So this past OrcCon was a blast: I got to run FLFS (and sold three with hardly any effort applied), did another great Primetime Adventures, got to play in John Wick’s Houses of the Blooded preview (more on that later), and then turned the tables and got John to play the current version of Sons of Liberty. He’s going to be writing the introduction, and I figured it might be a good idea for him to actually play the damn thing before he ran off to Arizona.

I rounded up three players for the playtest late Sunday night; one dropped out and I first of all confirmed that the game plays better with three Patriots than with two Patriots. That said, we had Paul Revere (played by Arturo Rubio, who has zero web presence but is awesome) and Alexander Hamilton (played by the Wick). In about thirty seconds we realized that we were about to play Sons of Liberty: the Buddy Movie.

We pulled cards to determine the situation (for reference, play with the online version ). The primary objective was “The Sons of Liberty must monkeywrench spring boxes before the British can equip a street gang.” The opportune objectives had them replacing ship captains and helping out a mole among Tory supporters. As we played the Grandmasters of the Americas, deciphering the whist code objectives, John insisted that the spring boxes in question were not normal spring boxes, but something more sinister. We ran with it.

The first scene of any Sons of Liberty game must be one of three options: it must be a chase scene, a big fight scene, or something must explode. We went with a chase scene: Alexander Hamilton and Paul Revere pushing their horses to the limit ahead of pursuing redcoats. There’s witty banter, there’s evading pursuit, there’s tricking the British, and then they decide to switch from horses to a carriage to avoid being recognized when they roll into Salem, their destination. Patriot players have full control of all rebels and patriots in the game, while the Tory player controls all the loyalists. At the home of Paul’s friends with the carriage, John took the opportunity to narrate in Marie, the alderman’s daughter, who was secretly a supporter of the cause, despite her loyalist father. And right about then the game was on.

The redcoats beat Revere and Hamilton to the house; they confiscated the carriage. Marie tried to stop them, but the regulars laughed, threw her in the carriage, and headed out. The chasers became the chasees as the Sons of Liberty raced after the carriage, had a very satisfying fight scene as they thundered down the road – jumping from horse to carriage, knocking redcoats left and right – saved Marie, and headed on into town. End of opening scene.

Turo narrated a cut scene taking them into town and to the foggy Salem docks, positioning them to take on the opportune objective of replacing the ship’s captain. With a distraction provided by Marie, scandalously showing her ankles and drawing away the attention of the sailors, Hamilton grapple-gunned onto the ship and slipped below decks; Revere disguised himself as a sailor and mingled (drunkenly) with the leering men. Hamilton made contact with their mole on the ship, who showed him down to the special cargo – the spring box chained down in the middle of the hold. The mole turned out to be a triple agent, though, and shoved Hamilton towards the box, which opened its doors and began to suck him in. The patriot made clever use of his grapple gun, however, and the unbalanced mole fell into the box. Whirrs and clicks later, the box spat out two of him – one trussed up and the other murderous. One rapier duel later, Hamilton stood over the defeated man and concluded that the mysterious box split a man into his virtuous and villainous halves. Meanwhile, Paul Revere stumbled his way up close to the captain, dispatched him, and assumed his identity. When the constable came around the corner and was about to arrest poor Marie for indecent exposure, Revere swept in with a blustering distraction to buy her time. He then brought the carriage around; they loaded the spring box inside and cantered off into the Salem night with the mysterious spring box in tow.

However, the objective was not to steal the spring box, but to monkeywrench it. In order to do that, the Sons of Liberty had to find what purpose it was being put to. So with they decided to deliver it to the alderman, Marie’s father, and find out. No sooner had they stepped into the alderman’s parlour than Marie came downstairs to greet the late night “visitors.” The alderman laughed at the lot of them and thrust Marie towards the box, splitting her into good and gentle, freedom-loving Marie, and the villainous but oh so sexy Bloody Mary. Then there was fencing, rescues, and swinging from various bits of architecture. The alderman gloated that his now-loyal daughter would slaughter them and allow him to turn the street gangs into his villainous minions. However, one case of explosives and one overburdened grapple gun later, Revere, Hamilton, and Marie were whizzing out the mansion’s window inches ahead of the fireball. Which pretty much completed their primary objective.

