Now i realise that i've never really debriefed our ICA play of The Agency in a meaningful way, but things have been busy busy busy.
Be that as it may we're going back down to London on the 10th of July to play it again.
It went great last time, there was loads we liked and the overall core experience of the game works.
Six players played the game at the table in a brilliant combination of team co-operation, and players choosing to sacrifice their personal goals for the greater good of the country, as well as Diplomat who spent most of the game making back room deals on the in-game phone and ended up pulling off a coup on the last day of the game.
great stuff!
The other thing was the interaction from the 'audience' players.
Originally they were conceived of as a separate team of their own who spent the time rolling die and generally making the background stuff happening. This worked and was part of the whole "hiding the mechanics' part of the piece, but also didn't work as a straight experience for those players, so at the last minute we changed it all up a bit and instead invited people who didn't get to play the around the table could come and watch the proceedings and were invited to intervene and come and help with some of the game resolution mechanics as well as help form the plot and scenarios in the game.
And people did. there was some great interaction and audience members returning over the 90 minutes the game took to see where Tigali was at what they could input now.
We really enjoyed this, partly because it adds a whole element of unpredictability which we love into the game experience. Everything is still determined on a set of statistics and dice rolls, there is no 'playing god' but the nature of the input and some of the consequences that external audience members come up with in return for the choices the characters are making are different from our own, and it also begins to transform the piece into this game engine over which we have increasingly less control as we gradually cede it all over to players and audience..
So for the next incarnation of The Agency we are going to open the idea up even more, audiences will now be able to watch and join in the game from anywhere in the world on the internet. We're building a webpage that will host a live feed of the game being played and a live twitter feed through which anyone will be able to interact with the live game on the ground. i will post more details on this as we figure out the parameters of it all, but you can check back here or follow @the_agency_live which will be the feed's twitter id. This will allow not just for a remote audience to play but for those players to be bel to keep up with the action as well as how their idea played out if it makes it to the board.
today we've begun to redraft, changed some of the game balance to bring out some elements more and crucially we have lost a character and replaced him with another.
The Architect is now gone and instead is replaced with an Emergency Response Team.
The ERT operatives can deliver fast and short term aid solutions to regions of Tigali which are under threat. The presence of a ERT unit improves a region's general health, meaning that getting a unit in can help to stabilize or even save a region on the brink of disaster. We have also built in a new Airdrop move for ERT units meaning they can be moved faster and more cheaply. This increases the speed in which the team can deploy these units around the map, but also only provides a short term solution, and training new ERT units is very expensive, and as ever taking a flight anywhere in Tigali has a 1/6 chance of crashing due to freak weather conditions... We hope the new character is going to spice things up a bit more, the Architect who was in previously felt a bit 'more of the same', a character whose role was only really self serving and was a hangover from when we wanted the Architect to build townships for population control, this means that we have also removed a whole victory condition, which was a bit flabby anyway, and instead created a much more exciting character with t a bit of variety.
A lot of that will make very little sense if you have not played the game yet, but good news the Arts Council have kindly granted us a small pot of money to develop the piece so it will about over the next couple of months.
The game is exciting and quite tense, and has got players interacting with each other in ways we never really expected, and we're going to be developing that further both for the physical experience and the online element, so please stay in touch.
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