# [Og] Go Look Food



## Firefly Games (Aug 21, 2007)

I ran a demo of _Og: Unearthed Edition _ on Thursday at GenCon Indy. The premise of _Og _ is that you are dumb as a box of rocks except no one's even gotten around to inventing the box yet, and you only have perhaps a half-dozen words with which to supplement your grunts & gestures for in-character communication. Unless you have the Draw skill, which lets you produce cave paintings which may even be somewhat accurate if you roll well. As is obvious, it's a comedy game.

We had 7-8 players, including a boy & girl playing with their father. Prepping for _Og _ adventures is ridiculously easy, since they immediately go off the rails anyway, so I just kicked off the improvisational mayhem as suggested in the book - "You wake up. You're hungry. There's no food in the cave."

The rest of the tribe looks to our prehistoric heroes to solve this crisis, and after a confusing conversation they head out of the cave in search of sustenance. Fishing with sharpened sticks goes well until one caveman tries attacking the 'water food' with his club, with predictably useless (& wet) results.

Meanwhile, the other cavemen pursue a flock of terror birds on the savannah, but manage to stampede them over a cliff, turning them into 'food.' At least one caveman safely climbs down the cliff, but another plunges off into a nice soft landing ... into quicksand. A fellow caveman on the clifftop makes a simply astounding roll using the 'Succeed Wildly' optional rule and throws a vine into quicksand caveman's waving outstretched hand as he gestures & grunts pitifully for assistance. A grunting caveman - sort of like a shaman - tries to assist, but succeeds only in causing a cloud to pass over the sun.

While the clifftop cavemen drag their pal out of the mucky quicksand, after a few hilarious mishaps, the others tie vines to the terror birds so they can be hauled up the cliff. Except as they begin lifting the birds, a velociraptor bursts from the jungle and leaps up to latch onto the birds. Unable to figure out a better plan, the cavemen atop the cliff simply keep pulling up the birds ... that is, until someone blows a roll & plunges off the cliff, managing to grab onto a bird leg. So he's hanging next to the velociraptor, which fortunately can't bite him without letting go of its own bird & plunging to the ground. Being smarter than your typical caveman, the velociraptor does not try to bite him, but instead waves its tiny arms in frustration.

Back on the ground, a cavewoman - now alone at the bottom of the cliff - decides to climb back up. Except a missed roll means she blunders onto a nice, wide ledge ... with a big nest ... and some pterodactyl eggs. And, oh yeah, mommy is just now flying back home. One caveman manages to intimidate the pterodactyl, except his buddy - who has started a fire to cook the fish caught earlier - drops a burning club on his own head while trying to also scare the flying reptile, so it is less impressed. The cavewoman grabs an egg & begins climbing again - except another blown roll means the egg begins cracking. She drops the egg and the pterodactyl swoops down to save it while she finally reaches the top.

Some more failed grunting causes a distant volcano to uselessly erupt.

The cave people depart the dangerous cliff, carrying their hard-won susteance  back to the cave, when some monkey men - missing links, even less advanced than the cavemen, which is saying something - show up to demand some food. The cavemen chase away one monkey man, and quickly turn the other three into 'food.'

(At this point, we'd been playing for just over an hour in a 2-hour slot, so I asked if folks would like to continue or leave off here, and everyone voted to continue).

Ariving back at the cave, the cavepeople find a T. rex prowling around while their clan-mates cower inside. Some of the more impulsive cavemen are ready to fight the carnivore, but (relatively) wiser heads prevail, and the grunting caveman finally gets a success - the cloud that passed across the sun earlier discharges a lightning bolt, causing a rockslide that buries the T. rex. The tribe is saved! Everyone eats & congratulates themselves on another day of non-extinction.

Then we ran through a quick end-of-games advancement session - yes, _Og: Unearthed Edition _ does include caveman advancement. The most valuable thing of all in _Og _ is new words, of course, so everyone learned a new word based on their best (or worst) moment. Then we rolled for a new Ability for each caveman, with success for a few, failure for a few, and two unfortunates developing brainlock & being unable to ever learn their desired ability.

Overall, a great game with lots of laughs and fun, even if I did borrow the 'food runs off a cliff' idea from an earlier demo I'd run. But cliffs make everything more fun in _Og_.


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