Woo!

You are a true gentleman, Jonathan Walton.

Rock on, Johnathan! I'll see if my group can try this out next Thursday.

Posted By: Mike SandsA grizzly demise would only be appropriate when the menace is made of bears.

You do know that bears continue to be the greatest threat to our nation, right? :)

Thanks, Jonathan, for sharing. Yay Geiger Counter!

Yeah, I imagine that there will be more than a few survival horror movies called "Grizzly" being played out over the next few months :) Perhaps I should run a little mini-contest to see who can develop the best style sheet for a killer bear movie, with the winners being hacked together to form an example style sheet in the final version of the game.

Thanks, Jonathan!

Geiger Counter was designed to do two things: 1) emulate movies in which
most of the main characters eventually die and 2) perform really well in
single-session play, such as a pick-up or convention game.

I've played Geiger twice now at cons and had lots of fun both times, so I think you've succeeded at this.

I really like how its casual B-movie flavor lifts the typical pressure I feel to be profound and meaningful and to weave artful plot. Players can just crack one-liners, roll dice, describe bloody deaths, and have fun. It's like a beer-and-pretzels storygame.

This looks really fun. I tend to like games that have a design goal of performing well for pick-up play. Hope I can get it to a table sometime.

Jonathan, while reading I'm taking note of the typos... would you like me to send them to you, to doublecheck the ones spotted by other people?

Jonathan, would you be interested/willing to compare/contrast your game with some other horror games out there in another thread?

Brian, I can do it in this thread. What other games would you like a comparison to? The ones it's closest to are probably Dead of Night and The Infected, perhaps, but it's still pretty different from both of those.

Well, what I was wondering about, Jonathan, was that I've heard about and read several games recently that seem to have similar concepts but approach them in very different ways. I've heard of Dead of Night but I don't know anything about it, and I've never even heard of The Infected.
But both Geiger Counter (and I read an older pdf of it a little while ago . . . I definitely need to download the new one soon because the old version I read looked really cool) and Dread seek to emulate horror movie stories in which death is very possible and even likely for many characters, right? and to a certain extant doesn't Fred Hicks's game-in-production Escape or Die also shoot for that kind of concept/atmosphere?
I'm just wondering, if you or others have experience with these games (all of which I think sound very cool, but none of which I've actually played yet, incidentally) if you could share any insight into their differing strengths for emulating the horror-movie genre.

Brian, in addition to what Lukas said, Geiger learned a lot from games like Dread and Escape or Die.

Dread (Eppy's version, not Rafael's, which is great, but a totally different kind of game) is all about pacing and escalating tension, in my mind. Whereas Eppy builds tension gradually by drawing Jenga blocks, with the understanding that the tower will eventually fall, Geiger does it by the menace gaining an additional die every time it appears on screen or is strongly alluded to, up to a max of 8 dice. Everybody knows that an 8-die menace is nearly unbeatable. The best you can often hope for is a mutually destructive result that injures/kills one or more characters and weakens the menace somewhat, allowing future conflicts to seem less impossible.

Escape or Die (at least the version I played last year at GenCon) is all about panic and things happening fast, in real time, since you're playing against a timer. While Geiger doesn't always move at a breakneck pace, the scenes are supposed to happen really fast in comparison to many other games, lasting 10-15 minutes max and sometimes being less than 5 min. The whole game is intended to play out in between 2-3 hours, once the group gets used to the rules, including brainstorming setting and creating characters.

Geiger's real strength, in comparison to other similar games, is its use of a map that is drawn over the course of play. In practice, I find that it feels much more like playing Betrayal at House on the Hill or (so I've heard) Last Night on Earth than it does playing Dread or Dead of Night or the like. There's even some stuff that feels strongly like Kill Doctor Lucky or Clue, in which Sgt. Mustard is in the underground laboratory with the access codes. Then, of course, Sgt. Mustard gets eaten by Experiment Designate #DX244 and you realize you're playing Geiger Counter :) But the hybrid boardgame-RPG aspects are fairly prominent in Geiger Counter.

I also think the Conditions + Buyoffs (the damage/situation system), which are stolen from / directly inspired by Vincent's draft of Afraid and Clinton's The Shadow of Yesterday, help create the kinds of crazy circumstances that you always find in survival horror movies, without requiring a GM to inflict those on players. Honestly, Conditions and the map do 75% of the work, as far as getting players to frame interesting and appropriate scenes. "Your character is 'Trapped' and 'Alone' at the bottom of a mine shaft? Okay, so you're lying under a pile of rubble, trying to pull your legs out and yelling for help, but nobody can hear you..."

GC is GMless. In my experience, Geiger works equally well with anywhere from 3-6 players. While you could play with 2 or 7+ if you really wanted to, I think it would be a bit strained.

Thanks a lot, Jonathan! This is sounding very interesting. I may have to try it out. Maybe I can bring it to Go Play Peoria, if nothing else. It sounds cool, especially the map.

Posted By: Jonathan Waltonthe new play sheet as a separate download, now with 100% fewer bears!

booo! but in honor of that awesome typo, if/when I play Geiger, I want the movie to be about bears. Hopefully robot bears! Or bear-sharks.

Crap, I meant proofread by me, MikeRM, and Renato (not Moreno). Where is my brain recently?

Cool Jonathan, it looked great at Design Matters. I'm not sure they had any left on Sunday.

I didn't see it being run anywhere at GoD or after hours. It's such an embarrassment of riches you really need to be there if you want a new thing played, mostly. The excellent Darcy Burgess (who ran Perfect) aside.