We played Avery and Mark's re-imagining of The Deep Forest today. It was a three player game. We barely got through spring by the time it was 9pm. (I think we were having too much fun doodling and coloring our map). We sped up to be finished by 9:30 (poor ol' Eric had to get home!).

The rest of the game ran fine. It was fun, but it felt like a weaker version of The Quiet Year. The removal of the scarcities mechanic left us without direction. The take on monsters inhabiting a world also was disjointed because it rarely felt like we were a single community.

I wrote some more about it on my https://www.ericvulga...­.

We did have a lot of fun doodling (the rules say the sketch should really take no longer than 30 seconds...we didn't follow that.)

I think the fact that we had to cut the game short and speed things up did cause some challenges. We got through almost all of Spring, which is primarily about exploration, defining the map, and establishing culture, and then we literally sped through Summer (building up and stockpiling,) Autumn (changes due to external influence,) and Winter (tensions flare.) Since we only got through Spring, I'm not surprised the game felt meandering and disjointed.

As a facilitator, if I were to run this game again, I'd do a few things differently:

• Every time I've heard someone pitch Deep Forest (DF) (myself included) they frame it as The Quiet Year (QY) with monsters, but there's supposed to be a very different emphasis between QY and DF: DF is about a community in the midst of decolonization that was pushed off their ancestral homes, had their culture stolen from them, and are now trying to rediscover their culture and identity. This is why scarcities have been removed, and the focus instead is on what the community adopts and rejects from the culture of their oppressors. In this context, this is why you create individual monster communities: what happens when cultural rivalries and conflicts have a chance to arise again? I feel that I did a poor job of emphasizing this as a narrator.
  
  
• Run it shorter. Even if you'd left when the meet-up is officially over, we still wouldn't have been done. If I ever run the game at Meet-Up again, I'd cut each season in half and encourage folks to move through their drawings more quickly (i.e. get the sketch onto the page; you can add color later.) That way we still get the balance and flavor of each season without any one season getting too much focus.
  

In general, I feel that DF has some really interesting themes, and that you tend to end up with some interesting moments and ideas, but that it's not the sort of game I really enjoy (I prefer more character-driven narrative.) Although, having reflected on it a bit, I'd be up for giving it another shot.

ADDED:
I DID enjoy this run of The Deep Forest much more than my previous game. The previous DF game I played in had a group of 8 people...over twice the recommended maximum in the game rules.

Yeah, it's hard to judge any game that's cut short. The fun isn't an even experience across the whole duration, it's a rising curve with more pay-off towards the end than the beginning.

Also: getting people to hurry sketching is extremely hard, socially speaking. You're making a visual artifact so people become much more attached to getting it right. q.v. a line of dialog that we hear but then just vanishes.

Yeah, that's true. I was thinking more in terms of I'd give a reminder at the start of the game rather than act as the sketching police. Either way, unless someone forces you to run Polaris again next week, Ben, I'll probably pitch Deep Forest again so that I can give it one more go with a fair shake.