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The Microscope game is a unique collaborative storytelling experience. A roleplaying game without a game master, dice, or character sheets, the designer terms it “a fractal roleplaying game of epic histories.” This blog has reviewed Fall of Magic and Fiasco in the past. The Microscope game is another award-winning product (Most Innovative New Product, Gaming Genius Award, 2011, and Finalist, RPG Game of the Year, Golden Geek Award). Get set for an evening of storytelling with a group of friends or family with Microscope.

Before You Play The Microscope Game

Building the story requires the game booklet or pdf, two to five players, a token, some blank index cards, a table on which to spread out the cards, and a felt-tip marker. Snacks and beverages, optional but recommended. No one is “in charge” or has any more authority than anyone else. However, it is helpful if at least one person has read the game instructions prior to playing. No scenario or characters are prepared in advance. 

The goal of Microscope is to cooperatively create the history of an imaginary civilization of your own devising. Everyone wins if they have a good time. 

Begin The Game

The group makes a few decisions together at the outset of the game:

• A one-line overview of the history to be played. Summarize what happens; no details are needed. The overview should be epic and can actually sound kind of boring. Creating the interesting details are what the game is all about. A few examples from the game book are: “A new force changes society, wiping away the old values.” “Refugees carve out a new life in a distant land.”

• The starting and ending periods of the history. (Every story has to pick a place to start and end.) A period is a very large chunk of time—decades or centuries. Players come up with a short description (a few lines) summarizing what happened in that period. For example, “Disasters make the land of the refugees unlivable,” and “Original refugees, safe and prosperous rulers of their new land, deal with fresh groups of refugees.” 

• All players designate certain tropes they want to ban from the history (“no”) or want to make sure is available (“yes”), and these are written on a list. Often this step brings up cross-genre storytelling aspects, like someone wants shiny vampires to be available in a spacefaring science fiction tale. The story doesn’t to have to include all of the “yes” items; they are merely available. The group needs to reach a consensus about the yes and no tropes. These lists comprise the palette.

Periods, Events, And Scenes 

Microscope encourages shared control of the story through a mechanism called the Lens. Each player takes a turn as the Lens, and their role is identified by the Lens token in their play area. They decide on the focus for the round—the part of the story to be explored.

Once the focus is declared, each player, starting with the Lens, takes a turn adding details to the history by creating:

• A period (decade- or century-sized chunk of history).
• An event (a specific thing that happens inside a period), for example, “Village is destroyed by flash flood.” 
• A scene (moment-by-moment interactions within an event), for example, “The flood survivors meet to decide what to do.”

The player describes the new period or event, its outcome, and decides when it occurred in the timeline of the history. With a scene, the microscope zooms in! They invite the other players to role play various characters, and the group develops the scene outcome together.   The final step of the turn is to summarizes the period, event, or scene on a card and place it in the array. 

“Microscope is all about building on each other’s ideas.”

Tips For the Microscope Game

• Microscope encourages each player to contribute their own ideas to the story, even players who are shy or don’t think of themselves as imaginative. The group needs to encourage, but not offer specific ideas. This approach can be a new dynamic for some groups of friends. 

• No player owns any part of the history, even periods or events they created in the first place. It’s all up for grabs. However, everything already part of the story is canon and cannot be contradicted.

• The past is never closed. An event may destroy a person, city, or civilization, but a player can always go back in time and develop it further. 

“Your ‘boring’ idea can snowball into something unexpected and wonderful.”

Microscope Review

Microscope is one of my favorite collaborative storytelling games. It is much more difficult to explain than to play. The number of players is flexible, although more than five will limit the history to only a few foci or necessitate multiple sessions. (Neither of those options is a bad thing.) Microscope is great for people who don’t play a lot of roleplaying games. Actually, such players have an advantage in that they don’t need to unlearn character min-maxing and other control dynamics that sometimes evolve in RPG groups.

The biggest hurdle to a satisfying collaborative story is many people’s tendency to avoid conflict, tension, risk-taking, and other “bad stuff” happening characters. With Microscope players may feel freer to explore interesting mayhem!

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This page updated 12/8/2021 to add The Big Cinch preorder button.