players: Justin, Ace, ET, Ben

Summer Polaris deluge continues! This was my fourth Polaris game in the last six meetups. ET had played once before but Justin and Ace were new to it.

As anybody who has sat down and played Polaris with me knows, I teach it pretty strictly, because Polaris has a particular structure and style of play. Once you grok it, you can gain fluency and have fun. But if you don't play Polaris the way Polaris is designed to be played it can be a struggle. There is a learning curve.

The fascinating/frustrating thing that happened in our game was that we had a very satisfying fictional situation (the falling out between the hero Aludra and her girlfriend Sadr, followed by murder-vengeance of poor innocent Rana) but it didn't really fit the Polaris intent of protagonist/antagonist, so we kept grinding against the rules instead of profiting from them. Which was a bummer, because the fiction was cool.

Polaris is an older game and it's interesting to me that things that a few years ago felt very productive -- like having static roles of antagonist/protagonist -- now feel limiting. Yes, creative constraints are great, the crowd says, but not necessarily every kind of constraint. The antagonist/protagonist divide works when it works, and it's potentially nice because people know what they are supposed to do, but if that's not what you want to do, you're out of luck.

And another note to future generations of designers: any game where you have to keep telling players "no, do it this way" has a steep price tag associated with play. I've known that about Polaris for a long time.

I just wanna say thank you, Ben, for stepping up and facilitating Polaris last week, even though it's hella difficult. To me it felt like, even though we struggled with the rules, we still got to tell an interesting and tragic story.