AZ Game Fair 2019

Last weekend I attended AZ Game Fair 2019 in Mesa. It's just up the road from Tucson, and as a "special guest" I get a free badge, so it's usually a very inexpensive weekend of gaming. However, this year my wife and baby came with, which meant a full price hotel room for 2 nights, so it wasn't so cheap after all.

I did not arrive at the convention until 10pm on Friday, so I might as well have just come up Saturday morning and saved the cost of the room that first night... oh well.

Saturday and Sunday, however, I did manage to spend a lot of time at the convention, and actually play some games for once!

Old Favorites

Puerto Rico
After hopping into a game or two of The Resistance with Sean Ramirez of The Dukes Of Dice podcast, I taught his friends Puerto Rico, which sat at the top of the "best games" list for a decade (and with good reason). Sean and I had played before, so of course it boiled down to a contest between him and me. I haven't played that game in years, but it's definitely one of my favorites, and I pulled out the victory.

Game Design Panel
After that, I was on a game design panel with another local designer, David Short, as well as Canadian special guest Daryl Andrews, and the guest of honor from Italy, Vital Lacerda. The panel was called The Secret Lives of Board Game Designers, but had no real direction or moderator, so I tried to sort of direct traffic. We mostly took questions from the audience.

Railroad Tycoon
After the panel, my friend Hoss was running a game of Railways of the World (FKA Railroad Tycoon). There were only 3 of us, Hoss, myself, and a new player Hoss had just taught how to play. We used a map of Great Britain, which I'd not seen before. I kinda liked the map. It was a tight game, and in the last round I had to go to the bathroom, so I made my last 3 plays out of turn (they didn't affect anybody else anyway) and ran off. When I got back, they'd just finished counting points, and Hoss had won by 1 point! I don't know if I trust him though, the first thing he said that game was that I should be banker because he was bad at counting, and the first thing he did in the game was grab $10k bills in lieu of $1k bills... :)

New Hotness

Underwater Cities
In addition to those old favorites, I got a chance to try a few of the new, hot games. Saturday night Hoss and I sat down to figure out Underwater Cities. The rulebook took about 45 mins to learn from, mostly because they repeated the "play a card and place a worker, and if your card color matches, you get the bonus" text at least 4 times.

I was enjoying Underwater Cities while we played, but thinking about it afterwards, I am not sure I'd want to play it more than maybe twice. The "play a card and place a worker, and if your card color matches, you get the bonus" thing is cute. I did feel like I never really wanted to play an off-colored card, even though I had something in play that gave me a consolation prize when I did that (though I probably should have done it once or twice).

We had to stop 1 turn before the end because they closed up, so I don't actually know how my strategy turned out, but I got a pretty good feel for it. I saw maybe 2 real paths I'd want to try (the one I did, and 1 other). I'm sure there's more, but it wasn't obvious what else you could really do.
The collect-cards-in-play part was a lot like Terraforming Mars, and I definitely liked this A LOT more than I like Terraforming Mars.

Wingspan
Wingspan was solid. I enjoyed most of it. Probably the only thing that I thought was weird was the random-and-variable resource pool. You need resources (in 5 types) to pay for playing bird cards, and there's an action where you take some resources (you can upgrade that so you take multiples, 1 at a time). The resource pool is 5 dice, rolled into a supply. When you take a resource, you remove the die from the supply, reducing what's available. Caveat, if all remaining dice in the supply match (there's only 1 resource option available to you), then you may choose to re-roll all of the dice, resetting the whole pool to 5 random things before taking one.

I could see wanting a random resource pool, and I could see wanting a competitive resource pool (like dice drafting), but I'm not sure the way they're combined here is the best way to do the job.
One of the types of reasons I don't like it is because there are a bunch of card effects that are like "take a [specific resource] from the supply, if it's there" - which is therefore super variable, based not just on what's rolled, but also based on how many dice happen to remain in the supply. Worse, there's a card type that says "when [X happens and succeeds], take a die from the supply," where the likelihood of X happening depends on what opponents do (which is fine), but the likelihood of X succeeding increases as the number of dice remaining decreases... so while it looks like this card gives you flexibility when it hits (you choose a die rather than get a specific resource), in reality, this card is not likely to hit at all, and if it does, you probably get some random resource, not a real choice. I could argue that's just a lame card effect, but I think it's a symptom of a lame resource system.

