GM/Reader: Jared Sorenson
Players: A lot
System: Parsely Games: Six-Gun Showdown
We signed up for this game event. And paid real money for it. And we got swag.
Jared ran Parsely #8 Six Gun Showdown, complete with pew pew pew sound effects and his 8-bit smile.
As a group we stunk. We kept going back and forth trying the same things over and over again and dying for it. We died a lot. In fact, I started keeping track of how many of ended the game… by the end it was most of us.
But that’s a great thing about Parsely, even when it’s stupid and frustrating, it’s fun. A puzzle you’re sure you can unlock if you just give it one more try. Jared’s presentation also adds to the effect, though I have to say, he’s vastly under utilized by GenCon. It says a lot about the play culture that his games at Pax fill up a room of 500 people, and at GenCon we had maybe 20 to 25.
What is Parsely
Jared took old text adventures and turned them into roleplaying games, well, sort of. He just took old text adventures, and called someone the parser (who read through them) and then gave everyone else one chance to give an instruction like “Go North” before they had to go south to the end of the line. The game is fun because it’s so silly, because it’s so strict, and because people never pay attention to each other. It’s the most high-stakes game of telephone out there.
What’s better, since the game are so small and presumably cheap, Jared gave them out as prizes for everyone that attended! Yay, prizes.
GMs: Ezra Denney, Colin Fahrion, Beth Daggert, Matt Klein, Karen Twelves, and Sean Nittner
