them. The game ran pretty well, too, although I'll tweak it before I run it again to make it pop a little more. I don't think it's a terribly serious game, but I didn't realize that it's making a run at a pretty well-established niche.