Yesterday I ran the first playtest of a new larp that takes place on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). I’m collaborating with Albert Kong and we’ve been noodling on this game for a few months – it was great to test it out in the wild!
I’ll try to avoid spoilers as I describe the game. The larp is set in space in the far future, when humans are colonizing the galaxy. The game starts at SFO BART Station and ends in the East Bay. Every few stops we’d get off the train and have a scene at a station, then we’d get back on and continue the journey. The stations represent different planets, moons, and space stations. The ride on BART represents the space ship journeys between destinations.
We had about one hour of workshops to prep the players and then the game itself lasted two and a half hours. BART had some delays – no surprise – but it didn’t throw us off too much. The overall story worked well and our players (all six of them) were amazing! We got lots of great advice to improve things for next time. Our second playtest will be in May. If things go well we might try scaling to hundreds of players with dedicated NPCs at platforms.
I’ll post more updates here. Until then, you can email me at [email protected]
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