But other than that, I thought the game was fun, and solid.

Just One
Not as hyped as the previous two games I mentioned, Just One is a hot new cooperative party game where the goal is to get one of your teammates to guess a word by giving 1-word clues. The catch is that after each player writes down their 1-word clue (but before the guesser sees then), any matching clues cancel out. So it's scary to use the obvious clues, because if someone else does that, you don't get them, but then everybody avoids the obvious clues, and you still don't use them!

It's a fun party game, would play again, even at 2 in the morning :)

My Own Games and Prototypes

Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done
Crusaders came out just a few months ago, and so far it seems to be very well received. The production is very nice, and several people approached me at the convention to tell me how much they were enjoying the game play!

One guy who had backed the Deluxified version of the game was trying to read the rules while his friends played another game, so I offered to teach. In the end it was just 2 of them (the other 2 kept playing that other game), so I sat in and made it a 3 player game.

It's been a while since I've played Crusaders, but I still liked it a lot!

Crusaders: Divine Influence
I had made an expansion to Crusaders about a year ago, and I had thought it was probably done. I sent it to Utah with Michael in October so the TMG team could play it, and I just got it back about a week ago.

Ben and his daughter were looking to play one of my prototypes, and so as the last game of the convention, I taught them Divine Influence. Emma had not played Crusaders before, but she picked the game up just fine, even with the extra expansion rules. It went well, though I think the free movement from the Influence action is too fiddly, hard to visualize, easy to forget, and usually unnecessary. I should either cut it, or make it simpler -- maybe something like "you may freely move between adjacent hexes with your influence marker on them" (a dynamic known as "railroading" in some games). Maybe better would be to simply cut it, and save having to make components for influence.

David's doggo card game
Late Saturday night I played one of David's quick card game prototypes. It's intended to be a sort of follow up to AEG's Cat Lady. Indeed, much of it was super similar to Cat Lady (collecting similar types of sets from a 3x3 grid), however this game was a step up in complexity, as you could buy upgrades to the patterns of cards you're allowed to pick up.

I gave him some feedback, hopefully it was helpful. Mostly it was "once a player replenishes the board, their turn should be over," which I think he agreed with in the end. The rest was about a special card called "fetch," which did something thematic that David liked, but I thought should probably instead just be "get a card from the discard pile," which also seemed thematic to me. The way David wanted to do it, in my mind, subverted the main mechanism in the game, which is something I don't like doing. The recent game Noria does that, and I wish it didn't.

GenCon report

Last week I returned from GenCon 50, my annual pilgrimage to Indianapolis, which started about 7 years ago when TMG was a fledgling publisher.

I fondly remember our improbable endcap booth... here's an excerpt from my blog post after he fact:

Michael, Erin and I went to Gen Con a few weeks ago. I have never been, I've always thought of it as more of a commercial event. I don't like he idea of going to (and paying for) a gaming convention and then having to pay extra to play in events, or simply to get into the Open Gaming room! However, this year I didn't attend the con in the capacity I normally attend game cons - We attended as Tasty Minstrel Games. We had a booth, and brought 6 different games to sell, including Eminent Domain, Belfort, Martian Dice, Train of Thought, Jab: Realtime Boxing, and Homesteaders 2nd Edition. Our booth was rather busy all 4 days of the con, and we did many, many demos. Looking up and down our booth at all 6 of our offerings I noted that, while no game is for everybody... within their target demographic, each of our games is really very good. They are the highest quality game, and the art and production (now that we've moved to Panda) are also the highest quality. I felt proud to stand behind each and every one of them! Even Martian Dice, which is the type of game that generally doesn't interest me at all, is really very good for what it is - I heard people saying it was better than Zombie Dice (a similar quick filler).

One of the best feelings was when someone who had bought EmDo or Belfort the day before would stop by and tell us how much fun it was or how much they liked it when they played it that evening! Another high point for me was when 2 different people stopped by our booth with a copy of Terra Prime asking me to sign it, and telling me how much they like the game! We also had a number of EmDo Kickstarter supporters stop by tell us they were anxious to get their copy of the game.

