I flew in Wednesday night and was surprised at how many people were already at the convention. I debated over time in the BattleTech pods, but work fatigue demanded an early bedtime.
On early Thursday morning, I had a great time playing
Belfort. It's a nice little worker placement game that combines territory control as you build locations in the 5 sectors of the city. Unfortunately, the shipment of the new printing was delayed on the boat so I'll have to pick up a copy later this month.
I played Team Leader in an excellent
Paranoia XP game of Through the Pipes, with a great group who role played the character quirks well but still fumbled over each other hysterically. I learned a few tricks from the GM, who appreciated that I dropped a few hints on engineering the Tube Crawler and my joke that it would be easier to remember the character stats if we were playing the same character. I think he's going to use the idea next year to have the players play 6 clones!
Thursday ended with
Sunrise City. It's basically a competitive version of Sim City where each player drafts 3 different roles to play in the 3 game turns. Each role gives a bonus to the zoning, bidding, construction or scoring phases of the game, and decides turn order. You start the turn by laying down 4 new foundation "zones" (residential, commercial, industrial, park, mixed or community bonus) where anyone can build, then each player bids 1 of their 8 chips to control an empty foundation zone. The player who makes the last bid controls the zone and scores extra when the 1st floor is built that turn. Then each player lays 4 floors that are the size of 2 zones. Building the floor requires placing on the same zone type (or a wild). If placed as the 1st floor, it scores bonus points for the player who controls the zone through the bidding. If placed as a 2nd floor or higher, it scores +1 point if an odd-numbered floor. The floor pieces created a nice 3d visual effect as the city was built. Points are converted into "stars" whenever you score 10 points, but you get a bonus star whenever your score ends exactly in 10. This made for an interesting mechanic where sometimes it was better to build and score less points, but get a second star. I liked, but I'll wait to see if I can play with my family before buying.
Friday morning was my game of
Paranoia. I ran a streamlined version of the "Communist Cafeteria Conspiracy" where the players received 6 different missions about how to fix the unhappiness and mind control caused by the Commies in the Cupcake Cafeteria. The players were assigned to be the Venture Villains (Monarch, Dr. Girlfriend, 21, Phantom Limb, Dr. Killinger and Underbeit), but nobody even tried to play the roles. I learned that convention players are a mixed bag, as 3 players eventually ran with the whole premise of running the cafeteria into the ground while the other 3 just weren't engaged. Perhaps it was giving out too many forms and giving them a visual with miniatures, but they brilliantly handled the sequence of filming their propaganda film and "handling" a vicious alligator in a box identified as "BE SCARD." I had to skip over exciting fun spots of mayhem because the players were too cagey to bite on any of the plot hooks.
After cleaning up and watching 10 minutes of a crazy RPG where the players were GMed by an improv team in a custom RPG to play kids with crazy imaginations and mega-props, I met hepcat for
A Few Acres of Snow at the Mayfair area. Mayfair does a poor job at Origins, basically running a game rental room where usually nobody is available to teach the game. A gamer stuck around to teach hepcat and me, and I'm very grateful. hepcat is absolutely right that the deck building works just right with the area control, and I loved how the options played out. hepcat played defensively collecting gold, while I built up my cities and started the only sieges.
I skipped my session of
VivaJava to have dinner with hepcat before
Yggrasil. It's a beautiful game that looks indecipherable at first but turns out to be really simple. You select elves to get a +1 bonus after combat or send the Valkyries to randomly choose 3 tiles from one of several bags to get up to 3 warrior souls that give a +1 bonus when used before combat. You might have to thin out the tortured souls in a bag by drawing 5 and discarding any tortured souls. Loki will bring out the Frost Giants that penalize you until you defeat them, and the 6 evil gods will advance and get stronger unless you fight them back. You lose the game if too many advance past certain points, or any 1 of them gets to Odin's throne. You win the game if you can beat them back until you run through the movement deck for each of the evil gods. We played on Saturday night on my iPad at the bar, and the digital version makes it really easy to play.
I was very happy that I skipped out on my scheduled game of Revolution! to hang out with hepcat to play
Samurai Battles. The demo made war gaming approachable to a military newbie like me, and we almost had hepcat on the ropes as our heavy infantry and cavalry rode in to decimate the enemy center as our right flank was starting to fail. A strong (and lucky) counter-attack resulted in the early death of our second leader to win the day, and the demo crew enjoyed watching the results as much as we did playing. It was incredibly enjoyable watching hepcat's spit take as he realized that the enthusiastic gentlemen explaining the game and the depth behind it was Richard Borg. Just a few minutes earlier hepcat was waxing about how much he loved Memoir '44 and other games in the C&C series, so the look on his face was priceless. The fanboi picture just doesn't do the moment justice.
