2007

A massive (perhaps too massive) global conspiracy was revealed to the players of ObieGame ’07. Hang onto your keyboards – this one’s a big recap.

Strangers (Max and Donny) email to ask for your aid in exposing the Entworth Corporation’s cruel experimentation on animals. As with all things, though, not all is quite what it seems. Entworth has something much more valuable than the happiness of animals at stake, Donny and Max (the mysterious strangers) are not who they say they are, and is that a board of shadowy figures pulling the strings in the background? It seems a little illumination is in order.

You piece together the information secreted on a server owned by one of Entworth’s subsidiaries, as well as information provided by Agent McKenna, CIA, who mysteriously appears midgame to fill in a few gaps. All this cloak-and-dagger stuff reveals the following (deep breath):

Entworth is owned by Danforth Partners, a company that is apparently a semi-legitimate front for all the world’s crime syndicates. Yes, all of them. The Yakuza, the Cosa Nostra, the Triads, the Russian Mob – they’ve pooled resources and are running a ginormous multi-national because it makes them more money than just doing crime.

Danforth is worried about a security leak, and their super-secret security service is zeroing in on one half of an illicit affair amongst the board of directors as the likely culprit. Tensions are high all around as Entworth has stumbled into developing a very valuable piece of technology, a device that can break any code or encryption currently in use, granting the owners complete access to and control of, well, almost everything.

As if it’s not bad enough that these bad guys could have a super-powered code breaker, Danforth’s long time adversaries – the Illuminati themselves – want the device too. They learned of its existence thanks to their mole at Entworth: Max.

So what’s a poor duped-by-the-Illuminati-and-threatened-with-jail-by-the-CIA player to do? Sprint around town encountering car escapes and dead CIA agents; get trapped in a room with a neuro-toxin bomb set to go off in 90 seconds; find Max and Donny, lose Max and Donny, and find them again in the midst of a Danforth security vs. CIA/FBI/Border Patrol sword and gunfight extravaganza; and finally see Max slip out the door with the code-breaker in hand, off to deliver it to… someone else.

Winners

1st Place ($200) – Team Tiger Lily
2nd Place ($75) – Some Geraniums

Special mentions:
Honesty Award – Dan Brown and the LAO Club
Clever Team Name – The Con Artists
We Wish You’d Gotten Farther Since You Seemed Dedicated – A Well-Packed Sub and Do you want to cdz?
Remarkably Ineffective Use of Outside Help – Mushroom-Cadabra

Materials:

  • Web version of the ‘recruitment’ email. Much of the language in this initial communique was lifted from an online rant about the Iraq war, with references to cute fuzzy creatures substituted for cute fuzzy countries.
  • Surveillance photo. One of several included with a security section report about a character’s movements. The photos were taken by a planner while on vacation, and we have no idea who these guys are. They just happened to be meeting in front of a EIGHT STORY TALL globe.
  • Emails… pay attention to the last group if you want to spoil the ending and find out who dies.

Fun Facts:

Once again we were too realistic for our own good at the start. The initial emailwas deleted as junk mail by at least a half dozen teams, who then went scrounging back through their trash once they realized other squads were moving ahead.

At least two planners had to be regularly quizzed on plot details to keep everything straight – quizzed like graded-questions-and-answers quizzed. We don’t think we’ll make things this complicated in the future.

The CIA agent’s full name was Jesus Xavier McKenna. Two points if you get that joke.

The Minigame:

A week-long minigame the previous October was used to test a couple of ideas, and introduced anyone who played to the company NeutronAxis, recently merged with Entworth. The game worked fairly well for the limited planning, although no one fully completed the task (identify an assassin and their target) so our carefully rehearsed getaway scene – featuring a truck, four actors, and probably a good screaming-at from Safety and Security – was never put into action.