The game ran a little short in just three meaty scenes – I’m still tinkering with the pacing mechanic, but it’s much better than the Valor nonsense I started with – but the game was damn satisfying. Both John and Turo (and Paul, who turned up towards the end) gave me tons of good notes which will be incorporated into the game, and one suggestion that I wasn’t too sure about: doing the game in explicit turns. As it stood, the patriot players and Tory player played cards willy-nilly when they could, lending support for the madcap adventure feel. To support the competitive aspect between Patriots and Tory, though, they suggested putting it into turns, which would focus the action and force discards when a Patriot couldn’t play. I was highly skeptical of the suggestion, but rather intrigued.

So we playtested it two days later. My good, longsuffering peeps at LAGames threw in for a turn-based rendition of Sons of Liberty the following Tuesday. The primary objective was “The Sons of Liberty must remove tea while the British equip a sailing ship.” Obviously, the British had stepped up their shipping schedule and the tea would arrive in Boston Harbor before Sam Adams and company were ready to have their tea party. The Sons of Liberty had to prevent the tea from arriving too soon. Opportune objectives involved bribing slaves, testing the mettle of an orator, and hiding Benedict Arnold’s militia before the British were able to send in a mistress to seduce him. Again it was two Patriots, this time Thomas Jefferson (Mark Vallianatos) and Ethan Allen (Judson Lester).

The game started with the patriots getting an emergency relay from a heliograph station, only to have the station explode halfway through the message. Then came the wing of British ornithopters dropping bombs and confiscating the mills up and down the Hudson River valley. Jefferson fought back, reasonably enough, by arguing the legal aspects of the situation. When that only went so far, he resorted to beating down redcoats with his cane (giving rise to a new tagline for the game, “Beat down redcoats with T.J. and his cane.”). Ethan Allen and his mooseriders mopped up the redcoats that were left. End of opening scene.

The turn-based thing hadn’t screwed up the entire game, so we decided to continue on. We gave the patriots hands of five cards instead of four to see if that was necessary since card play was constrained. The first opportune objective was an attempt to bribe the slaves working to supply the ship, but British security was tight – the Patriots lost out and had to make a strategic retreat. The next scene, however, involved a giant fight in a church. I mean, really, there isn’t much to say after that. The redcoats tried to break up the assembly, Ethan Allen threw a pew at them, and so on. It was pretty glorious, and certainly tested that orator, who was thereafter capable of exhorting his flock to resist British oppression. Then, accompanied by said flock, T.J. and Allen stormed the British cargo ships, “removed” the tea, and sent the British packing. A rollicking good time.

Then I was presented with a dilemma. The turn-based play was a lot simpler, easier to grasp, and allowed the players time to think, strategize, and plan. There was less performance anxiety, and in a lot of ways the game played better. However (yeah, you saw that “but” coming a mile away), while the turns brought along all this good stuff, it also subtly changed the flavor of the game. Sons of Liberty is a competitive game: not one in which a ‘winner’ is selected at the end, but one in which the players definitely compete with each other to have the coolest contributions to the game. Here’s the thing: when using turns, the competition was all about being clever. The game focused on putting together just the right combination of cards and narrating in just the right way to give you a continuing advantage later. Without the turns, the competition is right there, but it’s a different competition: it’s a competition all about being awesome. Without the time and reliable structure of taking turns, players are throwing cards on the table and shouting about how they, well, grapple-gun out of an exploding building. The feel was very different.

So I have this decision: clever, or awesome? This is a very difficult decision, especially for me. I love both of these something fierce. Choosing between them is tough! And then Mark, blessed Mark, offered these words of wisdom: “Of course, you could always put both in the book.” Of course! I could have both. And we discussed the difference between having a hand of four cards versus a hand of five cards… wait, that could also be player-selected. Then I dug down to the game’s roots… if it’s Dynasty Warriors in the American Revolution, I reasoned, shouldn’t it have an Options Screen? Players can select if they want the game to run Clever or Awesome, can decide if they want to set the difficulty to Easy (5 cards), Medium (4 cards), or Hard (3 cards). I just need to figure out how to implement Babalities and I’ll be set!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Sons of Liberty, My Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.