Den of Wolves

Den of Wolves was my first megagame, Epistolary Richard invited me to be part of his team, the crew of the Temperance Shepherd. The game was organised by Horizon Games.

Why this was my first experience, John Keyworth had also been talking to me about how he found them a more interesting avenue for his game design interests in 2018.

Synopsis

Den of Wolves is based on the Battlestar Galactica TV show and boardgame but with the “Wolf Clan” taking the part of the Cylons. The Clan has launched a genocidal assault on the rest of humanity resulting in a stray fleet drawn from many different planets trying to escape the ongoing follow-up attacks.

Before the game started

I was emailed a player pack with the layout of the hall, a timetable, the rules and video to explain them. The rules seem pretty close to the Battlestar Galatica boardgame only with less abstraction of the fleet; instead each ship is modelled out individually and needs to maintain its own food, water and fuel.

The video confirmed my understanding of the reading the rules and also introduces the visual representation of what the individual vessel will look like.

Although I left it to the last minute reading all the briefing information made the mechanics of what we were doing simple but I did have to go back to the notes to remind myself of the names and backgrounds of various game artefacts.

Game structure

The game was played over several turns divided into a team and an action phase. During the team phase you had to stay to your home ship and discussed plans with your shipmates. While initially this was interesting later on there was nothing really to discuss beyond sequencing how to secure and return shared resources from other ships.

During the action phase people could move between ships and the resource trading and production began. Really the core of the game for the non-combat or politics players happened here. The most interesting turns were after a Wolf attack when you had to ascertain the impact of an attack and also see if there was any chance of repairing your own damage or if not telling the other ships what the impact on their plans would be.

After the action phase ended, a media and political report would begin. The media reports were atmospheric if not always useful and unlike the TV show the political reports were more like a reading back of minutes of than relaying the political leadership of the fleet.

It wasn’t until political hustings began for an in-game election that the political side became more characterful or in-keeping with the source material with the players broadcasting their views to the entire fleet.

With all the phases complete you then tested for changes in morale (and subsequent consequences) and conducted end turn actions.

One curious aspect of morale was that you could only drop a maximum of two bands if our reading of the rules was correct. This meant that at some points it was better to provide no rations or water to your crew than to supply with a minimal amount as the change was determined by a d6 whose range was greater than the modifiers provisions provided.

Having done this once we had a handy surplus of supplies for the rest of the game but at the expense of some suspension of disbelief.

Jumps

The main battleship, the Aegis, could signal a Jump at any point by holding up an A4 Jump card. Each ship in the fleet then had to set their FTL drive and raise their own Jump card.

The adjudicators then checked each ship display to check the ship had sufficient fuel for the jump and what co-ordinates had been entered.

We never suffered a lost ship or a split fleet. At most some ships appeared late and lost some time in the Action phase because no-one could interact with them until they rejoined the fleet.

The Jump action was interesting because it involved a whole fleet action that paused the game until it was resolved. There were relatively few of these. It gave a feeling of a mass game with little in the way of shared experience. Overall I often felt that the small sub-games were having little bearing on the overall game as their resolution was not important to the main action of the game.

Jump coordinates and fuel requirements were coordinated over a WhatsApp channel so Jumps were well-organised and therefore anti-climatic.

I also thought it would have been fun to have a bit more AV special effects during the Jump. The room had a projector where the destination could have been displayed once the jump was complete and it would have been fun to have some jump sound effects as well.

(The Missing) Narrative structure

While the game briefing has a bit of background narrative the day started with out of character rules and process clarifications but jumped straight into the action.

After each jump there was a bit of verbal narration of the ships arriving from the jump but mostly it served to tell you which ships you couldn’t interact with due to late arrival. No-one announced the arrival later so often you’d be checking with people whether they were “really” present when they were talking to you.

On one occasion a verbal slip meant that it wasn’t clear whether the Aegis had arrived or not which was a bit alarming!

The game ended with no narrative conclusion whatsoever. Instead we switched to out of game debriefs. This was a complete anti-climax, like playing a long game and then not bothering with the scoring.

What worked and what didn’t

The structure of the tables representing ships and having to move between tables to do actions at ships is great. It was also a strange moment when a Wolf attack requires you to stay at a ship. It was an opportunity to strike up a conversation with other players.

At several points in the game the players were reminded that one of the ships had the majority of the surviving population on board. Unlike the TV show where the population count of the fleet is pivotal and highlighted as a measure of success or failure, the game didn’t seem to need to have people survive if the machinery of the ship economy persisted. Hence the need to remind people that the starving, rioting population did actually need help.

Radio channels between the ships were represented as WhatsApp groups. This seemed to work great and was characterful and practical.

Damage to the ships was resolved after the wargame action, not during it. So you have this strange situation of being suspended for ten minutes before discovering that the ship you are on has been hit several times or has just been boarded. This was probably a lack of GMs to administer the sub-games during an attack but it meant that I experienced the game in this very strange asynchronous way. There was very little feeling of drama.

