I Watched the Skies as the Oceans Churned

We said things like "Bully" and "Cheerio" to add authenticity.

My wife had to fend off praise from her co-workers on my behalf. When they heard that I was to spend the day at a middle school participating in an event that simulated politics in the midst of global crisis, they assumed I was assisting in a program aimed at students. They were wrong. I was spending another all day event at the Fairhaven Middle School because Bellingham MegaGames was hosting another round of Watch the Skies and there was no way I was going to miss it. 

Briefly, Watch the Skies consists of teams of people representing the nations of the earth. The teams are segmented into roles where each role plays a type of game with the other nations version of their role. Check out my last post for a more in depth description. 

Having tired of being left out of the thick of things last game, we traded in our giant robots and left Japan to become the United Kingdom. Ryan was our Prime Minister, Andy was our military leader, Cameron represented us in the UN, Shaun was our deputy head of state (a new role this time around that was capable of visiting any area of the game that they wished) and I took on the role of Chief Scientist.

Our goal going into this game was simple: Make an aircraft carrier into a spaceship. That was a responsibility that fell largely on my shoulders. Andy would need to shoot down them aliens to get me the resources, Cameron was in charge of smoothing over our actions in the UN and Ryan had to give me the money to conduct my research. I had to take what resources I could and figure out just what exactly needed to be done to get this space boat up and running. We started out with a bang, obtaining an intact alien space craft in round one. However, I approached the head scientist of the game and confessed that I would like to build the battleship... but I wanted to first create Iron Man suites for everyone of the scientists in the hopes of creating a peacekeeping task force that would police the world separate from the bureaucracy and politics of the rest of the game. Oh, and I wanted to have a remote self destruct system in place as well. Just in case.

My game long personal goal became all consuming. The turns rolled on by, I was aware that their were giant monsters emerging from the sea, but all that meant to me was the potential to harvest the next piece needed in my suit. I nearly forgot entirely about the battle ship my team insisted I build. They asked how it was going, I told them I needed red mercury. Which I DID need red mercury, just not for the battleship. Turn by turn I allowed my plan to seep out into the scientific community. Russia and Germany seemed concerned at first, but ultimately everyone got on board. I was aware that some were probably just using this new scientific alliance to push their own research to their end goal, but that was fine, I was getting all the resources necessary, and oddly enough most of our governments seemed unaware when we announced our worldwide scientific alliance. We stood for peace and anti-nuclear warfare almost simultaneously with London getting Nuked by America (something I found out after the game, as I assumed it was France. Seriously, this Iron Man thing gave me tunnel vision). Also I gave some phony tech to my government telling them to do something with it as it was useless to us. They sold it to Brazil, who in turn assassinated Ryan. Brazil then came within a hairs-length away from being nuked into oblivion.

I only wish I could have seen the look on our collective faces when control informed us that we were now a new nation, taking over India. We were dumbfounded, this wasn't in the plan, we were supposed to keep peace from the comfort of our own nation. Instead I was instated as the president of this new scientific nation, I had to assign military leaders and UN representatives. The global scientific community had pretty much vanished. There was some heavy fallout. Russia's scientist had her flag ripped right off of her back as she was disavowed, Japan's Prime Minister showed up and demanded money from all the research we had "stolen". Other nations were forced to send their presidents to the labs to try to finish up research, while we had suddenly become the wealthiest and most technologically advanced power on the face of the earth. And once half the nations started surrendering their Nukes to us, we became the most heavily armed force on earth as well. At some point China jumped ship, which was fine and probably for the best. I had informed Control that I wanted to activate the kill switches on the suites and return all the tech to the UK. My plan was to murder the people I had spent the entire game gaining their trust. Luckily for them it didn't work out. I managed to sabotage our giant force field we had placed over India, which allowed a giant monster to attack and kill a few million people, but no real harm was done. The aliens, which had been on my back-burner all game showed up and told us to disarm our Nukes. "Ok" we agreed. After-which I almost immediately went to control and asked if I was able to activate the three we had for a full scale attack. I was not able to, as I was not in control of the military. 

Oh, and it just so happened that my line of research worked out to also build the UK the spaceship I was supposed to be working on all game. They got it just in time to do battle with some giant Kaijus and then took off into the stars... leaving a power vacuum in the UK that I gladly filled. I left India in the capable hands of my peers and was crowned the King of England. My people were happy, I had a massive amount of tech and a Nuclear wasteland to rule over.

