On Thursday we play-tested a first prototype of Squeeze Emergency Procedure, it was @ivan and myself, the game is 10 minutes long.
The game is asymmetrical, in two subsequent scenes the players role-play different roles (facilitator and player).
In the first scene Ivan played as a TimeTraveller (TT) from the future that will be able to travel back to today in order to share information about the climate change and how the civilization will evolve after that.
I was playing the facilitator role, that in the first scene was an AI that had to accompany the TT and if something goes wrong during the travel, I had to run the Squeeze Emergency Procedure, aka 40 questions about the future that TT has to answer in 3 minutes, - before dying because the Time Travel machine didn’t work well 
The first thing is to give the TT structure time to design their character, I forgot about that and Ivan had to answer a lot of questions in a personal way, which is part of the goal (bleed) but also it was too much. And by structure I mean to have some prompts that can help the player create their TT character.
The questions also didn’t worked, right now are an alternation between question about the future and question about yourself, but we both felt that there were too much personal questions, so the list will change.
Over all, the first scene was fun (we answered 22 questions).
In the second scene two physicists are having lunch and they receive a USB from the future with the audio of the TT sharing content about the future.
The goal of this second scene is to highlight some of the content that TT shared and reflect together on it.
The scene was not structured at all, but almost naturally, since Ivan just role-played the TT I took the role of the one analyzing what has been shared. The small number of questions about the future though made the session pretty quick, while in my vision this is were we try to imagine ways to go there and plan possible strategies to reach the future that has been delivered to us.
Ivan felt that the second scene needs some tension too, at the moment it was too casual.
In general I think that the game has big potential because: 1) it’s quick, 2) it’s fun, 3) you don’t need to know anything before (accessibility, everybody can play) 4) it’s scalable.
I see running multiple session and collect hundreds of entry to create a map of glimpses into the future.
NEXT
- new list of questions
- Time Traveller character building sheet
- Second Scene prompts
- Second scene output
- Second scene tension (change of location/characters)
- rules sheet