Microscope Review

Originally published July 10, 2013

Microscope is unlike most games out there. It is not a roleplaying game (though it has roleplaying elements). It is not competitive. It has no end condition. It is not a board game or card game though it does use index cards and table space is helpful.

So what is it? It is a collaborative storytelling game created by Ben Robbins where you build up a timeline or timeline around a central theme. You create periods of history, then zoom in to create events within those periods. Finally you can zoom in further to create specific scenes to decide what happened at crucial or at least interesting moments in your history.

The game is nonlinear however. You can start in the future and work your way back or jump around the timeline as you choose. Along the way the game will constrain your options somewhat to give some form to the stories you and your friends create.

Gameplay is done by consensus using your fellow players as randomizers instead of dice or cards. As such you should enjoy collaborative story telling if you are going to play it. There is no winning at Microscope and being too possessive of the story will only ruin everyone's fun.

I picked up this game over a year ago at my friendly local gaming shop (FLGS) but didn't have an opportunity to really play it until Kublacon this year. I'll reference that session for examples as I describe the game.

The game begins with deciding what the premise of the timeline will be. This can be anything: the rise and fall of an empire, mankind's spread across the stars, or the evolution of a species. For our game we chose an underground civilization discovering the surface world.

The next step is book ending the time period. This consists of writing the start and end points of your timeline. This should contain centuries if not thousands of years of time. There may be things that exist outside of that time period but for the game all events will be between those two periods. In the game I played we began with the apocalyptic Skyfall where the cave roof collapsed revealing the upper world. The end was perhaps equally dire with the sun of the above world going out, plunging the world back into darkness.

The third step is to decide what the palette is: what to include in the game and perhaps more importantly what not to include. This is a good way to firm up the focus of the setting. It also allows people to remove elements that they are uncomfortable with or don't want in the game (like magic or laser beams). In our game we removed gunpowder and gods. We included art, sailing, dinosaurs, people with supernatural abilities, and a technologically inferior surface race.

A lost world to explore

After that the players do a single pass creating periods and events in those periods. An important aspect of the game is deciding if a period/event/scene is light (positive) or dark (negative). This has no mechanical significance but I noticed people (or at least me) tend to try to balance light and dark after a while. It serves as an indicator if your timeline is too upbeat or (more likely) too dark.

Create these periods, events or scenes is pretty simple. A period is some long period of time like the 100 years war, the Great Depression, or Pax Romana. It can last for several years or a few centuries. An event is a specific instance like a battle, the creation of a monumental artwork, or a scientific discovery. It must be placed within an existing period. Once you have decided and described your period or event you write it on an index card and place it in the timeline.

Our Microscope Timeline

Once the initial pass is done the game proper begins. One person is the Lens and decides what the focus of the particular round is. Particular focuses from our game were Art, Dinosaurs, Sailing, and Obsidian (a tyrant in our timeline). At this point one can start to insert Scenes in events.

Scenes are a bit different in that they can be collaborative. You start out a Scene by asking a question to be answered in it. Some questions from our game were: What was saved from the Musical Gardens when the sky fell? How did Obsidian lose his eye? What horrifying thing was found by the first astronauts?

The person calling the scene then says what characters must be in the scene and which can't be in the scene. Then each player chooses a role and a short roleplaying session begins. The scene ends when the question is answered. You can later call another scene to follow that one (which we did when exploring Obsidian's quest to destroy art).

All in all the session we had an awesome game. We had legionnaires fighting a T-Rex, warring empires, a bloodline running from the first explorer of the Sky Islands to the tyrant Obsidian to the first astronauts. In the end we explored the Skyfall itself a bit with the destruction of an empire and the legendary great musical gardens.

The end was less explored though I suspect it might have ended up being related to the cursed obsidian that fell from the sky. There was a battle of destiny between the humans of the underworld and the Reptoids of the surface with the later often getting the worse end of the deal. Interestingly art was a crucial part of this struggle, both as a way of cultural dominance (destroy a culture's art) and self-reflection (Obsidian's belief that the painting of the Sunbeam, a ship, showed a human at the helm and not a Reptoid).

The game itself lends itself well to these scenarios with a timeline forming organically out of the periods and events your fellow players add to the game. I highly recommend picking it up and trying it yourself. A given session can last a few hours or you can keep coming back to it, expanding the timeline again and again.

I think it would be excellent way to build the history for a rich fantasy world, either for writing or for play in a traditional roleplaying game. Also there should be another game coming out soon called Kingdoms which deals with the kinds of localized dramas that occur in your history. I look forward to trying that out soon and reviewing that as well.