Philadelphia Artemis Event Wrap-Up

Hey guys,

On Wednesday I organized and hosted a night long Artemis LAN party at a local hackerspace called Hive 76 in Philadelphia. We held the event on our open house night where we show the public what's going on at the space.

After a few hitches with the setup, the game worked pretty well. We had some older spec laptops with old (ancient) GPUs that I realize in retrospect didn't even support Direct X 8. Next we had some Mac's (and potential Linux computers) that we tried to use. First we tried virtualization, which didn't work. Next we tried Wine, and with some fumbling eventually got to work. Despite our shortage in Windows laptops, after the warm-up game we had a full crew for all subsequent games (we played 3 or 4 in total). The server was hooked up to a huge projector.

A few days before the event I'd decided to try and do a First Officer role. It was something that I wanted to try just in general, but I thought the role would have lent itself well to instructing people on how to play the game, including the Captain. You can imagine Commander Riker, for instance, going over to helm and instructing an ensign, and as always advising the Captain on certain things. Well, I never got the chance. I'd already been at helm for the setup and warm-up game, then by the time of the first or second game everyone was working together like a well oiled machine. I'm still interested in trying it out, maybe next time.

At one point our Comms Officer found the station to be "kinda' boring", so on the next round I switched with him. It's true that Comms is the least developed station (hey, the game is only about 3 months old) and so as host I decided that it would be hospitable to allow everyone else to have the more engaging roles. As a huge trekkie already, I didn't really mind what I was doing in the game. Although, I'm not sure if I could have played more than 2 consecutive games as Comms in it's current state.

At Comms I really liked hailing space stations, announcing what was going on with enemy ships (in battle and just in general like when they'd run into mine fields), and going into red alert. Also I really liked adding fun flair to the experience. As an example, in one of the games the Captain asked: "What should we do now, where should we go?", and I remarked: "The nebulae are beautiful at impulse, Captain" in a deadpan bridge officer-like manner. As a result, the whole room erupted in laughter.

We won a few games at the lower difficultly, and almost beat level 5 but the night ended with our destruction. Unbeknownst to us, our engineer had stepped out for a phone call and we engaged an enemy fleet without power allocated to the shields! It was frustratingly hilarious though.

This was our first gaming event at Hive, ever. It was also my first time playing Artemis with other people, as well as everyone elses' first time playing period. Even people who originally scoffed at the idea of playing something "so geeky" when I first mentioned the idea in early November eventually joined the game. As previously stated, we had all six positions consistently filled with 1 or 2 people waiting to play on the next round. Additionally, people who weren't even there for the game couldn't help but keep their eyes on the projector screen.

Suffice it to say, everyone had great fun and there was definite interest in having another Artemis event. Someone even suggested that we get other hackerspaces (they're all over the world at this point) together for massive bridge vs bridge and co-op sessions.

Here's the blog post on Hive's site I made a day after the event. I included the best picture we took. There's something else scheduled for next Wednesday's open house, but we might still play a game of Artemis or 2 even so.