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A More Perfect Union

It’s been a busy year, but the new, improved, revised, and rewritten Union is in final editing right now. It’s very close to be ready for your game table. Very close.

I’m stupidly excited to have a stand-alone version of Union that people can just sit down and play. I’ve always thought Union was a very special game, but I never felt I really gave it the spotlight it deserved because it was hidden inside of Microscope Explorer.

And because I never did give it much spotlight, some of you might be thinking, “uh, Union? What’s that?” So here’s the recap:

Union is a game of family and ancestry. You build a family tree and explore the lives of the people who came together to make each new generation. And yeah, if that family tree looks upside down, that’s because in classic Microscope-style we start by knowing the end, a descendent of all these ancestors, then jump back and forth to explore all the lives and loves that got us to this point.

It’s really all about seeing how each of these people is the main character of their own story, even while they are part of the bigger story. Because without every single one of those past unions, that descendent could not exist.

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Union was originally a variant of Microscope, included in Microscope Explorer, as I said, but it was always really different enough from Microscope that it deserved to be its own game. If I hadn’t been doing Explorer, I probably would have just written it as a separate game from the start, since it has a very different feel and style from Microscope.

I’m releasing it as a PDF only, which removes a lot of the overhead of doing print runs, maintaining inventory, shipping all over the world, etc. I’ve worked hard to make the rules as concise as possible so that printing it should be painless. The original version will still be in Microscope Explorer, of course, but if you want to play Union, this will be the one to use.

    Ben Robbins | October 10th, 2018 | , | leave a comment