Review(?) Watch The Skies

Last night I read through all the material that Stone Paper Scissors provides for the Megagame Watch the Skies. It was... rough. The packet cost roughly 50 USD and was alarmingly amateurish[*2], both in layout and design. Despite my usual ritual of gawking at anime feet before sleeping, I felt so deeply surprised and compelled by this work that it felt necessary to forgo that in favor of writing this review.

First a bit of background;

WHAT THE HECK IS A MEGAGAME?

I'm by no means an expert on this. I've neither played nor run one, and truthfully Watch the Skies is the only one I've read or know anything about. (Maybe all their texts are like this?) However, from my understanding I've deduced the following:

Megagames take the pedantic boundaries between LARPs, RPGs, Board Games and War Games and throw them right out the window before stuffing 20+ people into a single grand in-person game that usually involves tabletop components. For designers new to the idea it can send your brain whirring with thoughts on what a Massively Multiplayer Tabletop Game can do. [By some accounts the original Braunstein could be considered a Megagame, but we'll get back to that idea another time when I blog about Micro-Megagames.]

Me and a fellow local game enthusiast (who we'll call Jesse for the sake of this post) have been enraptured by this idea for a while now. Like a lot of folks our initial exposure to Megagames was a Shut-Up & Sit Down special on a particularly popular one: Watch the Skies ((this video is worth a watch if you have the time and want additional context)). As Jesse puts it, the appeal of a Megagame (and Watch the Skies in particular) is to achieve a kind of "Model UN with some balls."

WHAT IS WATCH THE SKIES?

For those familiar with XCOM this is going to sound pretty familiar. Aliens (chaired by a team of 3-5 players) have begun launching mysterious operations across Earth, attacking cities, abducting humans, and infiltrating nations. Meanwhile 8 Human Nations (each run by 4 players with unique roles) attempt to further their country's goals, protect mankind and intercept UFOs, all while keeping Global Terror low and profit margins high. Human Player roles are as follows:

The Head of State - Signs off on decisions, wheels and deals with other nations and generally is the party face who tries to keep the nation working on target.

The Foreign Minister - Goes to UN meetings and votes on UN resolutions as well as handles most negotiations.

The Chief of Defense - Assigns where interceptors, armies and navies get deployed on the world map and handles their resolution.

The Scientist - Assigns Research towards long-term projects, makes trades on the black market, and participates in the Science Summits (which are essentially longform improv and boasting while trying not to leak too many government secrets).

Play happens over the course of 6-7 40 minute turns, constituting a non-stop day of roleplay and political chaos.

It is (in theory and seemingly in practice) very cool. The actual play packet... not so much.

THE GOOD

The way the game talks about organizing a Megagame, giving some basic tips on running a marathon game like this, advice on room layout advantages and general scheduling are all perhaps the most usable material in the whole packet. It's the stuff that shows this team has run Megagames, made mistakes and most of all learned from them (and thus have passed those lessons to us the readers). Excellent stuff there.

Something in particular I'd have never thought of is what the game refers to as "Last Turn Madness" where players make rash and out-of-character decisions because it's the last turn so why not. The game's solution? Tell players the game will end on either turn 6 or 7. I'd take this one step further and tell players the game will end on turn 6,7 or 8 to really keep them playing cautiously.

Structurally the game's all there. The roles are carefully selected to interface well with each other and the room as well as be relatively easy to grok. No one's getting information overloaded and the focus remains firmly on play.

The game only comes with one Alien faction and while I won't spoil how they play here, it gives the Alien players plenty of interesting choices, flexibility and limitations (dare I even say "replay value"). In fact, the Alien Players' play experience feels like the one that is most carefully crafted and I'd honestly change the least.

THE UGLY

This game was harder than it should have been to track down. It involved jumping through a variety of links before digging deep enough into Stone Paper Scissor's website to actually purchase the darn thing. And after finally getting the PayPal payment sent, and eventually getting the key to unlock the Zip File I just downloaded ((yeah they key protect it and send out passkeys on a delay)), what I saw inside literally made me think I'd purchased the wrong thing:

Yes this is the honest to goodness layout and format of the entire game. Sparse, dry, questionable font choice, almost unanimously single column. It's kinda grim in my opinion (credit where credit is due I'm sure the people who made this run it phenomenally, but I personally am a slut for production value, especially if I'm paying $50 for something). At least their choice of yellow is nice.