That was 2011. Fast forward to 2017, the 50th anniversary of the convention, and the first time in history that they sold out badges. First, the 4-day badges sold out. Then, in the weeks leading up to the convention, even the 1-day badges started selling out. For a long time now GenCon attendees have had trouble getting hotel rooms in the byzantine lottery system they use, but now it seems tickets to the show themselves will start to be a hot commodity as well.

To be honest though, I didn't feel like the dealer room was any more crowded than usual. I didn't spend much time outside the dealer room, but the halls and the little food court area nearby didn't feel more crowded to me either. I've long since sworn off trying to go to a group outing at a restaurant at mealtime, but the Noodles place, and the food court at the nearby mall, both had short lines when I went (which was often at normal mealtime). Only Steak & Shake seemed to be slow, but I think that's not unusual for them anyway -- as Michael said, GenCon seems to take them by surprise every year!

This year TMG has utilized the services of Envoy, who provides demo staff to help in the booth. That's been pretty great, though it's possible we underestimated the number of staff needed for GenCon. I spent a little time in the booth, giving demos of Okey Dokey and Joraku, two new small box imports from Michael's trips to Tokyo Game Market.

Most years at GenCon, Andy and I end up with meetings with designers, back-to-back-to-back every 30 minutes. This time our schedule was a little more relaxed. I'm not sure if that's because we did a better job of pre-screening, if we scheduled in 1 hour blocks instead of 30 minutes, or if fewer designers tried to schedule appointments with us. I got smart and as soon as Andy had set up our youcanbook.me page, I scheduled up the 12:00 hour each day for lunch :)

Even still, we did end up with a fair number of meetings with designers, and listened to a fair number of pitches. Some were not for us, some were submissions we'd already seen and had made suggestions for changes. Some were even from the two Designer Speed Dating events (one Thursday night and one Saturday night). I've been pretty down on Publisher Speed Dating lately. I like the idea of the event, but the signal to noise ratio has been so low for me that I was starting to feel like it was a waste of time. However, Andy and I have economized the effort by splitting up and each sitting through 1/2 of the pitches, then if we see anything we think the other should check out, we revisit that pitch. It seemed to me that the average level of designs in these particular speed dating events were higher than usual, and indeed, we asked several of the designers if they'd like to meet with us and show us more about their game. One we even took home with us!

In fact, we brought home a number of prototypes to evaluate -- 6 or 7 I think. That's a huge number, usually it's 1 or 2. Of the four I took home with me, one was from speed dating, one was from a designer we knew, and two were games we'd seen before and had asked for change before resubmitting. Another submission we played in our hotel Sunday night, and a few others Andy took back to Utah with him.

I got a chance to play 3 of those last weekend, and one was very well received by the players. It may be one of the rare "accept and publish as-is" types of submissions!

This year, Andy and I were able to take some of our meetings in our booth, which was very nice. I hope we can find a way to make that a standard. A few years ago we actually had a demo room, which was great -- I'd love to gt back to that!

So that was basically GenCon. I got to see some industry friends -- my brother-in-law volunteered with my friend Sara over at Renegade, and my friends over at Iello traded me a copy of Bunny Kingdom (which Michelle and I are enjoying so far, but I think we'll both like it better with more than 2 players). I got one of my prototypes played (but only 1), and I played a couple of other prototypes after hours by the blue noodle (unofficial unpub area). I played a couple of published games (Photosynthesis and Jump Drive) there with some of my game designer friends as well.

And then, just like that... 5 days, 20 hours of sleep, 3 trips each to the Noodle place and Steak & Shake, and 1 dead car battery later, I was back home. Sadly, I won't be attending Essen this year, but I will return in the future. Which means my convention trips for the rest of the year will be RinCon at the end of September (Friday only, then I'm off to a wedding in California), Sasquatch at the beginning of November, and BGGcon around Thanksgiving time. See you there!

