Planning to run Watch the Skies, a megagame rite of passage

When we were first discussing what game to run as our inaugural event, we knew it had to be Watch the Skies. Not because of the level of brand recognition that the game has, but because Riley Nixon had hosted a game of Watch The Skies (WTS) in Minneapolis in 2017 that was the first megagame experience for most of the Midwest Megagames crew. I'll likely post some bios and information on the various people who've been instrumental in getting this effort off the ground, but at a minimum, the team includes two of my best friends from college, one that I met after college, and one who I met years later and who also happened to get their start with the 2017 game of Watch the Skies.

Tim Troxel, Jay Michael Halverson, and Lucas Crist at Watch the Skies 2017 at the University of Minnesota. Tim and Lucas were 'corporate aliens' and Jay was Alien Control.

In this particular game, unbeknownst to the human players, the alien players were multiple factions of alien corporations coming to Earth to exploit its natural resources. It was an absolute blast to play in and we were hooked. A lot of life later, we got together and decided to form Midwest Megagames to bring the megagame hobby back to life in Minnesota with the mission of promoting megagames in the region and hosting regular games throughout the year. Given that a large portion of the megagame community got their start from seeing the video from Shut Up and Sit Down and playing in the 2017 game was the start for us, it was an easy decision to run this game.

The elevator pitch for the game is simple - Watch the Skies is 'Model UN' but with aliens. For those not familiar, Model UN puts students in roles representing various countries of the world and is intended to teach practical diplomacy, negotiation, and communication skills. The presence of aliens is what makes Watch the Skies what it is, but the intentions of the aliens are a mystery that the players must uncover. Although the base set includes one particular reason the aliens might be there, Stone Paper Scissors (the developer) also sells an 'Alien Add-on Scenarios' pack. This includes another 10 scenarios that game runners can use. These each offer a different alien agenda for them to follow and the human players to uncover over the course of gameplay.

The amount of social media coverage of WTS has is both a curse and a blessing from a game runner standpoint. We knew that we didn't want to have an alien mission align with any of the videos or published blog posts out there and none of the add-on scenarios really resonated with us. We didn't want the aliens to have an explicitly hostile mission, but we wanted to ensure that actions they took could be construed as hostile by the human players.

Eventually, we settled on the idea that the aliens were university students here to perform research on humanity and Earth. Alien control would then roleplay as the faculty advisor. This gave us all kinds of latitude for us to give objectives to the aliens that would require them to perform actions that could be taken as hostile, neutral, or peaceful. This also gave us the ability to 'nudge' the alien team to be more or less willing to communicate with the humans.

Another step that we took is mapping out a diagram of the team relationships on Miro. For those who aren't familiar with the tool, it's a very powerful way to organize and collaborate using graphics, images, and text. We used this to understand how the different countries would relate to one another at the start of the game. The upper left of our board was a list of different objectives we could pass to the alien team over the course of the game.

Miro board organizing the different relationships, treaties, attitudes, and capabilities of the different countries.

The upper right was the product of our last initial injection of chaos into the mix. Although we gave out country briefs before the game so players could understand some of the treaties and relationships their faction had with each other. This was represented by the spiderweb chart on the Miro board, linking each nation to others with a pink-colored block describing the relationship.

Example of linking relationships and policies of a country and its dirty secret

We gave each nation an envelope to open at the beginning of the game titled 'CLASSIFIED: EYES ONLY'. This envelope allowed us to do three things: first, we had come up with 1 'dirty secret' that each nation would want to keep to themselves, but could be a potential plot thread for them to develop over the course of the game. The second function of the letter was to give a 'P.S. Aliens are real, keep that secret, too.' - The game as-written states that the player countries governments are aware of the aliens but that their population is unaware. When aliens are revealed to the world to be real, global panic will rise. This just stressed the importance of keeping that close to the chest.

One of the letters given out at the beginning of the game. This one went to the United Kingdom team.

We created a list of headlines to give to the press team at the start of the game - most of which related to the dirty secrets in some way. If we were to do this again, I'd explicitly state in the letters to the countries that the press had some knowledge of their secret to draw more attention to the headlines as potential hooks to investigate the other countries. 7 of the headlines below tied directly to a 'dirty secret' - in the example letter above, the United Kingdom weather control experiments caused the top headline, 'Flooding in Kenya', which also allowed us to immediately use this as a global humanitarian crisis in the game.

Three of the headlines don't apply to a secret; the last one about UFO sightings, the World Duck Festival, and the red tide causing a decrease in herring production. I couldn't resist slipping in a 'red herring'.

Finally, the envelope for India's team congratulated them: "A decades-long campaign of anti-corruption purges in the Indian government has ushered in a new era of openness and transparency with the new administration taking office." We wanted to sow some level of paranoia in most of the teams, but also didn't want that to be universal. We thought it would be fun to have at least one team that didn't have anything to hide.

That's about the extent of the tailoring we did to Watch the Skies prior to running the game. I'll cover the logistics and other more generic planning details in another post. Thanks for reading!