The game: Microscope

The Players: Ed, Clayton, Tim, Eric

The universe: Big and empty. A universe with faster-than-light travel but no aliens, with a focus on humanity's leaving our homeworld (planet Wayward, because we were collectively bad at naming things). We left the world and entered the endless reaches of space, where we didn't meet anyone.

But that was okay, because we brought with us some uplifted animals and artificial intelligence. The latter was a particularly troublesome companion. Our big picture was "progress and destruction brought about by technological development," and boy did we get it: the AI, you see, was in the form of nanites, created in secret by the Clydesdale Corporation, which managed to break loose and infect the populace, ushering in an era of plague which is what forced us to abandon our homeworld in the first place.

But there's a happy ending, because despite the nanobot-plague leading to the creation of a Biological Purity movement, which was pretty cavalier about killing entire governments, and poor planet Mozho getting burned to cinders just because there was a rumor of plague there, it turns out that the poor bots just wanted to create a happy, functioning universe and protect humanity. In the end, after probably trillions of deaths in the name of defeating the nanobot scourge, the last survivors finally let themselves get voluntarily infected, and together we embarked into an age of enlightenment.

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What I was most impressed with in this game was the way that the bits of the timeline all came together to tell one grand story about the conflict between humanity and our AI. When I said that the planet was abandoned because of a plague, I wasn't paying any attention to the AI-Human war several periods down the line. It was Clayton who drew that connecting line as his Focus, turning the generic disease into a nano-bot plague, and giving the game a suddenly cohesive backbone that everything hung off of. And then Tim comes in, making scenes which portray the nanites as being essentially misunderstood and the Biological Purity folks as being the real bad guys in all this mess, leaving a clear road for the happy ending when we all get infected. I love it when a timeline comes together.

Good game all around, although I'll hand special props off to Eric, who used the last legacy to look at the celebration of Chicago Day (to commemorate the sabotage of the Starship Chicago) in the age of nano-human enlightenment, which turned out to be halfway between the fourth of July and the fifth of November. Which means that we ended the game by watching fireworks and getting hammered. Not a bad way to end a particularly troubled age.

You had a LIGHT nanobot plague? Kudos, sir. Kudos.

What I was most impressed with in this game was the way that the bits of the timeline all came together to tell one grand story about the conflict between humanity and our AI.

I love hearing how something one player made inspired someone else, which then inspired another person to build on that. That's the real heart of the game. It's much more interesting hearing how ideas built on each other during play than just seeing the timeline in chronological order.

Which means that we ended the game by watching fireworks and getting hammered. Not a bad way to end a particularly troubled age.

Nice way to end a game! Yeah, that's one of the perks of wrapping up on a Legacy, is that you give the last player some latitude to put a nice bow on top.