Strategicon: Gateway 2014

About a week ago I went to Strategicon's Gateway event in Los Angeles, as I've one for the last 10 years or so. This time was a little different, for 2 reasons:

1. I was invited to be Special Guest.

2. I brought a "plus 1".

I wasn't sure what to expect as Special Guest, and as it turned out the convention went pretty much the way it would have otherwise for me. It was nice of them to pay for my hotel room though, and it was nice to be recognized by attendees as the guest :)

The much bigger difference was bringing Michelle with me. I have never brought a significant other to a convention before, and I was very worried it wouldn't go well. When I'd extended the invitation I hadn't considered just how busy I'd be, and that I wouldn't have time to hang out with Michelle. Fortunately, it actually went quite well. Michelle met some of my friends, learned Eminent Domain from one of them, spent some alone time in the room and at the pool, and otherwise seemed to enjoy the convention just fine. What a relief! Because I was busy running Bomb Squad, Gold West, an EmDo: Legacy tournament, and Aquasphere, playing prototypes for TMG consideration, and hoping to play a few games for myself as well as visit with all the friends I've made at those conventions over the last decade.

I managed to play 10 different games on the weekend, some of them more than once:

Dog - Upon arriving at the convention, we ran into my old friends Steph and Chris. I asked them to teach us a game, so they pulled out the partnership game Dog. I'd seen them play this before, it looked like some kind of souped up Sorry... and it kinda was. Not too bad a game, but not the kind of game I really want to play often.

Got it! - Steph and I used to always compete at a few rounds of Got It! - which is like Set, but rather than looking for patterns, you're looking for math equations that resolve to a certain number. I got to play a couple of rounds of this, and it reminded me how much I like the game and how I ought to play it more often. It's tough to find people who really want to play this with me though. I'm glad Steph was up for it because we've always been pretty evenly matched, so it's always a good game!

Hanabi -Andrew and I played a few hands of Hanabi with a young woman who's name escapes me at the moment. We played 4-5 hands trying to get a perfect score (30, including the rainbow suit). Luckily, it only took us a few hands!

Train of Thought - I have been playing Train of Thought a lot lately because Michelle loves it. That just reminds me how much I really love it too.

Five Tribes - I played Five Tribes twice - once with Andrew and Michelle in the middle of the night at Denny's, and once the next day with 4 other players. I had one major concern going into the game: with all the possible combinations of moves on any given turn, I suspected a great deal of AP, or just people taking a long time to figure out what to do on their turn. In fact, I was surprised to hear it was so popular at GenCon, rather than hearing people complain left and right that turns drag on and on... after playing that 4 player game, I can confirm that it's very easy to take a long time on your turns. The game is still pretty cool, and I might play it some more, but I don't see that issue going away - if anything I see it getting worse as players know the game better.

Downfall - I got together with John Clair to play Downfall, an epic, post-apocalyptic game driven by an awesome card draft mechanism which TMG is planning on publishing. It was a 6 payer game and it took about 3 hours, which seems about right. Despite the fact that the big, epic, long games aren't usually my style, I really did enjoy playing Downfall.

Oceanica - I got together with Mark and Christina Major, of the League of Game Makers, to play a prototype which TMG was looking at for publication. I love the theme of that one, and the general structure of the game is sound, but currently I don't think the neat aspects are shining through properly so I returned the game to him with some comments. I hope he will address them and resubmit - I look forward to playing it again.

Unpublished Prototype -After Oceanica I played another prototype of John Clair's that had a really interesting format. Might be tough to produce, but it was certainly neat. I am trying not to talk about other people's prototypes (in case they don't want me to), so I'll leave it at that.

Concordia - On Monday morning I played in a Concordia tournament, which turned out to be just 1 round - the top 3 scores from 2 games claiming 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. I don't know if I really knew I was doing this, but when in a position to trigger the game end, I chose not to - dragging the game out a few more turns. This allowed everyone at my table to score more points... seems a little weird to use that as a strategy, but with that format it makes sense!

Glass Road - After picking up Subway lunch with Andrew, I spent the last hour of the con playing Glass Road. It took a little longer than expected, and I literally had to leave before the game was actually over. I calculated my score to be 19.5, which turned out to be just good enough for 3rd, I think. Not a very good performance, but at least I made my plane!

GameStorm 2009 - Part II

Slept in a little this morning, and then Jeremy and I headed back to the convention. We both wanted to play Castle For All Seasons again, and maybe Battlestar Galactica if we could. We didn't end up playing either.

