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!

Strategicon recap

Just a quick recap, for those interested in what I did at Strategicon. In no particular order:

Special Guest Vlaada Chavtil
I always like meeting the big names in game design, and if you don't mind a name drop or two, I have met such big names as Reiner Knizia, Richard Breese, Bruno Faidutti, Martin Wallace, James Ernest, and Antoine Bauza at various conventions. I also know other, maybe lesser known designers such as Tory Niemann Sebastian Bleasedale and others from the BGDF forums, and of course all the designers I've worked with through TMG (David Short, Scott Almes, Jay Cormier and Sen Foong-Lim, etc). I've met some RPG designers as well (Mark Truman for example), but as I'm not much of an RPG player, I don't worry about that too much. I do enjoy expanding my name dropping ability by meeting th famous board game designers though, and I hope to one day be considered a name that an upcoming designer might drop when posting along these lines in their own blog!

The special guest at Strategicon was Vlaada Chvatil, designer of a wide variety of games (in a wild variety of styles) from the Check Republic. I didn't spend as much time with Vlaada as I'd have liked, but I did check out his new prototype - an abstract game (I'm not really into abstract games) where you place pieces into play trying to satisfy specific patterns which allow you to play cards. These cards have bigger/better effects, and you use them to try to satisfy the conditions on the available scoring cards. It looked like an interesting game, but as I mentioned, I don't generally care for abstract games, and this was pretty abstract. Also, I'm not a big fan of 2 player only games, and this one looked like it was best with 2, if not really a 2 player only game.

Scribes Arena
Jason Chan came all the way from Hong Kong to his first ever US Game Convention to promote his game, Scribes Arena, which will be on Kickstarter, maybe as soon as later this year! Scribes Arena is billed as a cross between magic: the Gathering and Hangman. I'm not sure that's accurate, it's really more like a Hangman card game - the similarity to M:tG is that it uses cards (called "spells"), resources ("energy") to pay for the cards, and some of the cards ("Counterspells") cancel the effects of other cards.

Scribes Arena is a really cool game. I am pretty bad at Hangman (though usually decent at word games in general), and this one definitely has a unique twist. On your turn you draw a card and get 1 Energy, and then you play cards (which give you chances to guess letters), and finally you get 1 free guess (letter or word) for your turn. If you guess all the letters of a word, you move on to the next one, and if you uncovre all 3 of your opponents words before they do the same to you, then you win.

I look at it like you're dealing damage to the other player. At most, you'll need to deal 26 damage to "kill" each word (guess all 26 letters of the alphabet), but you can do much better by 'aiming' your shots - deducing which letters are likely in the word and guessing those. Guessing the correct letter feels like getting a sort of critical hit, because while it's only "1 damage," you only need so many correct letters before you can guess the word and get a finishing blow.

Jason has obviously put a lot of work into this game, and when it does hit Kickstarter I highly recommend you take a look.

Scheduled games:
I only played 2 scheduled games this time, which is 2 more than I've played in the last several years combined... Brass, and Village.

I haven't played Brass in a while, and I really enjoy it. I thought I was doing poorly, as every time I had a great plan, I'd end up distracting myself with something else and someone would beat me to it. So I did nothing spectacular, but a lot of solidly good stuff. I managed to win (barely!), and because it was billed as a large tournament I received 10 Dealer Dollars for my efforts!

I've played a fair bit of Village, though none before TMG imported the game, so I am at no real advantage over anyone else who's played a fair bit of Village. Except I'm apparently pretty good at the game, and as it turns out, that's something of an advantage. :) The person running Village didn't really pull her weight, leaving me to teach the new players while she played in the neighboring Thurn and Taxis event. I have done my share of teaching games, and while I hadn't signed up for this event in order to teach it, at least I am well practiced at it. We had 7 players, so 2 tables, and the top 2 from each moved on to the final round. After teaching the game and playing twice, it was a fairly large time investment, but at least I came out on top and was rewarded with another 5 dealer dollars (this one was billed as a Small tournament).

