The basic premise is that Earth is used as neutral territory for four alien races that are described more in terms of broad personality and belief than physicality, territory or history. Whenever something Big happens in their interstellar empires, delegates – the players – are sent to Earth in order to meet and sort things out. The summit venue is your living room, dining room or wherever you usually meet up to play games (think Men In Black’s alien ambassadors meeting in that Russian restaurant and you’ll get the idea) – in fact, this game could almost be played anywhere. Each player is almost always going to be an alien of one of the four races (presumably in human guise), as is the Host. The Host sets the topic and, optionally, defines the agenda.
For your money, you get a single, zipped PDF file of just under 400 kilobytes, uncompressed. The PDF is laid out so that a two-page spread can be read on a monitor. There’s very little margin in the middle of the printed leaf between each page, which makes cutting them up if you want to have a paper copy a finicky exercise. Also, because of the layout, you can’t duplex print it in order to turn it into a booklet.
I find the absence of a print-format copy rather surprising, especially as you can’t buy it in print (also because Wicked Dead co-founder Jared Sorensen has made separate screen and print versions of his InSpectres and octaNe games, in case you want to run off a hard copy for yourself). To make myself a readable hard copy, I had to cut down the middle of the printed pages, being very careful to ensure I wasn’t inadvertently slicing into the text. I stapled the pages together at the top, making for a notebook-style layout.
Beyond that, Alien Summit’s layout is fairly well done; there’s no traditional game art, just some geometric logos that have an alien hieroglyph feel to them. The text is two-column and legible, with an interesting font used for the title and main headings. The cover is a little bit of a letdown; it’s a stick-figure drawing of four figures climbing a mountain, the last one having just lost its head. I’d give it a Style of 3: Average, but the lack of a print-friendly layout is just too annoying for me not to take another point off, not when you can only buy it as a PDF.
Alien Summit is intended to be extremely accessible and playable. Outside the book, your only requirement is a standard deck of playing cards. After reading the game, I’d also recommend the game master either supply three tokens to each player to track use of player character special powers or keep track him or herself on a separate piece of paper.
The author describes her aim in writing Alien Summit as creating “a simple game… more talking than combat… that would add a new twist, a new flavour to our conversations”. For someone who came up with the standard, D&D-influenced gaming school, I found Alien Summit a little hard to wrap my head around at first. The rules, instead of framing a traditional, numbers-based “adventure simulation”, are minimal and basically intended to drive ongoing personal interaction. The GM – or “Host”, in this case – supplies a Geneva Convention-style dilemma, and the players, by dint of their characters, are given tools to facilitate conversation and conflict. Player and GM, assuming at least one read-through, should be able to get going in five minutes.
Character creation is quick and uses the aforementioned deck of cards, dealt by the Host. Characters presumably look and sound like their players, so creation is based strictly on personality and some special abilities. One card determines their PC’s race based on suit (take a Joker as a race card and you’re a human); five others define personality Quirks, such as Cryptic Brevity or Widespread Fame, or provide a race-specific goal. Players can trade cards back to the dealer and even swap out their race card, then hand two of their Quirk/goal cards back to the dealer. This gives the players some control over what is basically a random process.
The races themselves are defined more by personality and belief than physiology; mainly as the characters will look and sound like their players. Also, the four races feel as though they’re cut from a magical, fantasy cloth, rather than a science fiction one, especially the root dwelling, forest-spirit-worshipping elves – er, sorry, Hapnid. This might be an unpleasant surprise for those expecting a more… alien bent to the races. Regardless, though, what’s there gives players enough – even if they don’t get a goal – to improvise personality and, more importantly – standpoint on the given issue. The race descriptions are brief and neat, although the author’s normally clear prose breaks down noticeably here, especially when describing the Tokwa race; I had to re-read it about three times before I was sure I had a firm idea of what the author was trying to communicate.
The character’s race gives each player certain powers. The first is based on the race’s beliefs and creeds, and can be used to change a topic should conversation stray into the real of those beliefs. The second is less a power and more political point scoring; if another player says something that can be taken by you as a negative over-generalisation about your PC race, you call them on it and are immediately owed a favour. It’s limited to two uses, though. The final power is always a one-shot, straying into the realm of mind-control.
Combat is catered for in Alien Summit, although with an interesting storytelling bent. If matters between PCs come to blows, each player starts describing the advantages each has in combat. The total number of advantages act as initiative and govern turn sequence in combat, and each turn, the acting player gets to describe a specific action he or she is performing on another player. An action uses an Advantage; defending uses two. There’s no random mechanic here; an attack is automatically successful unless it’s defended against, with those able to assemble more Advantages getting the opportunity to attack first, wearing out others’ Advantages and denying them the opportunity to retaliate at the end.
Implementing the effect of combat is left rather vague. While you can humiliate your target (where the target must act in a deferential manner to your character), maim your target (where the target loses the use of a limb or other body part) or kill your target, there’s no guidance on when or how these effects are applied. However, dying isn’t as big a deal as it is in other games; the dead player can either haunt the gaming table (able to talk, but not interact physically with the other players) or create a new character (using the fairly quick process as described above).
On first read-through, it seems there’s not really that much for the GM to do in Alien Summit. The text defines the Host’s duties as dealing the cards during character creation, setting a topic and vetoing possible abuse of special powers. While the text implies that the GM can play NPCs other than the Host, it doesn’t detail what sorts of characters these NPCs could be or when they would pop up or how they would aid the game. It takes until the last page (admittedly, of only twelve) to inform the GM that his or her Host NPC can optionally have Quirks and a race.
In fact, this is a recurring symptom; the text briefly mentions what may be important game concepts (like agenda, meeting plans and rules) in passing and doesn’t come back to them later. It also doesn’t give any hints and tips on creating a Matter For Discussion beyond the very short, broad stroke examples on the first couple of pages. Do you provide a heap of detail or leave your players to make up as they go? Although the text’s first page says, “until the Host declares the meeting adjourned… nobody's going home”, the game doesn’t attempt to govern the session’s pace (or give the Host hints on how to). Play basically continues until it stops, either with a diplomatic resolution or the players and GM calling it a day (with the option of continuing next time).
Although the lack of business for the GM could be held against Alien Summit, I have the feeling that the game could get along fine without a GM, if the players are co-operative on the metagame level. Alien Summit really is a conversational game, with no other aim than adopting a persona and interacting with your fellow players’ personae. It’s something to do when you just want to talk, but feel like something a little different from regular conversation. As such, it may well turn a few traditional gamers off, but the author conceived Alien Summit as something that could be played while you’re waiting for everyone to turn up for the evening’s Main Event game, so they’ll probably be getting their big fix of dice-rolling later on anyway.
When translating the above into a Substance score, I’d give Alien Summit a 4 for knowing what it’s about and sticking to it without being outstandingly well done, but drop a point off for the occasional confusion or vagueness (not good in such a small product).
In the end, Alien Summit knows what it’s about – facilitating interesting conversations and arguments – and does it well, providing enough detail to serve as a springboard for the imagination but not so much that players will feel tied to a canon, and that deviating from it could break the game. Does that make Alien Summit worth ninety-nine cents? I think so. I was hoping to play it in order to give you some more concrete opinions, but unfortunately the combination of the Christmas season and my wife and I planning amove to Cairns means we won’t have time to organise a game any time soon.