Today (Friday) we played the following:

Hammer & Spike, Rick's new train game, with Rick and his mother in law Joan. I'd heard a little about this at BGDF and on his blog, and I was excited to try it. Hammer & Spike (affectionately known as Rickety Rails) is a train game where you build connections and deliver resource cubes, like Railroad Tycoon (and in fact inspired by RRT). The cool bits are that your deliveries are limited by "fuel." Your train can only go 3 cities before having to refuel. Players can build fueling depots, and you can use fuel from your own station for free, or pay an opponent $2 to fuel up at their depot, in order to move another three cities. The other neat thing about the game is that the cities (of which there are 6, the rest are towns) have a variable demand. There are 4 colors of resources, and when you deliver one to a city, the city decides it now wants a different color. On top of that, a big point-getter is a "switchyard," which can be built at a city, but not until you've delivered 1 of each colored resource to that city. The effect this has on the game is very big, and very good.

I could go on about this game, I liked it very much. I couldn't think of much to make it better - I did suggest a small change to how replenishing cubes works - (since it helps all other players, it hurts to have to pay money to do it), and we all agreed the game does not end soon enough (you play for 20 turns, when it should probably end after 15 or 16). I would happily play this again, but I don't know if I will this weekend or not. I hope Rick will send me a copy to play with Michael - who knows, maybe Tasty Minstrel Games* will want to publish it!

* more on Tasty Minstrel Games later

We went to the hospitality room and got some hot dogs for lunch, then Jeremy and I found Jennifer and we decided to play Brass. Just as I was finishing up explaining the rules to Jeremy, Rick returned from showing his prototype to some group of industry people, and he jumped in as well.

I noticed in this game that while 2 people were building Cotton Mills for early income, both of them were also building ports to ship them through instead of using the external market. For the record, the players doing so were Rick and Jennifer, each of whom had played at least once before. I shat out Coal mines like it was going out of style (Developed the first one away turn 1, then built 2 level 2 coal on turn 2). Jeremy did the same, sadly trumping one of my placements positionally. Due to this, I did not get to flip either mine before the Canal phase ended. Jeremy built a boat, and I built 3 level 2 Cotton Mills and shipped them all through the foreign market.

In the second half of the game, I got all the boat building cards, and Jeremy didn't... so we sort of swapped strategies. I ended up building *2* boats in the Rail era, and he built 1. I also built a lot of Coal and Iron, doubling up my action 2 or 3 times during the game. I don't think I built even 1 level 3 Cotton Mill, which was originally going to be my strategy - this is mostly because Rick ate up the foreign demand.

In the end, I scored 157 points while 2nd place (Jennifer) had 98. Jeremy was close behind her, and Rick was not too far back from them. I'll note that every tile Rick built in the Canal era came off the board - he didn't build any level 2 tiles at all in the first half of the game.

I continue to really like Brass. I am more experienced than my opponents were, so it follows that I was able to win, but I didn't think I was going to have that many points!

To pass some time, Jeremy and I played a little Magic variant called Magic War. It's sort of like a cross between Magic: the Gathering and War - the object is to get all of the cards from a common deck, and you don't need to pay the casting cost for anything (there are no land cards, you just assume you have infinite lands). It's fun, and not a little ridiculous :)

Finally, Rick and company invited us to play a 6 player game of Railroad Tycoon with his wife, her mom, and Candy. I had an excellent start, taking 3 or 4 shares on the first turn to secure the first delivery along with a service bounty, then soon after scoring the first 3-link delivery (3 more shares to upgrade my train). I got up to $10k and was ready to upgrade to level 4 for the 4 point bonus as soon as anyone challenged for that, and then something kinda bad happened. Rick's wife Helen built into Chicago when I didn't expect her to, but it was 4/5ths of a long rout to another city. I really wanted to build there, and worse if she finished the route I would have been cut off from a lot of stuff I thought I'd need, so I built to her destination to block her and help myself. So she used her next action to finish her track, but it cost her an extra $4k... this was just the beginning of a Big Mess in the Midwest, as Helen's mom really wanted to build into Chicago as well, and Candy was already sharing the Midwest with me. Thousands of dollars later, all that remained was a tangled mass of track. I had made Helen pay out the nose for her Boston-Toledo connection, and though I thought she might have been going for New York-Chicago (that card didn't come up) or New York-Kansas (which did), she ended up getting neither. It's possible hat my aggressive play lost me the game, though I think another major contributor was when I looked at the number of empty city markers left and saw a decent sized pile (maybe 7), so I thought the game had a couple turns to go, and I used an action to make a New City, only to find out immediately after that there were 3 or 4 empty cities on the board which hadn't been marked yet! This meant the game end was likely to trigger THIS round, and that being the case I would definitely not have wasted my time with the New City - I would have built track to some deliverable cubes, and I would have scored my 6-point Tycoon card in the process. Instead I lost by 10 points :/

