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Dysfunctional Roleplayers? I have roleplayed with some of the finest minds on the planet, including several famous professional game designers. I used to believe that there were really high-end gaming groups out there, where gaming had been elevated to an art-form, and no-one laughed at fart jokes or killed kobolds for fun. I know now that though that may be true, such groups are so rare as to be almost non-existent. The truth is, we're almost all dysfunctional. Even those guys who you would expect to only ever play games written by Forge fans, and only ever play fully rounded characters in a Method Acting style, probably also sometimes roll up a fighter and kick some arse in a bad fantasy setting ripped off from Conan and Lord of the Rings. So this novel -- the story of the Gods themselves, and their dysfunctional roleplaying game group -- should appeal to almost all gamers.
Game Night is Mr Nexus's first full-length novel. From a "Style" perspective, that does show -- there are occasional typos, spelling and grammar errors, and stylistic oddities, which have brough the Style score down a little. That said, I am a picky, picky bastard when it comes to this kind of thing, and the errors in this book didn't irritate me THAT much more than the errors in most mainstream published novels, or seem that much more prevalent, either. Style is raised by the understated but excellent cover art by Jon Hodgson.
The content is generally very good. I'm not going to go into detail about the story, partly to avoid spoilers, partly because you can read more, including downloading the whole of the book's first chapter, at Mr Nexus's website:
http://www.jonnynexus.com/gamenight/
The premise, though, is that the Gods of a typically mish-mashed and half-arsed fantasy game setting are meeting in the Heavens to play an RPG run by the Allfather. They each generate characters within the game; said characters are physically embodied, in the form of mortals within the fantasy setting the Gods rule over. This allows for some excellent viewpoint switches between the players and their characters, without making either viewpoint appear to be unreal, as it might if the book were about a real-world gaming group and their characters -- a neat touch.
As a general rule, I don't find fantasy humour especially amusing. I will enjoy around 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 Terry Pratchett books, say, and find the rest to be humdrum at best. I recognise this may make me unusual in gamer circles.
Game Night is different, because almost all the jokes stem from dysfunctional gaming, which to me makes them funnier. Much as with Pratchett, there is a decent story going on just below the surface of the gags, too. You won't necessarily identify with the characters, but you have almost certainly gamed with some of the archetypes in this book.
You probably won't enjoy this if you're not a gamer (although you probably wouldn't be reading rpg.net if you weren't). You don't have to be a hardcore gamer to find it funny, though; I persuaded my wife to read it (she is one of the "I will play RPGs because my family & friends enjoy them; they are OK as long as I don't have to read any rulebooks" brigade, but she's also much more of a Pratchett fan than I am). She enjoyed it a lot, but found the middle section a little hard-going.
I think that is my estimation, too. I actually read it quite rapidly, and found it very enjoyable, but the jokes started to wear a little thin around the middle. That said, this is a book that's worth finishing, because the final few punchlines are unexpected and hilarious, nailing a few of the running gags and throwing several brand new ones at you.
In summary, if you find the first chapter funny, and you liked Critical Miss, buy Game Night. You will almost certainly laugh out loud, many times, and there are a few thought-provoking points made by Nexus too. Perhaps my favourite one, which combines a continually thought-provoking quality with some of the best humour in the book, is the ongoing despair of the GM (in this case, the Allfather) at the players' callousness, stupidity, distractedness, and general playerishness. He gets particularly wound up when (as occurs several times, with especial hilarity) they convince him that something shouldn't have happened the way he said it did, and he has to roll back time and have it happen differently.
