Gen Con: Games I Ran One: Doctor Who

My experience with this year's Doctor Who was interesting.

I don't own the rulebook in a dead tree format. I ran games last year from my tablet. Silly me though took those PDFs off my tablet so I picked up the dead tree version from Cubicle 7 to run it.

Had a blast. I was fortunate enough to have Kurt from GameGeeks pick up and play the Doctor himself and while I don't want to say that his performance encouraged other players to pick up the slack or anything like that, they certainly feed into the game in an organic matter that seemed to me that it would've fit the show perfectly.

The actual organization of the game was a bit wacky though. See, a few of the actual ticket holders were late, but not so late that I couldn't take their tickets, so some waiting to use their generics, couldn't play. And that was after I handed out an extra character that was 'gender neutral' and so had a male and female version, which I just decided were husband and wife. The bad thing though, is that during the game, two of the people had to leave so I could've taken the other individual with the generic tickets. Ah well, outside my control.

Anyway, the game involved some characters coming from a modern time to the 'Victoriana' age so to speak where a certain reptile woman lurks with a few other standbys. The introduction to get all the players together was fairly quick and no one seemed to mind as it was a good flow to get all the characters from different times together without having to actually have everyone start off in the Tardis at once.

The players managed to avoid most combats by use of quick wits and fast talking, as well as some excellent reminders from Kurt that the Doctor is not one to be trifled with.

With I say everyone had a good time, I'm speaking from my own observation. I can't tell you what people were thinking or actually feeling, but the involvement level of almost all the players was pretty high even when they were playing a father desperately worried about his son.

In terms of the game itself, most people seemed very impressed with the new edition. I'm not certain how much has changed between editions because I don't actually play or run enough Doctor Who to break it down, but apparently there is some PDF with the main changes on it. Everyone was impressed with how nice the book looked, the free dice, the billions of story points, the nice cards, the numerous pregenerated characters and most importantly, how sturdy the box was. Apparently the old box wasn't anywhere near as sturdy so people had some gruff concerns about that, but Cubicle 7 took care of that issue by attacking the root cause of the problem.