I hate when that happens - when I make a significant game decision based on misinformation... especially when I specifically check on that information. I need to learn to be more careful - I should have looked at the board to see that the leftover empty city markers were accurate... those things get missed all the time.

After that game it was getting close to midnight. Jeremy and I found the Werewolf room and were waiting for that to start, but then decided we should head home and get something to eat. I had hoped to get to bed early-ish and then return to the con earlier tomorrow, but here I am now - 2 hours of Magic War and 2 more hours of Internet later... oh well - best laid plans and all that. Before we left I saw Julie and Peter and made plans with them to play Battlestar Galactica at 1:00 tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully we will play A Castle For All Seasons before that, and my prototypes afterwards - we'll see how that goes.

GameStorm 2009

I got to Portland yesterday to hang out with my friends Jeremy and Amelia, and to go to GameStorm. Today we played some Dominion and Rock Band then Jeremy and I headed over to the convention. I was bummed that there wouldn't be a Protospiel this time, but when we got there I found out there was a different, related thing called Game Lab. I hadn't heard of this, but evidently there will be some demo-ing and playtesting going on. I brought Winds of Fate, Terra Prime, Homesteaders, and Brain Freeze, and I think I'll try and get some of them played. In particular TP and WoF.

Today (Thursday) we played the following:

A Castle For All Seasons, with Rick and Candy from the bay area. I've been wanting to play this game for a while now, especially since my friend mike got it in the mail - but he's never available anymore and so hasn't brought it over yet. We finally got to play it today, and it was pretty cool. A little less intuitive to play than I'd hoped, but seemed pretty good... Jeremy and I both wanted to play it some more, but couldn't find another copy all day!

Afterward Rick showed me his new rail game, which looks cool. I hope to play it tomorrow. Then he and Helen went to get dinner and go to bed.

Agricola with Jeff (who we met last year at this convention). Jeremy had played once before, and Jeff had never played. It was an interesting game, and in the end Jeff finished with 36 points, maxing out his fields, grain, and vegetables. He didn't get a third family member until round 13 (another round 14 for the 3 points). I've never seen anyone score so well only having 2 people for that long! Jeremy finished with 39 points. I pulled out the win with just over 40 owing mostly to the Wet Nurse. I baked a ton of bread, finishing with 10 grain and 12 food leftover!

Street Fighter 4 on PS3. We went upstairs and checked out the video game room. Some guy was playing Super Mario Brothers 3 on an old school NES - I couldn't believe hos ghetto it looked! I remember it looking better than that, but I guess that's because nothing at the time looked a lot better. now it looks old and terrible. I played a couple rounds of Street Fighter 4 against some guy - I got crushed the first game, then owned him the second. Then we went to get some dinner.

On a related note, it sounds so funny when they say a value meal is on sale for $4, and then when you order it they say "$4 please." Not $5.34, but $4... no sales tax!

Hamburgum with DJ (a nice guy we met tonight). I'm really not all that good at this game, but I continue to like it. Jeremy boxed me out of most of the board by building - I could have avoided that, but didn't notice. In order to build more buildings I then had to complete a church, which took a lot of work and a lot of money. I ended up dead last, while Jeremy had a good game and crushed us with 109 vps - 15 points ahead of me. I was dead last.

Homesteaders with Jennifer, a woman who's played some of my prototypes at BGG.con and liked them. I narrowly beat out Jeremy 58-52. We were all a little Action light, I spend many of my Actions selling cubes for money and VPs.

BGG.con 2008 report

Last week I made my annual pilgrimage to Dallas to visit my friend Brian and to attend BGG.con - the annual open gaming convention put on by the guys who run the BoardGameGeek website.

