Today I played a
Megagame (not the one in the video - we played one that had never been played before, in fact). It was great fun, and I would recommend them. A megagame is kinda a mix of an RPG and board game - there's no strict goal or winning condition, but everyone has goals they're working towards and you can choose to not roleplay at all and just try and solve or optimise the problems thrown at them. Meanwhile other teams are trying to do the same - and their goals may well be at odds with yours. On top of that, some individual people may have specific extra information or goals that either run contrary to their team or that they want to keep quiet, for whatever reason - betraying isn't a major element, but it does mean some people on your team may prioritise goals differently to how you do.
The one we played was called "Planet of the Damned." Humanity in the distant future, has colonised multiple star systems around the sun (Sol), and multiple 'nations' of multiple star systems have emerged - e.g. the Earth empire centered at Sol, the Martian Association formed by former citizens of Mars who split off and so on. I was a member of Wolf359, essentially the British Empire, in space.
In this distant future, humanity had briefly bandied together to defeat a common threat - the Roach - who had attacked and devastated various human worlds, killing around 2bn people. We defeated them over the star system Zubat, where half their remaining fleet left and the remainder, around 80K sentients, surrendered, settled on one of the star Zubat's planets, and attempted to survive on their own.
At the same time, research on the Forerunners, a species of space colonising sentients who lived millions of years before humanity has begun to throw up interesting finds. It's possible some kind of major breakthrough might be imminent, potentially providing advanced technology or other benefits. Of course, many of the various polities want to get in on this research, to be the first to take advantage of the technology.
The game starts in the aftermath of this, as the human factions decide on what to do about the Roach, the Forerunner Archaeology and so on - and deal with all their other issues going on.
Well, that was a long intro! But I think it's important because 1) It's all relevant to the game and 2) It highlights just how complex these things are. A lot of the fun comes through the issues you deal with being complex with no correct answer, you just have to make decisions about what you think is best and see what happens.
In our game, my polity (Wolf359) was the most anti-Roach of all of them, with a goal to exterminate the surrendered Roach. We pursued anti-Roach measures very early in the game, having a battle fleet stationed over the planet ready to attack. However, everyone else wanted to research them, and focus on getting tech. We wanted to do what the majority of our population asked. This resulted in, at two summit meetings between the various polity leaders, our Prime Minister up and walked out half way through in protest (which incidentally made our political party extremely popular on our homeworlds, basically guaranteeing re-election...). We became social pariahs, and perhaps the only things keeping other polities from wanting to attack us was the fact we weren't being TOO aggressive on Zubat, and the fact we had lent quite a lot of ships to Supreme Humanity Command, who kinda had a lot of power. Eventually, other people managed to understand the Roach language to a point they could talk normally or close to it, and discover their true intentions.
Meanwhile the research on Mystery, the Forerunner homeworld, provided some very exciting and interesting information. It showed among other things the true goals of the Roach (as well as corroborating their stories), the origins of humanity and some other vital details. This lead to a massive shift of almost everyone's fleets towards Mystery. One polity was unhappy with an aspect of the research, relating to sentient AIs, and as a result took the step of nuking the planet. Believe it or not, this was an entirely justifiable action - there are strict treaties in place everyone had agreed to regarding interaction with AIs, and nuking is considered a necessary step under certain conditions with them.
The end result of the game was that everyone knew what the Roaches goals were, about humanities origins and also Mars accidentally triggered an event that wlll wipe out all sentient life within the area of space the game occured in (a few hundred square parsecs - yeah it was two dimensional) over the next hundred or so years. Overall, it was a great game and I think Wolf359 did fairly well - we didn't kill the Roach, but we achieved some of our research goals, with solidified our position in the galaxy as a polity willing to act in our people's best interests, and our fleet wasn't caught in the black hole Mars created.
(Note: I've intentionally withheld a number of key details about
why certain things happened - if you ever happen to play the game, you'll therefore not have those details spoiled. The game is designed so it can be replayed by the same people, although obviously you lose some of the surprise element that way).
