if you asked Ben's brain about gaming, this is what it would say

Dark Side of the Moon

The Earth was lost. The tide of Communism had spread to every corner of the globe. But on the Moon the last patriots remained steadfast, raining down showers of city-crushing debris from their lunar bunkers. Vengeful, destructive, but ultimately futile. It was a last hurrah for the West, but too late to turn the tide. On the moon the star-spangled banner still waved, but where the fifty stars once shined there was now only a single white disk…

Echo is the last of the Microscope spin-offs that’s going to appear in the Microscope Explorer book. I’ve been calling it a game of time travel but it’s really more accurate to say it’s a game of alternative history. The fun is changing key moments in your history and seeing how the repercussions — the echoes — make it turn out differently.

It’s a tricky business. It took a while to get the rules for Echo to a point where I was willing to playtest them, so I am happy to report that it is not only playable, it is fun. I had serious doubts. The whole process of taking a Microscope history and then continuously revising it was starting to look like it was an interesting idea but just too hard to manage as a game. But the current version seems to actually tackle it. Whew.

It was particularly interesting to see the same Periods morph back and forth. The Cold War space race became a military conflict — astronaut versus cosmonaut — then a great victory for the West, but then flipped and became a bitter defeat, leaving that last holdout of Americans on the Moon. Which also changed things so the alien relics buried beneath the lunar soil weren’t discovered until much, much later…

Playtesting? Yep, very soon. Stay tuned.