BGG.con is my favorite convention for a number of reasons: the people, the new games (it's hot on the heels of Essen), the atmosphere, the timing... it's a lot of fun, I haven't missed one yet, and I don't plan to miss it in the future.

I wrote up my experience at this year's convention in a Geeklist. Feel free to peruse it if you like.

Strategicon report - work in progress

Last weekend I went to Los Angeles for one of the 3 annual Strategicon game conventions - Gateway 2008. I like Strategicon because they have a lot of mini tournaments at which I can usually earn some dealer dollars to spend on a new game. I also like that it's usually a cheap plane ticket and a short flight to get to L.A. - and now I have a lot of friends out there to hang out with.

Here's a brief summary of my trip. I was in something of a daze for most of it, as I really didn't sleep at all, but according to my notes this is what went down.

Friday 8/29/08:
I arrived on the scene and immediately saw Greg Richardson at a table where the Ticket to Ride card game was being taught. I ha never played that game, so I learned it and played in the tournament, and lost miserably. I was overly ambitious with tickets, all of which shared several colors, and I only managed to collect 1 White card... so I was able to do exactly 1 ticket in the first scoring phase, and the rest of my collected cards went to waste! In the 2nd half of the game I did much better, but that wasteful first round really killed me. Greg more than tripled my score!

After that I talked someone into playing the prototype of Prolix I'd brought with me. I can't recall who that was for some reason, maybe Greg, maybe not :/ I've played Prolix a couple times now since I received it in the mail. I think the board could be a little more interesting, but all in all I think it's still my favorite word game.

The next thing I did was an Amun-Re tournament. I don't play this game very often, but I usually do well at it. This time I didn't draw enough cards, and the cards I did draw just doubled up on cards in my hand. Boo! I made some bad bids, mostly because I'm horrible with the 'jump bid' card - whenever I draw it I try to do something tricky and end up screwing myself. The final score was 41-37-36-?, I finished 3rd. Sadly, a Princes of Florence tournament started before our first game of Amun-Re was over, so I lost amun-Re AND I missed out on Princes of Florence!

Next was a game of Race for the Galaxy with some of my L.A. friends (who have played the game twice as much as I have). I'm not a big fan of multiplayer RftG. I played several games of it this weekend and my opinion has not improved.

We had some time, so I suggested Wizard's Tower. Shannon liked that game, so she played while I also taught Travis. I don't think Travis cared for it much.

Erig Burgess, Travis, Chris and I sat down for a game of Tinner's Trail. I had been playing poorly in general all day, and that didn't change here. however, in Tinner's Trail I made some disappointing mistakes based on misunderstanding or simply forgetting parts of rules. I'm usually better about that, and I was frustrated at how badly I digesting Tinner's Trail. I finished dead last, and would like to play again just for that reason - but as for the game itself I don't think I liked it very much. It's just not all that interesting.

Finally in the late night it was time to play some Werewolf! I went and found Winton in one of the side rooms leading a game. I played in the next one, and I was eaten in the first night. I had to wait hours for the game to end and start again, and was eaten in the first night again! I spent a lot of time waiting and not much time playing, and by the time it was over and Winton and I went to his place to go to bed it was almost 7 in the morning! After after 4 or 5 hours of sleep we headed back to the con.

Saturday 8/30/08:
The first game I got into was a Notre Dame tournament. It's been a while since I've played that game. Our game finished with scores of 68-68-65 (I had 65). I made a mistake midgame that cost me probably 2 points, possibly 3 - still not enough to win because the winner had better tiebreakers than I did.

While we had some time, Chris and Shannon suggested Fairly Tale. I never liked Fairy Tale much because i felt like it was a sort of wimpy version of a Magic: the Gathering booster draft, only after you draft in Magic, you play a game! When my friends wanted to play it I was reluctant, but better to play that than nothing. I had to relearn the rules, and I didn't want to hold things up so I decided to relearn them as I went. So I went ahead, learning rules as I went along, choosing cards mostly at random, or because they had similar symbols on them. After the game, which I didn't win, I suggested we play again now that I knew what I was doing – but noone wanted to! Bah.