For a game with fairly strict licensing terms and obnoxious DRM, I was appalled to immediately see a screenshot of a Chryssalid from XCOM proudly used as art for one of the Alien cards. It's... not great. Nearly all the layout is done in this bland single column layout, and while I'd love to say this was an effort to be printer friendly, but many handouts have ink intensive pictures that clearly undercut any toner considerations.

[[We love to see the watermark on that UFO - Fun Fact: From what I can tell every team's briefing on what they know about aliens is exactly identical save for the date listed of first contact... They also all end with the line "But these super-advanced weapons are very very expensive and difficult to build and we only have a few of them." which aside from being a clunky run-on feels like comically bad writing that achieves neither a pulpy fun vibe, nor serious drama.]]

It became clear both from the copyrighted materials used and the deeply unappealing UX that we'd need to redo many (if not all) handouts on our own time. Oof.

So what about the mechanics? They're... fine? Serviceable even? Combat is resolved by drawing cards and comparing scores or results. Are these cards reshuffled? Is the game intentionally playing with deterministic odds? Who knows, the game never says.

I do appreciate how these cards pack a lot of detail into a single draw, being useful for the resolution of espionage, UFO damage and PvP strikes... Only issue is that in any of these instances you're still drawing more cards to resolve each individual scenario. Makes me wonder the point of cramming so much info onto one card? To save on printer costs? Why not resolve Espionage with a coin flip? (It has a 50% chance of showing up in the 18 card deck) Why not have players roll d6s when attacking each other?

Best I can figure the reasoning would be two fold: 1) Keep players fully accountable to the ref (as you have a physical card you can cash in for results instead of a die you could fudge) 2) Perhaps this is to further obfuscate the rules and results to the players. Nowhere does it say a Spy only has a 50/50 shot of succeeding, and that may be intentional, provoking players to take higher risk actions without the full knowledge of the true statistics.

Jesse and I (and many others) have talked about why the whole "gain 1 blue and 1 red attack die" thing in board games is so genius at obfuscating the exact rules while still letting you make interesting decisions. You may know the red die is better, but currently you're operating under the assumption of "I have a better chance to hit" rather than "I have a 67.77% chance to hit" (which similarly obfuscates the classic XCOM frustration when you have a 95% chance to hit and miss). So maybe a point back? But now we're back to the layout which is... not great (though better here than anywhere else in the game).

Meanwhile UN assemblies and Alien decision resolution is nice and provides a solid ground for discussions. The mechanics are nothing revolutionary (certain numbers of votes required to achieve certain things, some nations have veto powers, etc), but they serve their purpose well. The real meat here would come from the UN Crises of which the game comes with 11. I say would because ehhhhhhhh. Aside from being painfully British when it comes to foreign affairs in a way that's difficult to articulate in the constraints of this post, most Crises aren't particularly compelling?

Most involve minor civil wars, natural disasters, etc - They normally boil down to "throw money at the situation or take Terror - Referee discretion to make things more interesting." Very little of it interfaces with the Alien threat or the global stage, and many feel the same.

Of the few that do stand out, they lack a certain level of flavor and intrigue. The pandemic Megaflu that can spread is interesting, but spreads painfully slowly and doesn't have a whole lot of consequence. The AI that LexCorp (yes the game literally calls the company LexCorp) develops can instantly cure diseases... of which there's really only 2 of in the game (including the aforementioned Megaflu) and leans much more on Referee improv. Finally a crisis in the Pacific involves sending a bunch of navy ships to monitor and possibly prevent massive seismic activity that'd cause tremendous damage via tsunamis on the coast line. Though the solution is a bit unrealistic, this one at least has some real punch and drama to it. For a game where only 7 (or fewer) of these will ever show up, I feel like they need more punch and urgency as well as immediately actionable solutions.

