Must… get… sleep…
Each night I start these reports later and end up with less text. The tradition continues this late Saturday night as we just returned from an 9am – 11pm gaming marathon. Matthew joined us today and it was our best day yet. The crowds really pick up on Saturday making the show floor quite congested; combine that with a Colts / Bears pre-season football game in the adjacent RCA Dome and this was one busy downtown today.
The morning started at 9am with a meetup of a small group of diehards from BoardGameGeek. I coordinated this in one of the discussion forums and it was great to see such a strong turnout. We checked out a couple of games from GameBase7 and went to the reserved tables in Hall 500 to start. Three games hit the table right away – For Sale, St. Petersburg, and HAVOC: the Hundred Years War (wow, it feels cool to do a BGG link for that game!).
I brought out an early (but portable) playtest version of our soon-to-be-published game HAVOC: the Hundred Years War (website) and taught it to ginn5j, rschmucker, and qzhdad. Amazing coincidental side note: Randy Schmucker’s father taught my chemistry class in high school!
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ginn5j, rschmucker, and qzhdad join me in a game of Havoc. |
I think impressions were favorable and at least one of the group indicated he will pick it up at BGG.Con.
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Another group of BGG’ers play St. Petersburg. |
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Zambo and ynenn (Jason Little) get ready to try a stack of Jason’s prototypes. |
Thanks to everyone that showed up to make this a nice diversion and chance to put faces to names. Let’s do it again next year!
We wrapped up around 10:30am, hit the show floor for a while, grabbed some lunch, then went to our second annual Anime BESM RPG session. This is very light-weight RPG action and perfect for kids – think of it as interactive story telling with low emphasis on killing monsters (these are rated TV-7Y – no killing!) and high emphasis on role playing, humor, and fun.
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Matthew played a brutish bully-bashing 3rd grade girl; Jacob played the kid-with-no-name and was only allowed to speak twice during the adventure. But boy, did we listen when he spoke. |
Next we split up on the show floor, with the boys playing some more Pokemon while I sought out some collectible game that looked at least a little innovative. I don’t understand how each year new CCG games get released that bring nothing new to the industry – same old mechanics, same old themes (fantasy, anime, superheroes). Tucked away in the back row of the show floor was a very impressive booth by Temple Games where they were showcasing their new collectible tile game titled ChiZo Rising.
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Some of the tiles in ChiZo Rising. |
I sat down for a demo, expecting to be disappointed but ended up being surprisingly interested in the game. There are some interesting mechanics here based on the geometry of tile laying – interesting point #1. They also implemented a real “action stack” of tiles – interesting point #2. I enjoyed it enough to pick up two starters and two boosters for $30 total and will report more soon as I give it a try with the boys. The artwork is pretty impressive as well as you can see from the photo.
Jacob, Matthew, and I then challenged each other to a game of Ticket to Ride: Europe in the Big Box Play & Win section. This was a first play for the boys and we all enjoyed it immensely – I’m convinced this is even better than the original. I prefer the tightness of this board and the ability to use train stations to squeeze in an extra ticket or two.
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Jacob and Matthew near the end of our game. |
The “play & win” and “learn & play” areas were well done – they had DVD instructional videos for several of the games (as you can see below). A great way to scale the teaching process.