By: Raymond Kimball
Reacting Microgame Coordinator

Dear Reactors, 

Complementing the debut of Reacting Short Games at the 2024 Annual Institute, I’m pleased to announce the publication of the first Reacting Microgame, Jonathan Lawrence’s Ban the Jesuits! This publication is the culmination of 18 months of hard work to create templates, build a review system, and run a game through it to work out the inevitable glitches. We are very proud that we’ve created a process that:

• Produces a high-quality product,
• Applies peer review to support both the author and the community, and
• Teams up with world-class partners!
• Here’s a small taste of what’s waiting for you in Ban the Jesuits, which can be run with anywhere from 8 to 30 students:

Faceoff for the Future of the Order: The year is 1772 and the Jesuits face accusations from multiple directions ranging from fear of their allegiance to the Pope and independence from local political and religious rulers, claims that “seeing God in all things” has led them to wrongly accept concepts from other religions and violated Church teachings, to rumors that they are hoarding secret wealth despite their vows of poverty. Jesuits, Royal Ambassadors, Archbishops, and members of the Crowd have gathered in Rome to decide the fate of the Jesuits.

Reacting Microgames are a member benefit and can be accessed at no charge if you have an individual or institutional Reacting Membership. If you are not a member, you can pay a one-time fee to download the materials and license the game for use in your classroom.

We’ve completed peer review on the second Reacting Microgame and hope to have it out in the fall of 2024. Looking forward, we believe this system can support publications of up to four Microgames per year at an appropriate level of quality. If you have a Microgame in work, please contact me so I can keep you apprised of all the latest developments and make sure you’re getting the support you need.

With systems now fully in place for structured creation of Short Games and Microgames, we have archived Legacy versions of those games from the RC website. Legacy games are those whose authors have indicated that they do not plan to develop them for the new formats. We are still thinking about ways to make those Legacy games available in a manner that does not cause confusion in the community. Look for more updates about this effort by the end of the summer.

Play on!