Instead we played Pow Wow. I like Liar's Dice, so I thought Pow Wow might have been OK. It's a cross between Liar's Dice and Indian Poker. I managed to win without even losing a round :) it was neat deducing the probable value on your card based on what people bid. A few times I made it really obvious by my math what everyone's cards were, and Chris 9to my left) was able to make the 'correct' bid. he commented on my making it easy, and I noted that it was on purpose - I could let him take down each player to his left in turn, doing all my work for me! :) there was an old way to play Magic that involved attacking to the left and defending to the right - I recall using a similar strategy there... I used Varchild's War Riders to give my left hand neighbor an army of creatures, then watched as he mowed through each player around the circle. When it became time to fight 1-on-1 I would simply destroy all his creatures and stop giving him more :)

I somehow got suckered into playing another multiplayer game of Race for the Galaxy :/

Liz arrived, and while she was waiting for Aaron and Travis to finish 2-player games so they could all play Indonesia, I showed her BrainFreeze! We played a few rounds of that and a game of Wizard's Tower with another guy.

I've wanted to play Winds of Plunder at home for a while now, but I had forgotten how and was being lazy about re-learning the rules. So I took this opportunity to play the game again. Soon after my first turn I remembered that you should never start that game without picking up a cannon in the first turn! Or at the very least, don't do it when there's a cannon on the upcoming tile. i picked up a treasure map instead, and then I was followed around the board by another player, being plundered at almost every turn. Then one turn when me and my aggressor were on one edge of the board and the other players were on the other edge, I had 5 wind cubes, my aggressor had some cubes, and between the 2 players on the opposite edge they had 6 cubes. I had the Blackbeard tile, and I bid all 5 cubes. If my aggressor had bid even 1 cube then we'd have won the wind direction and we wouldn't have had to use all of our actions for a gust of wind just to get anywhere. So even inadvertently that guy had my number! I finished dead last :(

I taught BrainFreeze! to the guy that was all over me in Winds of Plunder and his wife, who had gone to the U of A for grad school. She was pretty good. He wasn't as quick...

They always have Charades events at these cons, and it's fun to play once in a while. I found Winton in a back room where they'd just started a game of Charades. I jumped in on a team, which happened to be the team that won! I didn't realize it at the time, but that earned me 2 dealer dollars!

Travis, Chris, Shannon, Winton, and Daniel were in the main ballroom playing Gimme 5, and I joined them for a while until it was time for more Werewolf. Chia and Greg were playing Tichu in the vicinity, and would occasionally pop in for a round or to comment on the choices.

Finally, another night spent playing WW. This night was much better. I had some good games, including one where I was a Wolf, and I did the best job I'd ever done – until I was put on the stand, gave a really good defense, and then didn't stop while I was ahead. When I'm really tired especially, I tend to babble. I couldn't stop myself, and I ended up giving myself away. I died, but the wolves ended up winning thanks to the brilliance of Amber, who ended up leading a charge against the final Werewolf so she wouldn't give them both away, and then going against 7 villagers on her own and coming out ahead!

At 7 or 8 in the morning it was time to either go to sleep or go to breakfast. I decided to go to breakfast with 5 other WW players.

After breakfast I wanted to wake up a little, so I played BrainFreeze! Again with 2 of the Werewolf players from breakfast.

Sunday 8/31/08:
I jumped in a Power Grid tournament and ended up at the same table as Chris. I don't play PG very much since I don't like it a whole lot. But when I do play I generally do well. This time I didn't play terribly well. I didn't like the starting location I chose, but I didn't make any huge mistakes. In the end, Chris had enough money to buy up to 17 houses and power them all. I could power 17 as well, but couldn't afford to buy them all. Another guy could afford to build the houses, but his power plant capacity wasn't big enough to win.

Because of Power grid I was too late to get into the Brass tournament, but I went to check it out anyway. 4 new players had learned the rules and had just begun the game. Had I been there in time it would have been a pretty easy game for me, as it takes a game or two to figure out how to play well. When one of the players had to go and asked me to take over his game, it seemed like a handicap since his game so far had not accomplished anything. He had almost no money left, hadn't built any income, and had built some tiles and canals that were completely useless. In the end I won by about 4 points, but it was really hard and fun to dig myself out of that hole! The win earned me 10 dealer dollars as well :)


[will finish later - left notes at home]