Dealer Dollars and Maximum Throwdown
It has been a while since I collected enough Dealer Dollars to matter, and unfortunately there was nothing in the dealer room I was really interested in. I ended up getting a copy of Maximum Throwdown, a dexterity game where you throw cards into play. I like to throw things, so I figured it was worth a shot. We tried it at Brian's house the following game night, and it was wildly mediocre for us. i was awful at the throwing - in the beginning I missed altogether, and later my cards slid underneath those already in play rather than landing on top of them. nobody was too terribly thrilled with the game, but I think the group isn't one to really get excited about dexterity games to begin with.

Scoville, Battlecruiser, and other TMG playtesting
I played 1 game of Scoville at Strategicon, and managed to win by a mile... but everyone seemed to enjoy the game a lot. I used a new feature which I'd just gotten from the designer, and I liked it a lot - I think it will probably make the final cut of the game. In fact, with that new feature, one of the rules was able to be streamlined away, and I always like when we can do that!

I played a couple sessions of Battlecruiser, one of which was great for comments afterwards - we tried lots of different combinations of cards, and discussed the wording, intent, and ramifications of most of them. I got some great feedback for the designer on that one, and much of it has been addressed in the latest version of the game.

I also playtested a future TMG dice game, which isn't coming along as well as I'd like, but based on the tests and comments, Michael and I were able to theorize a better structure that should work out better (sacrifice one of YOUR dice to re-roll anything you want, not one of your scoring opportunities!) Also, we're thinking that an up-front draft of all the cards (instead of 1 card per round) would be better as well. Sorry to be cryptic about this one, I'm not sure how much info I'm really allowed to put out there for this one just yet...

Hanabi and party games
I didn't play much Hanabi, but I did play some. As for Party games, I finally tried Reverse Charades. It was fun, but I really think the ideal team size is 3-4 people. We had 5 people per team, and I think it was too many.

The 8 hour drive wasn't too bad, with the company of my friends Jeff, Elisa, and Brian. I wouldn't mind doing it again, though I also like the expediency of air travel, especially when the convention is so conveniently close to the airport.

Now Boarding
I met up with Tim Fowers briefly on Sunday, and we played our design from the Design Retreat: Now Boarding. It's a cooperative optimization puzzle with time pressure, and this time we used a different version of time pressure - we timed each Departures phase (1 minute), and the rest of the game was un-timed. It seemed to work really well, and it automatically synchronized people and kept them from getting out of phase with each other.

It was nice to see many old friends, and make some new ones... some of whom may be coming to Rincon next month :)

T - minus 3 hours... headed to Strategicon!

I don't know how or why this happens, but as usual I'm awake mere hours before I have to get up and leave for a convention. This time I'm driving (or riding) to L.A. for Strategicon - mostly because I never got around to buying plane tickets, and now they're ridiculously expensive.

But after the 22 hour drive to Indiana, this 8 hour trip to L.A. should be no big deal :)

I have been so overwhelmingly busy leading up to this convention that I have done no preparation for it whatsoever. No plane tickets, no pre-registration, no scheduling of games... I was pretty close to deciding to just not go. But I'll be there, and I spent all day today preparing some prototypes to take with me.

I'll be bringing 8 prototypes - 9 if you include new Heroes for Dungeon Roll:

Captains of Industry, and City Hall, by Michael Keller
Two great economic games, both coming soon from TMG. Watch for a Kickstarter for these two in about a week!

Scoville, by Ed Marriott
A 2014 release from TMG about breeding peppers :) Cross primary colored peppers to get secondary colored peppers, and cross those to get even better peppers. Fulfill orders and complete recipes to score. So far just about everyone I've played this with has loved it. Watch for a Kickstarter project for Scoville this November (to coincide with BGG.con).

Battlecruiser, by Philip DuBerry
A quick card game, reminiscent of Libertalia, but much simpler and quicker (and therefore I like it better).

Rockin' Roll (in house TMG production)
A follow up to the very successful Dungeon Roll. If things go well we should have a Kickstarter project for this around the end of the year, and hope to deliver in time to debut the game at Gen Con.

