Ha! That looks (conceptually) amazing! You’ll have to tell me how it goes… I tell you what, I’d love to go to PAX with you one day. What a joyful thing that would be!

Announcing Better Than Mechs, a TTRPG AP podcast, dropping this autumn. Follow for more details!

Ha, I just saw you asked about roleplaying games too! Oh man… (Sorry for dredging up old threads!)

3. The genre pick. I now want to demonstrate the breadth of what’s out there, so I’d find out what their favourite thing is. Space ships? Probably Dropfleet, A Billion Suns 2E if it’s out. Giant robots? Titanicus. Superheroes? MCP. Fantasy? MESBG. Horror? Perilous Tales. And so on.

2. Complete the hobby loop. I’d get them, ideally, to build, paint, and play with their own minis. For this I’d want something modern and low-impact. Top candidates are Gaslands or Greathelm. Cheeky choices, perhaps, because I think they’re also good examples of the state of the art.

I had a feeling you might say that! 😆 I reckon my general answer is to go for breadth: 1. 40k. The gorilla, however we feel about it. If possible, I’d play one game of 2nd edition and one of 11th to showcase how much things have changed. If you can do it with period-appropriate minis, even better.

Hooooo this is a fascinating question. What do you mean by ‘understand the hobby’? Its history? The state of the art? What the landscape looks like in practice?

I have not! It you’re far from the first person to mention them. I also have someone in my ear about He Who Fights with Monsters, which I think is in a similar vein, but by an Aussie author?

I read the first two on a tour of universities across Switzerland, the UK, and America, back when I had no idea what my next step was going to be. It was exactly the right kind of discombobulating, so I feel this hard.

Hard agree. I borrowed it (with credit, obvs) for the second edition of Chiron’s Doom — it’s such a concise communication of such a fundamental piece of tech, particularly for solo games.

Oh, interesting — stalled out for any specific reason?

Oh geez! I still haven’t read Absolution, but I clearly need to get on that quick!

There will never be a better feeling than someone coming up to you at a con and saying "I played your game and it was so fun" 10/10 experience.