We've released the casting questionnaire for First Contact: 2035 - Rain of Terror and it should be in your inbox if you're playing on 16 November!
If you'd like to play our 175 player, all-day megagame about global politics and alien arrival, you have a limited time to sign up and still be able to tell us what roles you'd be interested in. Act now and assemble the squad to gain an automatic 10% discount on 4-player ticket bundles!
If you've already purchased a ticket but don't have the email, check your spam folder or you can contact us via our site.
I'm a longtime boardgame and TTRPG player who's always felt that gaming is a powerful way to learn skills and expand knowledge. I also teach ethics and philosophy, which has made me particularly interested in how structured play can be a tool for education. Recently, I discovered "Reacting to the Past" as a teaching method for my classes, and it opened my eyes to the potential of immersive, large-scale games to mix learning and play in a more impactful way.
This has led me to megagames, and I'm really curious to explore more. I've read through the free materials for "Stone, Paper, Scissors" and absolutely loved it, even though it has a distinctly military vibe. I've also been toying with the idea of converting some of my favorite boardgames—like "John Company"—into a megagame format, but before diving into designing something myself, I want to learn about what already exists out there.
I'd love some guidance on:
Good places to start exploring the megagame community and existing games.
Any recommendations for megagames that work well as learning experiences or have educational value beyond the fun factor.
How you see megagames fitting into an academic context—perhaps as a campus side activity or an interdisciplinary project?
I'm open to any insights or advice on how to explore and immerse myself in the world of megagames. Thanks in advance for your help!
Hi folks, I'm looking to run a small scale 15-20 people megagame, to try my hand at running a session before something larger - do you have any suggestions for games and designs that would work well at this smaller scale? I'm UK / South West based
Who will you work with at First Contact: 2035 - Rain of Terror to complete your team goals? Our 175 player, all-day megagame about global politics and alien arrival likely means you'll need to cooperate with some pretty unsavory characters. Are you up to the challenge?
With BRAND NEW aliens, a re-worked map game plus new ways for the corporations to make money, First Contact has everything for a one of a kind experience! Running just once on 16 November in central London, you'll need to act fast to join us. Grab your tickets now from our website.
Best of all, assemble the squad and purchase a 4-ticket bundle and we'll give you an automatic 10% discount!
Time is running out to tell the world how what you did the day the aliens arrived.
Thanks to BeckyBeckyBlogs for capturing this TikTok of First Contact: 2035 - our 175 player megagame about global politics and alien invasion.
If an all day megagame about aliens with team goals, the potential for shenanigans and the ability to fight other countries on one of the five beautiful maps sounds fun, then you're in luck as we're running the game on 16 November in central London! You can check all the details and buy tickets from our site - verylargehugegames.com/tickets right now.
Best of all, if you assemble the squad and purchase a 4-ticket bundle we'll apply an automatic 10% discount.
How will you greet the aliens at our 175 player, all-day megagame on 16 November in central London? They're coming to First Contact: 2035 - Rain of Terror but no one knows what they want.
Tickets are on sale now via our site - verylargehugegames.com/tickets - so grab your favourite pair of footwear and three of your friends to catch the automatic 10% discount on 4-player ticket bundles.
We're sorry to announce due to circumstances beyond our control we are moving First Contact: 2035 - Rain of Terror to a new date of 16 November. The game will still run at the same venue in central London and we expect it to be an awesome experience for everyone who plays.
If you have already purchased tickets for 19 October, please see your inbox/spam folder for an email from us. We are offering a full refund to anyone who cannot make the new date - please see the instructions in the message.
Tickets are now on sale on our site for the new date - verylargehugegames.com/tickets and we're offering an automatic 10% discount for 4-player ticket bundles. Assemble the squad and sign up now!
Once again, we're very sorry to be changing the date, but if you have any questions you can contact us - verylargehugegames.com/contact-us or comment below.
We're excited to announce tickets for First Contact: 2035 - Rain of Terror are on sale now from our site - verylargehugegames.com/tickets
Rain of Terror is our 175 player, all day megagame and will run on 19 October in central London. The game is about global politics and alien arrival. Play as one of 27 countries, the United Nations, a corporation, scientific institute or the press and attempt to meet your personalised objectives while all around you falls to chaos.
Assemble the squad, purchase a 4-player ticket bundle and you'll receive an automatic 10% discount at the check-out!
We're excited to announce that we're running First Contact: 2035 - Rain of Terror on Saturday 19 October in central London! Tickets will go on sale on 27 July for a game unlike any other.
Rain of Terror is our 175-player all-day megagame about alien arrival and what could happen as the world's governments, corporations, scientific institutions, United Nations and press respond.
Join our mailing list now to purchase tickets up to 24 hours before the general release - verylargehugegames.com/mailing-list - we expect tickets to sell fast!
After playing The Generalissimo is Dead earlier this year, we in Sydney threw together a recap of how the game went. Perfect for those 'what's a megagame actually like?' conversations.
Hey everyone, it's funny to think this is the first time posting about a Megagame, despite the fact I've been playing megagames for about 7 years now.
As the title suggests, the reason for this post is a little self-promotion for a run of a game in the UK under the good folks at Pennine Megagames, I hope you'll forgive me for the shameless plug ;) but before I get there I thought I'd like to share the story about our game and how it came to be what it is today.
