Players: Pat, Drew, Sam, and Meghan.

Our kingdom was the Earth Defense Force, a secret international agency tasked with dealing with extraterrestrial lifeforms that have come to earth, hostile or otherwise. Picture something between Men in Black and X-Com.

Our one and only Crossroad was "Will the kingdom accept the Bogan civil war refugees?". The jist was that a typically violent and troublesome alien race called the Bogans had just had a civil war, and the losing side had taken their fleet and fled to Earth. We had to decide whether to accept the 24,000 members of this alien race, despite the myriad of problems that would cause. If we said no, they'd invade.

When it came time to resolve the crossroads, we had two Power players and resulted in a stalemate. We then played two scenes in which we tacked on more juicy predictions and shifted some side effects to sway the Power players. It ended up working a little too well: when it came to resolve the second time, both Power players had reversed their previous decision-- resulting in a second stalemate. The third time around, one of our two Power players threw up their hands and took Touchstone, leading to the final resolution to accept the Bogan refugees. We were all getting kind of tired at that point, and Crisis was only missing one box, so instead of starting a new Crossroad, we just checked Crisis and blew up our Kingdom.

Here are some areas of confusion that came up. I was working from an out-dated set of rules, so these may have been addressed in later revisions:

- Can a Perspective player add more than one prediction per Crossroad? The consensus was they could, but there was still a moment of "uhh, I think so..."
- Can Perspective make predictions when their character isn't in a scene (i.e., they're playing an NPC instead)? We went with "no" on this one.
- Where's the best description of "Pay a Price" in the rules? The rules for preventing a player from fleeing the Kingdom make reference to Paying a Price, so I flipped through the rules looking for a header saying "Paying a Price" but came up empty-handed. I ended up using the steps listed in the rules for taking another player's role.

I think that's it. We chatting for a while with the other Kingdom group after the game. Maybe someone could chime in if I'm forgetting something.

Double Kingdoms? I missed it!

Here are some areas of confusion that came up. I was working from an out-dated set of rules, so these may have been addressed in later revisions:

Yes, this is criminal (but inevitable) negligence on my part. The rules have changed but they're still being cleaned up so I couldn't give you a (legible) new version right now if I tried. Soon! Very soon.

- Can a Perspective player add more than one prediction per Crossroad?

Yes, as many as they want.

- Can Perspective make predictions when their character isn't in a scene (i.e., they're playing an NPC instead)? We went with "no" on this one.

Definitely no. You have to be in the scene to do anything. Secondary characters (NPCs) have zero Roles and can never do anything like that.

- Where's the best description of "Pay a Price" in the rules? The rules for preventing a player from fleeing the Kingdom make reference to Paying a Price, so I flipped through the rules looking for a header saying "Paying a Price" but came up empty-handed. I ended up using the steps listed in the rules for taking another player's role.

All that has totally changed. Intervening, Changing Roles & Challenging Roles are way more homogenized and streamlined.

Want to hear a secret? You can Intervene to stop something anybody does with their Role, including Power's vote on the Crossroad ("Power says yes expel the refugees, we Intervene and protest in the street to raise a stink and make you back down"). But of course your opponent decides if your Intervention works so if they say no you still may escalate and take their Role. This allows for smaller level conflicts fights that don't necessarily go nuclear. It's looking pretty slick.