Hello and welcome to the My Daughter Queen of France post-game thread. Our players were Jess (Shakespeare), Jerome (facilitator), Mike, Brian, Katherine and me.

We already had a big debrief about what worked and what didn't work right after the game, but I invite folks to recap their thoughts (or add more). I definitely think My Daughter is on the more challenging end of the game spectrum. The meta "role-playing a character who is role-playing other characters in order to communicate your secret agenda to Shakespeare-who-watches" can make your brain pop.

I do want to say that I am mighty pleased that even though the game was not going particularly well, everybody handled it like smart adults and discussed what was going wrong instead of imploding like a miser's heart on xmas eve. Serious, kudos and thanks for that.

(Spoiler alert. That's the secret to success in every story game under the sun: communicating with the other players.)

I think the big discussion we had after our first break was a turning point in the game. Katherine, who I think had been most confused about the meta/multi-level thing, was the most awesome in her scene following that discussion, pushing her character's agenda whether or not it made total sense.

Other thoughts: I have a policy of trying to include all the actor characters in at least one scene, and that made it really hard for the less directly involved characters. Having two professors in particular made me reach a little. I really think that players, especially new players, might benefit from some guidance about who would be a good actor character. For the record, I think the best ones are people who have known both Shakespeare & daughter for some time, and who were heavily involved in daughter's life at some point. Bad characters to pick are people who are not that emotionally invested (professional relationships only, eg.) and people who only met the daughter a few times.

Am I going off into irrelevant territory here, or do other people view the game this way?