I've been fascinated by the concepts of Microscope for quite a while, yet never had the opportunity to play in one until just recently. Over Discord and via a shared Google drawing with a group of first-timers (well, ALL of us were new to the game though two of us had read the core rulebook in advance) crafted "the rise and fall of the clockwork gods" and it was a lot of fun.
Cannibal artificial gods, cyberpugs, twisted love stories involving deities and mortals, and the big final question: "Are mortals doomed to be consumed in the end?" While it took a bit to get started, cross-riffing ideas soon took over and the game moved quickly; next thing we all knew it was five hours later.
The big takeaway for myself was about SCENES. Scenes in Microscope can be dictated, or played out in an improv way. I don't feel terribly great at improv roleplaying, but it's a skill I can work on. Another thing that's useful to have handy are books or other tools for generating random names of peoples, places and things. One player had access to these in our game, and we'd all ask at time: "please give me a couple names for this Scene." Another possibly useful toolset would be Inspiration Pad, but that tool needs some setup time if you want really personalized tables to roll on.
The biggest challenge to playing Microscope remotely, obviously, is the tableau of cards. Traditionally Microscope is played around a table with 3x5 or other notecards getting dynamically created and moved around the board as your non-linear history is filled out.
Enter Google Drawings. With an hours' fiddling, i was able to create a tableau for playing a Microscope game that could be dynamically updated and changed as the game played:
Players were invited to edit the Google Drawing, and the screen was streamed to Discord for those who couldn't view via a Google account. I saved the 'template' drawing, copied it, and filled out the copy as the game record (with a date for the document title)
The core Microscope rules talk about order of play in terms of 'left' and 'right' of the current player, as makes sense in a in-person roundtable setup. However in online play a more linear lineup of players in an online setting, i.e. Discord, the rules have to switch to 'before' and 'after' or 'above' and 'below'.
The final board for our game looked like:
Traditional tabletop Microscope alternates the orientation of the 3x5 cards, so that Periods, Events and Scenes have a visual flow that helps distinguish one kind from another as well as their relationships (which Scenes are part of which Event). As can be seen in the sample play screen above: some cards ended up being much larger than others because of content. In my final template, the card text will shrink down to fit in the shape, rather than require resizing objects as they are updated.
Having successfully played Microscope online, I am definitely going to try again. Either with the same gang as before or with new players. Any takers?