And then there's science. The Scientist is the most selfish class, with their goal being to get the most Science Points to be the Top Scientist. I actually like this, it adds an edge to a vital pillar of the team... Only they're not terribly vital. They manage the team's tech resources and can trade or invest them into research as they see fit. This process is incredibly barebones, but that admittedly makes it easy to teach so I won't hold that against the game. Science Summits are confusing though...

Either they're a masterstroke where scientists are encouraged to talk about their tracked research projects (without leaking too much information) to win Science Points and possibly a Nobel Prize OR you're supposed to just kinda bullshit for 10 minutes and whoever bullshits in a way that's entertaining walks away with more science points. Which yes this is a game about improving on the fly, but it all feels a bit flat to me. One of many places where it feels just a touch more structure or direction could give the game punch. ((Though maybe this looseness with scientists especially is done so Refs have a lot of freedom to let players get creative in how they improve their nation)).

The espionage rules are fine? I guess?

What's most disappointing is that (while I'm fond of the lack of a direct win condition, implicitly pushing towards a play-to-find-out style) countries are given very little in the way of motivations or directions. Most briefs suggest that a country outpaces another specific country in science, makes some kind of global impression and protects either mankind or themselves. You'll get occasional wrinkles like a team wanting to be involved in every crisis or not have foreigners in its borders, but even these goals usually feel vague and somewhat uncompelling. This is one of the other things me and Jesse are intent on changing. Some kind of meta currency reward for smaller turn-by-turn country-specific objectives would've also gone a long way in this game it feels, but perhaps that's too much admin in a genre all about time crunch.

I appreciate the game's aversion to having winners and losers per say, focusing on an end-game debrief where players talk about how they feel like they did in regards to their goals (quite compellingly, the "primary victory condition for all Reticulan [Alien] players is to role-play as good Reticulans"). But I don't think that precludes giving characters concrete actionable motivations. I don't expect to "win" a murder mystery party, but I do expect some degree of objectives and motivations to pursue.

My biggest issue is the game exudes a "Draw the Rest of the Owl"[*1] energy in all the wrong places. One might even go so far as to say it qualifies as F*ck-You Design. As a game runner I want to know what challenges I'm presenting, how conflict is formatted and why it's compelling. The players then bring the new ideas, color and cool ideas for me to rule on. In Watch the Skies, the referee is expected to bring almost as much (if not more) new to the table as the players which is... not ideal for a system that is already heavily relying on the referee to organize the event and make frequent rulings based off player actions.

Maybe this sparseness is to ensure the rules never get in the referee's way or that any set of refs can run the game however they want? But that feels... overly generous.

I don't think Watch the Skies is bad per se, but it's an absolute skeleton of a game that expects you to either wing it or roll up your sleeves to do the lion's share of the work. It's $50 for spectacular Megagame coordination advice that has stapled to it an idea for a game and some vague pseudo compelling procedures. At best it's the game equivalent of a coloring book that also has you connect the dots.

Now to be clear, this game is older and clearly a passion project that escaped containment, so I'm not hugely surprised. But for a $50 DRM locked commercial product it lacked any kind of bite that'd make me recommend ever purchasing this versus just writing the game that you think Watch the Skies will be like (an activity you'll pretty much have to do anyways if you're interested in playing it). If you're looking to play it at a local spot, I'm sure most people who run this understand what they're getting into and will likely put their own amazing flairs on it. Probably worth it, but your mileage may vary (as with any communal experience honestly).

I have no qualms with people reviewing things they haven't played, it feels particularly pertinent to do it here where (after reading it) I'm not even sure if I can or would play it. Both Jesse and I have a laundry list of changes we'd make, to the point where we're mainly holding onto Watch the Skies for its name cache, division of roles and [checks notes] name cache.

If and when we run our own version of this game I'll be sure to blog about that too, but until then it felt pertinent to pull back the curtain on the actual text of the game and reveal that the meat of Watch the Skies has always been in the hands of the people running it, and not something you can get for fifty dollars worth of PDFs with questionably legal assets. 

[*1 : for those who don't know what Drawing the Rest of the Owl refers to]

[*2 : I don't use amateurish as a huge knock here - It's good to do something for the love of the thing! But hecking wow if this doesn't feel like a rushed passion project with google docs layout]