The game used plastic tubs for cargo shuttles which were the only way to transfer items between the ships. It quickly became apparent that cargo shuttles were the essentially part of the economy as they determined what could be exchanged and how quickly. Ships without them had to rely on the good will of those with them and some interesting variations of pony post were invented. For example with people putting wounded crew on cargo shuttles delivering fuel so that they could be dropped off at the medical ship when they were supplied with fuel.

The tubs and the act of physically ferrying tokens around had a haptic feedback that matched the activity it represented.

The Wolves

Spoilers

The Wolves were very poorly explained and were a very external presence. Presented as one-dimensional xenophobic zealots it wasn’t clear to me how they were able to infiltrate other planets. Rather like the boardgame the infiltrators on the fleet weren’t there to deepen the narrative as in the TV show but instead to act as an obstacle to be discovered and dealt with so the fleet could escape their pursuers.

In the debrief it turned out that there were also fanatical cultists on the fleet, which seemed a strange decision. Why have another poorly characterised faction when they seemed to have an identical agenda to the Wolves? This allegiance it had no impact on the way the cultists behaved, they conducted deals and supported the game economy just like everyone else.

The game only needed one antagonist but they just needed more depth and more impact on the game.

Too like life

There were a few aspects of the game where things felt underwhelming as a game but reminiscent of real life. They felt like aspects of the game that didn’t work but when I’ve reflected on it I’ve thought that maybe these things don’t work well in real-life either.

Gossip is news

The media group generally did a good job of providing some entertainment at the end of the round but as participants in the game and an information service they sucked.

Due to the intentional segregation of the various ships there was a constant need to share certain basic information about supplies and ship damage. However that was never covered and instead ships had to find and record the information themselves which was both dull and a waste of time.

They also didn’t really facilitate the political goals that were on the ship sheets.

Instead there was a lot of personality politics and council gossip and intrigue. Which is almost exactly the level of reporting we have on Brexit.

One of the media team said that they had worked in the media business before so it felt that will it was not right it did at least possess verisimilitude.

Political elites and distant policy

Players taking part in the political sub-game (a council representing the different planets the ships had come from) went to a different part of the building during the game term. They could use Whatsapp to ask questions about what the rest of the team thought about policy votes but mostly they were playing an entirely different game to the rest of us and perhaps saw a lot less generally that the other ship-based players.

In addition to this the council had no-one way of enforcing the decisions they made. Instead there was a de-facto federation of ship captains, if the captains agreed with what the political sub-game declared, it happened. Otherwise the political players didn’t really impact the game much.

Again if you feel that having an out of touch political elite who aren’t able to enforce their decisions is just a reflection of the current political state then you might feel this is just straight reportage.

Still, I would have felt a bit stiffed if I had been taking part in something that was requiring effort but had no impact.

Could we have failed?

One question I had (and would have asked the admins if I had had time to attend the post-game social) was were they prepared to lose a ship?

In the endgame debriefs the Aegis crew revealed they had gone through their damage deck twice. They took and repaired enough damage to destroy the ship.

If it had of been destroyed then the game would have effectively ended.

Given that each player had paid to attend would the admins really have ended the game halfway through the day or was there always a fudge factor at play that meant the full set of turns would be played out?

What was this?

The game didn’t seem to really know what it was and failed to materialise a distinct articulation of its own form. Without defined characters or briefings people were not really roleplaying but were for the most part manifesting their own personality in a game structure.

It was a resource-management game that explained a loss state but didn’t have a win one. It was a competitive game for survival that didn’t state whether the participants had survived or not.

It didn’t really provide a reason why someone would do the drudge work in such a game to create a heightened experience for other players beyond a kind of ludic duty or masochism. It needed to reflect the impact of the high-level game mechanics back throughout the whole game.

I didn’t feel like I was taking part in one big game. I felt that I was participating in a distributed game that was only partially impacted by what the other players were doing

Doing it again

I had a good time at the game. I got to hang out with people I would otherwise not have seen. There was a basic element of challenge in our sub-game and everything had the value of novelty.

Would I do it again though? I probably wouldn’t go as a solo player as part of the fun seemed to me to be the social aspect. Having to play the game and make new friends seems a bit exhausting for a leisure activity!

I would also need to be interested in the theme of the game. The combination of a fiction and a game system that you were not interested in would be a recipe for a pretty dull day.

With the right theme and a core of a few people I already knew I’d happily go along and give it another go. The Halloween Haunted House scenario in the Horizon Games list seems the most compelling of what I’ve seen so far.

The experience isn’t like a LARP or other big social games. There is a mechanical underpinning to your actions where the quality of play does seem to matter to the outcome. I’d need to see it at work a few more times to know if its really something I’d enjoy though.