Today's game of Avery's The Deep Forest was much more satisfying than the last one.

We had two first timers (Brittany and Miguel) along with David and Craig (2nd timers) - so 5 people; a bit bigger than before.

What did we do differently this time? I took my own advice:

• When I pitched The Deep Forest, I pitched it as being a game about decolonialism, rather than The Quite Year..with monsters. I emphasized that the game would be about a multiple groups of monsters re-defining their culture and identity, and where their identities conflict with each other.
  
  
• I cut the deck down to 6 cards per season, as I mentioned I'd try. The game was still long, but we finished just after 10:00pm.
  

I also used an additional trick:

• I kicked off our game using Microscope's palette technique, which helped us establish a lot of the setting and general rules for the world right off the bat.
  

For our game, we had a quasi-sci-fi setting. We ruled out D&D-style monsters from the beginning and wanted space elements, BUT we made the humans medieval-level tech. This meant we had to explain their cross-planet exploration as being powered by sorcery.

Our Monsters were:

• Space Eels; gigantic eels with big spikes at the ends of their tails.
  
• Space Mega Chickens; like big moas...they weren't particularly bright.
  
• Space Lizard Halflings; a race of 4' tall lizard men...strong, but again not particularly bright.
  
• The Olipoids; a hyper-intelligent human-like insectoid group that had forgotten most of their technological accomplishments at the hands of their human oppressors. The Olipoid eventually split into two groups with different opinions about how to address community issues.
  
• Space Hedgepigs; an hedgehog-like people that grew big hedge-shaped orchards and burrowed into the ground.
  
• 2' tall Space squirrels; there were a lot of them...it was kind of an infestation.
  
• Dust Elemental; who couldn't speak our language and had sided with the humans during the occupation.
  
• The Tiny Dusts; a smaller puff-like version of the dust elemental that didn't seem all that bad.
  

Smart move reducing the deck size.

The Microscope palette seems to be a good graft for a lot of games. I never think to do it but a lot of other people have, with good results.

Yeah, Heather tipped me off to the palette trick when we played Fall of Magic a few weeks ago. I still haven't actually played Microscope itself yet.

The other fun thing about cutting the deck size is you're not pulling the same prompts every game.