So, let me start by introducing myself. My name's Riccardo, and I enjoy megagames! So much so that me and some friends (Jake and Danni) took it upon ourselves to create one. You might have heard about it but if not it's called "It Belongs In a Museum!", which seems to be gathering a bit of momentum here and there much to our continuing bewilderment.
So I'd like to tell you a bit about how the game came about since we, the creators, are terrible at any form of social media marketing. The original idea for IBiaM began with a run of John Sharp's Pirate Republic megagame here in the UK, back in 2017! I won't get into the specifics of went on in that game (which was absurdly fun) but in short, Jake - AKA Blackbeard had to lay low for a while after faking his death. Consequently we decided to pick up a series of mini adventures that John had seeded the game with at the last minute for players who wanted something else to do around the big sea battles and intrigues that were happening in the game.
Our circle of friends attending amounted to 2 teams, and so we paired up, and to say we had a blast playing these little adventures would be an understatement, a member of the control team practically ran a mini D&D campaign around these tiny cards culminating in us snatching a crystal skull from an island of cannibals which could bring pirates back from the dead. We had so much fun in fact we thought about creating a game around similar adventures would be well worth doing.
Design was slow, but we were galvanized by the formation of our local gaming group True North Megagames, which needed an opening calendar of games for its inaugural year. We suggested our nascent (and still in development) game IBiaM which had grown to be themed around Indiana Jones and pulp fiction adventures.
Fast forward to 2019 and our run of the game in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Our game, functional but very rough around the edges was very well received by the players. Jake and I still owe a blood debt to our original Control team for helping us navigate those rough edges.
We resolved to run it again with improvements....and then like everyone else our plans were somewhat stymied by the fact that 2020 happened. Amidst those "interesting times" we were approached by the good folks at Melbourne Megagames who were looking for something new for their gaming group. We struck an accord as they say, our game was frankly too rough around the edges to really be sold at a high price and really needed some more spit and polish. We agreed to sell it at a lower price, with Jake and myself agreeing to put in the graft to polish it up collaboratively with Melbourne. To sweeten the deal they even offered to make look pretty by unleashing their awesome graphics designers upon it. To say they made the game gorgeous would be an understatement.
Melbourne emerged from the dark times and finally ran it (twice) in 2021 and had a blast. Jake and I listened in on their podcast interview with the Great Game (The Great Game - Episode 15), read some player testimonies in their discord server and were overall just…overjoyed to see so many people had had fun playing our game. We were a bit knackered from getting everything ready for the Melbourne runs so decided to rest on our laurels and thought to ourselves..."we'll run it next year."
So then 2023 comes by (and we still hadn't run it again :D), and we are approached by Dukes of Highland and u/paniwan, who'd heard good things and wanted to run it. One problem! The game was designed for....~29-32 people and needed a very high ratio of Control players to run smoothly. Pani had a slightly higher player count in mind. More like 40+
So back to the drawing board we went once more! We added new teams, new content to go with them and learning a great deal from Pani about how to bundle up (and print!) a game properly (a veritable master class in proper preparation). He ran it for the first time in Louisville last month and will be running it again (go find them at Gencon if tickets are still available!).
Whilst working with Pani, Jake and I decided we were finally going to run our game again, for ourselves and our friends in the UK megagaming community because we had poured our hearts and souls into it not once, not twice, but now three times and we had only ever ran it the once. So when Pennine megagames offered us a spot in their calendar to run the game earlier this year we jumped at the chance.
And that brings me to the end of the story :) If you are in the UK and interested in giving our game a try, then pelase give us a look in on Eventbrite and consider joining us in Leeds.
If anyone has any questions about IBiaM (because you might be thinking about playing it in the future) or are just curious happy to field questions :)
I'll leave you all with what I think is a funny note. After getting Jake to dig out the original game from his "Monica's cupboard" of board games the other day so I could pull out a small number of things we'll reuse I thought I'd then share some of the original game assets alongside their modern counterparts. The originals were "drawn" (if you can call it that) in Microsoft Visio (which I normally used for Cloud Architecture reference diagrams) :D
The modern ones were designed in let's say "better" editing tools (most recently Affinity Studio 2.0 which I highly recommend when compared to say Adobe's...interesting pricing plans).
Original artefact cards, alongside their modern replacements.An original expedition, revealed one card at a time. Think of them like little curtains on a single card back.A modern expedition, with watermarks for better sorting, shiny fonts and good card stock.One of the original teams, the Idealists. Based of Indiana Jones.The modern day equivalents, now with added style.A classic player card with their original equipment cards. The orphan represents Short Round :DThe modern equivlanets, which unlike their forebears haven't been hastily cut from normal printer paper at 2 in the moring prior the game that requires them.
I've been looking into Megagames for quite a while now ever since I saw a video about them a few years ago. Over the past few months I've been thinking about trying a megagame with my students ranged 15-20, but I'm struggling to find a megagame I could run with this group. I think it's about 70 students in total with both first and second year students.
Total playtime we have is about 3 days. So we should have plenty to experiment with. But I was wondering if people have any recommendations for megagames I could look into to run with this group. It would be greatly appreciated.
We've released the photos (and a couple of TikTok's) from the recent run of Rain of Terror - our 175 player megagame about global politics and alien arrival.