This game was like a complete separatist mission for me. I didn't intend it to be that way originally, but ias things started moving in that direction my efforts became largely diplomatic. I didn't have the research I needed for my plan to come to fruition, so the more I bribed and buddied up with people the easier my goals were to accomplish. As a team, I think we did quite well. The UK managed to build their end game spaceship, I didn't accompany them to the stars, but they left my country in good shape, the Queen lived on (in the battleship) and aside from that little tiff with Brazil, I think our future was secured...as long as China's shady business stops.

This is just my side of what happened that day. For Ryan's take as the Prime Minister (and then as the deputy head of state after his assassination) click here. For Andy's take on being the military leader click here. And if you ever have a chance to play one of these MegaGames...Don't hesitate. They're an absolute blast. 

I Burned While I Watched The Skies

Left to Right
Foreign Minister, Head Scientist, Military Commander, Prime Minister

I am the ambassador to the cosmos. Or at least, I would have been had everything gone according to plan. Then again, one can never fully rely on plans when dealing with the political intrigue of the competing nations of earth, add to that three factions of Buddhist-like hivemind aliens working against you and really, everything is left to the roll of a dice, figuratively and literally.

This weekend I had the privilege of playing Bellingham MegaGame’s inaugural run with “Watch the Skies”. Essentially what this game boiled down to whas a simulation in which various nations were faced not only with the international tension of world politics, but with the impending threat of an alien presence descending from the skies. Practically what this meant is that teams of four (ideally) acted as The Prime Minister (or President), Military Commander, Head Scientist and Foreign Minister. Each team was assigned a nation to represent, and it was my pleasure to act as the Foreign Minister of Japan.

The turns consisted of two phases. In the first phase, teams would be separated into a series of mini-game sessions. The second phase had all the team members rush back to their countries (a table on the edge if a large room) to share information and ideas with the rest if the team. Scientists researched technology. Military Commanders allocated troops and resources to a large map where they duked it out with aliens or spied on other nations. The Prime Ministers divided up resources and directed the other members of their team. Finally, the Foreign Ministers dealt with a variety of world crises and tried to sway the actions of other nations to their cause within the security  council of the UN. My narrative takes place through this lens. For a glimpse into some of the other roles read the write ups from our Scientist and our Prime Minister.

As a team, Japan had gone into the game with the goal of creating giant mech robots. To what end we weren’t sure, and, granted, it was a little short sighted, but it was something. It’s absolutely vital to go into this type of game with an idea, and by, golly we had one. Accomplishing this goal was a matter of discussing our plan with one of the many, talented game controllers. This was really a story based game, and they did a fantastic job of facilitating every aspect of every hair-brained idea that was thrown at them.

So, some discussion began with almost no idea what to expect, and then I was off and running to my first UN session. Out of the six nations present I was one of two that did not have Veto power, Brazil being the other. From the get-go the other teams were coming in hot. We were presented with a famine in Uganda to deal with and the two pre-eminent ideas were from Russia and the UK. Russia said let them starve, and the UK said sell them food for alien tech. Ultimately we decided to set up a refugee camp, while Brazil and Japan opted to take refugees back to our respective countries. As we were about to head out the UK Representative also asked us each for a sample of blood… this was disconcerting to everyone, except for Brazil who was kind of freaked out by it, but didn’t want to cause any waves. The idea was that the UK was developing a test to find out who were aliens hidden amongst us. Still I thought it was coming on pretty strong, and I wasn't about to agree to something this bizarre this early on. So, heading back to our respective tables, we discussed. Our Prime Minister was delighted that we had received refugees, as we were wanting to find the best and brightest high school students in the world to pilot our “Project Gundam” (which was almost called “Project Pacific Rim II).

He can't come in here, He'll see the big board!

Over the course of the next few rounds, we almost lost the entire continent of Africa. The famine spread, the warlords took over refugee camps and then Angola and South Africa pointed nukes at each other for good measure. Japan and Brazil swiftly disarmed the two countries while Russia, secured the oil fields in Uganda.

The greatest part about these sessions in the scope of the game was the nuggets of information that were dropped. Russia let loose that there were at least four factions of aliens, which, upon learning that tid-bit of information, took all the composure I had not to start hyperventilating. Sure we were dealing with things the “didn’t matter” (which actually really did, very much so) but it was like on big espionage room. Everyone’s phones were constantly buzzing with information being sent to them from teammates in other areas of the game. A particular highlight was when I learned of the assassination of the American President. I offered my condolences to the representative and he brushed it off, not knowing what I was talking about. As the turn progressed, other nations glanced at their phones and quickly turned their heads toward the American in the room. He was probably the last to find out.

