A Trip to Notts - Retford Moot A

After a brief recovery from GridCon, Charlie and I headed north on the A1 to Nottinghamshire for the Retford Moot, a replacement for our normal Consequences live action roleplay (LARP) con on the south coast. The latter had fallen through for various reasons not worth rehearsing here, and had been replaced by Retford Moot A (B will be in February), a slightly smaller affair than our usual Consequences, consisting this time of short-form LARPs and boardgames. Charlie and I brought a games library, which had significant additions from other helpful folks (thank you!). It took place at the Best Western Plus Hotel, Retford, a venue that UK Freeforms (pre-COVID) used / uses for weekend LARPs on an annual basis every February - and we're really hoping this will resume soon. We had 70 or 80 attendees (I think), which is about the same as our weekend LARP games, but split amongst mainly short-form LARPs, boardgames, crafting, and general chat.

I took along Kingmaker and a few smaller prototypes. We played a couple of impromptu Kingmaker games with the new version with 5 players each time - very many thank yous to all the participants! In each case there was a prestige victory for an alliance with plenty of interest and story-telling of battles and great deeds of chicanery. I was particularly struck by a siege of York at which the great noble Stanley died in the successful assault, only for the compensatory Crown card drawn to be the Archbishop of York! So, perhaps the cleric was so impressed by the Yorkist feat-of-arms that he joined them; and crowned Richard of York as king! Regrettably, the Lancastrians later outfaced the Yorkists whose leaders were forced to flee as their countrymen abandoned them as rebels and traitors. In both games, players had a great time, and I can't wait to get hold of the real copies!

I didn't play any LARPs myself, so can't comment on those, but many many folks played a huge variety of board games, ranging from Dune Imperium and Ark Nova, through Kokopelli and Cascadia, to shorter fare such as Illusion, Just One, and Kites.

It was fabulous to meet up with all our LARPing friends once more at our Back Together Again Moot. See you all again in February!