Exhibit: Artifacts of the Ages, by Seth Jaffee
The Bluff Auction game. This one is not a TMG game, but it has gotten some foreign publisher interest. However, the publisher has become very busy, so it hasn't moved forward in a while.

Now Boarding, by Timothy Fowers and Seth Jaffee
A cooperative optimization puzzle, which may or may not have some time pressure. I'm having trouble identifying whether players will tolerate a real time game clock.

Eminent Domain: Exotica (and Escalation), by Seth Jaffee
Exotica is just about done, and I'll have my Escalation prototype with me as well. I'll also have the color proofs for Escalation (and Belfort: the Expansion Expansion) to wave around.

Dungeon Roll: Legends Booster and Holiday Heroes
We're working on the next Hero booster pack for Dungeon Roll - Legends. These heroes are more powerful than the original heroes, so they don't level up. These are first drafts, so they're not done yet, but they will likely have flavor and story text on the back, as well as some personal achievements a player can try to accomplish with them.

We've also got a holiday promo planned, with some holiday themed heroes such as Klaus, Saint of the North (Santa Clause!). I have these heroes (also first draft) in case anybody wants to give them a try.

So if you're at Strategicon this weekend, come by and say "hi!" I'll be in the boardgaming ballroom pretty much the whole time. Hopefully I can score a table and just set up all these games to teach to whoever wants to try them.

I'm also hoping to play some games that I didn't have a hand in. I played 1/2 a game of Spyrium at Gen Con (the only published title I even looked at all weekend) and I wouldn't mind playing a full game of that. I haven't played much Hanabi in a while. I picked up The Scoundrels of Skullport expansion to Lords of Waterdeep, but haven't tried it yet. I'm sure there's some other stuff I've been missing out on recently as well.

Ok, maybe there's time for a REM cycle or two before I have to leave. See you in L.A.!

Recent Developments

Gen Con was a lot of fun. We didn't have to spend a lot of time in the booth, so we got a lot more opportunity to meet people, play games, and review submissions. We played 3 or 4 prototypes, accepting 2 of them to take home with us.

I met a number of people at Gen Con, some of whom I'd met before, some of whom I see on Twitter, and some brand new faces.

While at the con I managed to play Hanabi for 12 hours straight. An epic session culminating in a very satisfying perfect score! It's fascinating to watch people play Hanabi together over time, and watch how they shift their thinking and behavior to be on the same page. We found that even with the same 4 players, our score would drop when we mixed up turn order.

Speaking of Hanabi, I spent last weekend at Strategicon in Los Angeles where the Guest of Honor was Antoine Bauza - designer of a number of popular games including Ghost Stories, the award winning 7 Wonders, and Hanabi. I played prototypes of Antoine's upcoming Tokaido, Sinbad, and the 7 Wonders expansion: Armada. I liked all three of those. I chatted with Antoine quite a bit over the weekend as well, even introduced him to Mountain Dew (he'd never heard of that particular soda) - though I don't know how he liked it. Antoine was nice enough to play one of my own prototypes as well: Exhibit. He had some interesting comments for me, which I will be taking into account.

At Strategicon I also ran several events or tournaments for Village, Belfort, and Eminent Domain. My friend Brian happened to win the sponsored Village tournament on Monday, so he got a copy of the game :) Other games I played at Strategicon include Seasons, which was the sleeper hit of Gen Con (and seemed very popular in L.A.as well), Off Your Rocker, and Dixit Jinx. Seasons and Dixit Jinx, along with Tokaido, were taught to me by Stefan Brunelle of Asmodee, who turned out to be a fun guy as well.

P.S. Stefan: I think you got a rule wrong in Seasons! That emergency action where you discard 2 resources to get 2 other ones - the rulebook says they don't have to match. Not a big deal, but thought you might like to know!

I had brought with me an advance copy of Noblemen, a co-production between Pegasus Spiel and TMG. I didn't really have time to play it, so I set the game up on a table and made a "Try Me" sign... I left it set up all weekend, and it got played at least 5 times, with at least 15 different people! I didn't talk to all of them, but I know for a fact that Brian Poe and Eric Elder liked the game :) I'm really excited for Noblemen to come out because I remember its development 4 years ago, before it won Hippodice. I even wrote some blog posts about it back then.