On Saturday, I spent more time in the Mayfair area and was fortunate enough to have a teacher (who looked like Santa Claus) for
Pillars of the Earth. It was a straight forward euro with some bidding, resource drafting and builder placement. I liked, but the territory control in Belfort was more to my taste than the arbitrary nature of the "bid for advanced craftsman" mechanic. Another surprise hit was
Super Dungeon Explore, a cutesy anime nod to 16 bit gaming similar to Descent but just too silly to be taken seriously. The miniatures were painted gorgeously by the GM's wife, and I might buy it in a few years to introduce my kid to adventure board games. I was suprised when hepcat wanted to blow off Nightfall for dinner, and on the way back I had the chance to play a few turns of
Kingdom Builder in a demo.
Then I insisted on getting over to the Mayfair area to play
Discworld: Ankh-Morpork. It's an enjoyable light asymmetrical territory control game, but I ended up teaching the game mechanics to a group of hard core Pratchett fans. My goal as Commander Vimes was to get everyone through the deck, while the other players were Ventinari (win with 1 player in districts) and the territory control Lords (win with control of a majority of districts). We were so busy chatting about the fantasy humor/satire genre and the convention that one player asked how the control mechanics worked again, and then immediately announced that he had just won the game. Not my best gaming moment.
I snuck in a game of Ascension with the gal running the competition (she beat me by only 8 points), and watched a few rounds of
Nefarious (looked very interesting). Later that night, hepcat and I learned
Yomi and
Puzzle Strike. I was surprised at how much game there was in each. Yomi is a fighting game where you have to ignore half of the card image to focus on the rock-paper-scissors aspect of choosing the right bluff to land a hit, then turn it into a combo to deal massive damage. Puzzle Strike is about racing the clock to push the gems that are falling into your player board into the player boards of the next player over. I'm pretty sure it's one of those games where you need to overwhelm the other players, because hecpat and I ended up in a stalemate where I had to do mega-damage to fill hepcat's board and he didn't have anything left he could hurt me with. I'm pretty sure we missed something or played wrong. We ended up with beers over a digital game of Yggdrasil that we would have won if we hadn't run into a bug.
On Sunday, I picked up
Thurn and Taxis as a classic to play with the family and
Kinder Bunnies to play with my 5 year old. I watched demos for
Carnival (looked fun),
zpocalpyse (looked grindy), looked at Empires of the Void (which seemed a bit light),
Conquest Tactics (impossible to read type) and talked with a few people about RPG mats/computerized D&D helpers. I talked for a while with the Chicago guy working on
Titans of Industry which has a clean look and promises worker placement with an early 1920s economic theme in the style of Le Havre -- he promised to get demos/release events at both friendly local game stores. I had hoped to pick up a demo of
Mice and Mystics but couldn't get in, and the Cambridge Games Factory booth wanted to teach me their new game
Montana instead of
Glory to Rome. I also found out that the BattleHive mini boxes I liked from Crystal Caste were again in stock, and picked up a bunch of crystals for use as the spice and circle markers for armies in my
Dune game. I ended the day watching a few rounds of a
Leviathans battle, then looked at the art show where the highlight was the booth with the evil My Little Ponies. Not too bad for walking around Sunday before a 5 PM flight back.
The energy was down, and the gaming crowd reflected the conflict with school. There just weren't many high school or college age kids until Saturday, but there were tons of old geezers like me with their families. The retailers scaled back their presence generally, and the booth were much larger with more space in the aisles. It wasn't a bad thing if you like elbow space, but it really did lower the energy. Mayfair and Rio Grande were as busy as usual, and the board game room was just great. Gamesalute and Cryptozoic had good areas, but the mass of old games from Crazy Igor was missing. The lower retail presence did impact my purchases, and I walked out with only a few pre-painted minis, Thurn & Taxis, Kinder Bunnies and 4 stuffed animals for the kids (a Rainbow Unicorn Pegasus, Godzilla, Darth Vader and Chewbacca). I would have bought Belfort, but I'll order it before attending GenCon.
I had a good time with plenty of events. I wish I had picked up a more engaged group of Paranoia players, but one did give me his e-mail address to play again back in Chicago. I'm expecting GAMA will learn some lessons and do better next year. Getting Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day to attend was a pretty big score for them, but they failed to capitalize on the opportunity with advance publicity.