Eventually after throwing enough resources at the problem, the famine and blight that plagued Africa subsided just in time for us to start dealing with the aliens directly. We invited a representative from each faction to visit us, three of the four accepted. The story went that the three factions that had shown up were peaceful while the fourth faction that did not show up was violent. Seemed pretty straightforward, except that Russia, our closest ally in the game was adamant about it being the other way around.

It wasn’t long until the UK Representative announced that he had stealthily stolen everyone's DNA and was going to test it to see who was an alien. No one was pleased with this development, so we leaked to the newspaper that they were working on a cloning program to thicken the distrust in the brits. This was unnecessary, no one trusted them. I still don’t know who actually nuked China, but the UK was certainly blamed, despite it most likely not actually being them. It was particularly delightful to watch the collective faces in the room as the UK announced in front of everyone a list of people the assumed were aliens. They were like mad geniuses at getting everyone to loathe their country. They even convinced one of the three “good” alien factions to call themselves the Elizabethans. It didn’t take much longer for me to convince some of the other nations to boot the UK from a permanent seat on the commity and replace the seat with Japan. Veto power at last!

What eventually became clear was this: there were,  two warring aliens (one consisted of three groups, but that’s confusing). One group was trying to eradicate the other from earth. They had come to earth with the sole purpose of destroying this other group that had landed and interbred thousands of years ago. Imagine my shock in turn 11 when I express my concern over which faction to back and our Scientists drops this: “Cards on the table, I’m an alien” Our military leader and myself stared at him. “I am...also an alien.” Our Prime Minister chimed in. We stood for a second, our Scientist wondering if we would attempt to kill him. “ok, we know which faction to back then.” That was that, we were going to try to help these other aliens escape earth before the Elizabethans and their motley bunch of human friends gunned them down.

They walk among us

This became hopeful when we successfully completed our Gundam program. We announced to the world that, although Japan was not a nuclear power, we had giant robots now that we had handed over to emotionally damaged teenagers to pilot. The idea was to use these bad boys to protect the mothership if it ran into any trouble as it left earth. Easy peasy. I went into the final UN meeting with the idea that we had our plan in the bag and I would use my newly acquired veto power to shoot everything down, just for fun. Then I got distracted by ideas of grandeur and things kind of went haywire. To hedge our bets, China suggested we send a man a woman and a DNA bank of all living things on earth with the ship that was attempting to escape. Should earth be destroyed by the Elizabethans for having not stopped “faction 4” from escaping, we would at least have a way for the human race to live on in the cosmos. If the ship was shot down, we lost two people. I was going to Veto the whole thing unless my condition was met “I want to be the man on the ship.” No one seemed to care all that much, so I climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies. Unfortunately we didn’t get very far off the ground. We quickly voted on the plan, and one of the controllers ran in telling us that there was a large battle going on and we had better come witness it. I walked out to a large group of people surrounding the battle map. Our Prime Minister, who along with our Scientist had decided to stay on earth, stood there solemnly. Our Gundams had been sabotaged and were useless, almost every nation and alien faction was attacking the spaceship. “It doesn’t look good” he said. “I’m on that ship!” I exclaimed much to his surprise. Those of us aboard the ship were asked to step forward. It was myself, the American President (who had been cloned or something, I’m not really sure how she was back) and the Russian President, who was the only alien player that had opted to leave earth. We watched as our hope went up in flames. I was the ambassador of ash and fire, not the cosmos.

In the end, Japan did just fine. We had a strong economy, and were the most technologically advanced country in the world. But the real surprise was Brazil, who had been on everyone’s good side. They were playing the long con and spent their time stealing resources and uniting all of South America.

The game was an absolute blast, it was exhausting, fast paced and all day long. The enjoyment of the game really stems from the creativity of the players, and there was just so much going on that it never felt dull. Having constant contact with your team was incredible. I was receiving real time information about insane things that were happening all while arguing about sending troops into Uganda. While the scale of the game and the open-endedness might sound like a problem, the way everything was handled made for a smooth and thrilling ride that I would play again anytime, and hopefully will soon.