I've also been playing a homemade copy of Il Vecchio, by Hall games, which I believe TMG will be doing in English as well. It's by Rudiger Dorn, and I'm excited to have a big name designer such as Dorn in the TMG line. Yesterday we played Rialto, by Stefan Feld, which I believe TMG is going in on with Pegasus as well. That's another name I'm proud to see in the TMG lineup. At Gen Con I picked up Feld's Trajan, which I played at BGG.con last year, but sadly I have not had a chance to play it yet.

Finally, the big news is that I'm making arrangements to go to Essen this year! I've been interested in Essen for some time now, but it's so expensive (and so long) that I haven't really seriously looked into going. Well, this year I am taking the plunge! My plan is to scope it out so that hopefully next year TMG can have a booth there and I'll have an idea of what's going on. I'll post more details as I have them, but I have secured a place to stay, and now I just need to buy a plane ticket!

The Pros of Cons

Last week I attended Strategicon's Labor Day offering, a convention called Gateway. It was so much fun I already bought plane tickets to L.A. and registered for February's installment of OrcCon!

Speaking of conventions, I am in charge of board gaming at RinCon 2010, right here in Tucson, AZ! I've got a lot of great events lined up for the board game section, and there will also be plenty of RPGs, LARPs, Minis, CCGs, and even video gaming going on. I'll be spending my time in the Board Game area though, making sure everything runs smoothly, and trying to get some gaming in myself.

If you would like to run any games at RinCon, PLEASE EMAIL ME (or leave a comment here)! I have plenty of events that need running and time slots to fill! I've got 4 types of events on the schedule:

Scheduled Games: One-off games being run by someone who can teach the game. Sign up, show up, learn the game and give it a try!

Demos: A special case of Scheduled Games is a Demo of a new or upcoming game such as Mayfair's new Lords of Vegas to be demo'ed by Special Guest James Ernest, and Tasty Minstrel's upcoming Belfort, being demoed by none other than myself, Seth Jaffee.

Tournaments: A more competitive format, where the winners of the first round advance, and the winner of the tournament gets a prize! Prizes will be RinCoins, good for discounts in the prize booth and at the vendor booths, as well as ribbons for notoriety.

Game Design Events: Being as interested in game design as I am, it only makes sense that I try to promote Game Design events at a con where I'm in charge of board games! I've got 3 different Design Events on the schedule, and I have high hopes for each one.

* Gamesmiths Prototype Testing: Designers play each others' games and offer feedback.
* Practice Your Pitch: Pitch your game to a panel and receive feedback on how to improve the pitch itself (not the game). This is important for any designer who wants to pitch their game to a publisher.
* Game Design Seminar/Workshop: On Saturday night a panel of professional game designers will begin by discussing some of their creative methods, how they go about designing a game or developing it once they have an initial design. After a Question and Answer period, interested participants will receive a Game Design Kit with some general Euro-game bits in it (meeples, dice, cubes, roads, discs, sharpies, cardboard, scissors, etc). They can think about that and play with the bits over the weekend, then on Sunday's Workshop they can present what they've come up with so far to the panel and each other and get feedback on that.

I think all three of these events would be interesting and fun for an aspiring designer, and I hope that members of nearby thriving design communities make the trek to Tucson October 8-10 for RinCon, I think they could get a lot out of these events! So if you're nearby (a cheap plane flight away), you should really consider coming to RinCon - the convention is cheap, Tucson is cheap, and I think you'll find a lot of benefit from attending this particular convention.

Overdue update

It's been almost 2 weeks since I posted anything! Not terribly much has been going on. Here's a brief summary of what's going on with my various endeavors:

Tasty Minstrel Games
The question on everybody's mind is probably "how's the publication coming?" Or if I'm lucky it's more like "When will Terra Prime and Homesteaders be in stores?"

Well, I'm currently working on rulebooks while Michael is soliciting quotes from manufacturers. Research is leading toward some good news for both price and schedule, so that's good. If everything goes as planned, the games should be out in plenty of time for BGG.con (see below)

Another thing that's new is that we received some submissions:
* a space themed worker placement/area control game,
* a colonization game,
* and a railroad game

I've had a chance to play each of those, one of which we've decided we're not going to pursue now, though we may be interested next year, one we're fairly interested in, but it needs some work, and one we can't really consider yet because another publisher has first dibs - if they decide they're not interested then we will decide if we are :)

I got an email about a submission as well, and we will be receiving yet another from someone we met at the GAMA trade show. I'm looking forward to the latter, because I liked it a lot when I played it before.

Game design
Nothing doing on the game design front at the moment. Concentrating on TP and HS publication, and notes on the prototypes I've been playing.

On a plane recently I read through some of my design notebook, and put a little thought into an old Pirate game idea. Actually, it's a game about trade where you can pursue victory by being a merchant (facilitating trade with pickup/deliver trips around the board), a pirate (attacking merchant ships and ports), or privateering (attacking pirates, and interdicting trade). It occurred to me that some of the mechanisms from Terra Prime could be used here - some of the bookkeeping and mechanical actions I mean. It would be an entirely different game with different decisions and different motivations, but some of the mechanisms could be similar to Terra Prime.

Gaming
Lately I've played a lot of Glory to Rome. John came over and we played 8 or 9 2p games - I won all but one of them. I even beat Tyler 2 out of three yesterday.

I've started going to a new friend's game night once a week, and I've tried some new games there: Municipium, Giants, Castle for all Seasons, and Jet Set, among other games like Space Alert, Goa, Princes of Florence, and Yspahan.

I'm playing in an online In the Shadow of the Emperor tournament, and I'm doing terribly. I also lost an online game of In the year of the Dragon - by 2 freaking points!

Conventions
Kublacon is coming up in about 2 weeks, and I fully expect to go to that. I seem to have slacked on buying a plane ticket, so I might have to pay too much to get there. Also, Southwest.com hasn't been working the last couple times I tried it, which is getting pretty annoying. I'm sure I'll also go to Strategicon's Gateway event in September, and of course BGG.con in November.

In fact, Tasty Minstrel Games has plans for BGG.con! We will have a booth, and we will be having a sort of launch party for our 2 games. We call it the Tasty Minstrel's Winner Cleans Up event - participants will gather for a presentation style rules explanation, then random groups of 4 people will be given a copy of the game to play in the open gaming area. The winner gets to keep the copy of the game! We plan to run one of these events for each game. I'll be posting on BGG about it, and I'll probably put up a sign-up sheet so we can get an idea of how many people will want to participate.

OrcCon imminent, and Winds of Fate thoughts

This weekend is the first Strategicon event of 2009, OrcCon, in Los Angeles. I enjoy the Strategicon events because they are close, and therefore cheap, I have friends in L.A., and these conventions have a lot of tournaments - it's a good opportunity to do some competitive gaming and if I perform well I even get to walk home with some prizes :)

For the last couple of years I've gone by myself, but this time my friend Mikey is coming with me. This should be fun - I've been trying to get my friends to come to these conventions with me ever since I started going several years ago, but Mikey's got a wife and 2 kids now, so I guess it's not as easy for him to get away. Usually the cons conflict with swordfighting events for SCA or ECS, which Mikey used to do, and which Tyler and Jake always go to.

In addition, some new friends I've recently begun hanging out with - Elisa and Jeff - will be going as well. It should be fun to go to a convention with friends for once.

In other news, I've been putting together another prototype of Odysseus: Winds of Fate - my original is still in New York. So far I haven't made any adjustments based on the feedback I got from Jeff Warrender and Gil Hova and they're playtest last month at Spielbany, but I've been giving it some thought and I have some ideas... I'd like to try it again as-is with those ideas in mind and then see about implementing some of them. My next post on the subject should shed some light on details of these changes. I'd also like to talk to Nando about them and see what he thinks.

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]