Convention Summary

BGG.CON 2007 was quite a bit different than 2005, the last time I attended.  In 2005 and 2006 the convention was held in downtown Dallas at the Westin with game rooms that were a bit more intimate.  The hotel was unnecessarily nice for a gamer crowd and expensive - I recall that the rooms were about $200-$230 per night, and I didn't have a roommate (though Sunriver Games picked up the tab).  The location was outstanding though, with many dining opportunities nearby via public transportation and walking.  There was a great inexpensive breakfast cafe adjacent to the hotel and we had some great side trips to an Irish pub and BBQ joint.  Still, the room rate was very expensive and likely would have constrained growth beyond the 200 or so people that came initially (note: my numbers may be way off, but I think they are close to accurate!).  The small crowd did give a very intimate feeling to the convention and I felt like I got to associate with a significant percentage of the attendees - this was a GOOD thing as the gamer crowd at BGG.CON is by and large a very well adjusted, easy to get along with crowd.  And none of them smell.

The move to the airport Westin brought a number of tradeoffs - someone should design a game with a theme of running a game convention!  The room rate was very affordable - my share after splitting the room with Greg will be about $240 for four nights.  You'd be lucky to stay at a Best Western or Marriott Courtyard for that rate, and this hotel was very nice (I travel a small bit and have stayed at some very nice hotels across the world, and this is in the 3-4 star category on a 5 star scale).  The gaming space was first rate and handled the crowd size just fine.  At peak times (Saturday afternoon) it was a bit challenging finding good space, but I don't think anybody had to resort to sitting on the ground to play which would be the first sign that space was running low.  Jim and I both agreed that the lack of dining options was a major issue that needs to be resolved.  There were two restaurant options in walking distance (we know this because we ran 4 miles one morning around the area, and Jim ran again Saturday for 5 miles): the hotel and Denny's.  The Denny's was as expected but too smoky, and while the hotel food was good it was very expensive and provided a limited menu.  We were fortunate to have local friends that drove us to Cajun food one night and BBQ another afternoon, but there's no way that everyone had the same treatment.  In the balance I think this hotel was still a better call and will plan on returning next year - it was the best game convention experience I've ever had.  Here are a few suggestions for Aldie and crew to address the food issue next year:

• Continue to search for other hotels in the DFW area that provide free airport transportation, sufficient ballroom space, reasonable room rates, and a small diversity of dining options in walking distance.  I think if there was a Red Robin or TGI Fridays or some similar option nearby the problem would be solved.
• Keep it at the Westin, but hire a shuttle service to a strip mall or shopping center nearby during dinner hours to allow people a chance to get away without hiring a cab.  Increase the convention fee to cover the cost, or charge a $5 toll per person to use the service.
• Don't cater the food from the hotel.  I've dealt with this quite a bit over the years running small conferences at Corillian and the costs are high and the quality typically low.  Get people away from the hotel and they will be refreshed and get some local flavor.

Aldie and crew (Vicky in particular) should know that my criticisms are on the fringes and I give the convention an A or A- rating as a whole.  For reference, I would give GenCon a B (A+ for show floor, C or open gaming), Origins a B (C+ for show floor, B for open gaming), and Essen a B+ (A+ for show floor, D for open gaming, and A- for local flair and dining).  Looking at 2008, BGG.CON may be the only convention I attend as I will unfortunately miss GameStorm (shame on them for scheduling over spring break!).

Here's a quick wrap-up on the games I played at BGG.CON.  I played 19 games and won 10 of them, confirming what I've told Julie that I'm really good at figuring out new games on the fly but gravitate towards ineptitude as other players figure out what is going on.

Games to Purchase (or Games I'm Thrilled I Already Purchased!)

Brass - this was my one Essen order (thanks for picking this up Carey) and I'm thrilled I got it.  I'm a sucker for Warfrog / Wallace releases and this one didn't disappoint and I put it in my top 3 Wallace games with Conquest of the Empire and Volldampf. Please don't be put off by the criticisms that the rules are poor - I put the rules for this game in the upper 50 percentile and after one play through this deep game you'll easily have it all figured out.

Thebes - theme marries mechanics in this great lighter Euro that represents where game designers should move towards.  I'm so tired of poorly themed games that are really just abstract games in disguise - designers, spend time on finding a theme that fits the mechanics!

Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage - my best gaming experience of the convention, and I think Jim had the same opinion.  There is a reason this game continues to sit at the top of many all-time best game lists, including BGG - this is an incredibly balanced, thematic, asymmetric blend of American war gaming and Euro mechanics that will get played a lot over the next few years, especially if I can convince Jacob to play it

Cuba - I'm on the fence here as I'm worried it won't get played much, but I love the theme and bits and found the game to be very engaging.

Agricola - The cards are the clincher for this game - Uwe could have left them out and had a decent farming / civ building game that would have been solid but not have made my list of must buy in the company of Through the Ages and Roads and Boats. The cards add a roleplaying element and solidify the theme in a way that will greatly increase replayability.  The true test will be playing with Jacob and Matthew and seeing if they both get it and enjoy it.

Race for the Galaxy - This is the most obvious buy for me on the list of games I don't already have, and I expect it to be played often over the next few years. I can pack this in my portable game bag (what do I take out?  Agora? San Juan?).

Games I Hope To Play Again But Will Not Purchase

In the Year of the Dragon - This almost made the buy list, but I think someone else in the group will buy it and I doubt it would get played at home.  This is a very good game with very little downtime and a nice theme and a stream of difficult decisions.

Hamburgum - Like Year of the Dragon, this may get purchased if nobody else in my group gets it.  This is a game I want to explore more and likely has a great deal of hidden depth given the lack of random elements in the game.

Colosseum - I want to try this again when I'm not fighting a cold and sleep deprivation.  Jeff Deboer and Jim loved the game and maybe I can too, but the eye chart of show options threw me off and would likely make it unplayable with Matthew and Julie.  This is a surprise coming from Days of Wonder - I think they could have simplified the show production a bit more by reducing options or features and still had a very solid game.

Mission: Red Planet - On the fence here as the short play time may push it to a purchase but the quality of components disappoints.

Fjords - A surprising hit, I would purchase this if I didn't already have an amazing set of two player light games that rarely get played (Roma, Jambo, and Medici vs Strozzi for example).

Hansa - This is just a 3 on the 1-4 scale - I'll always play this if someone asks for it but would rarely suggest it myself.

Louis XIV - Ditto with Hansa, but maybe I just need to play with some players that aren't sharks.

Games I Don't Expect To Play Again

Before the Wind - Phalanx seems to be uneven in their production and translation quality, and I wish they had spent more time writing quality English rules for this otherwise decent game.  The reason I don't expect to play it again is I doubt anyone in my group will buy it, but I would probably happily play it again if suggested.

Oregon - No reason to play this again.  You know a game is flawed when you win my a big margin yet still walk away dissatisfied. I really hope Carey comes up with a good game design for codename "Mosquito Fleet" so that we get another great Northwest USA themed game (my current favorite of course being KC's unpublished Northwest Trek).

Games I Wish I Had Tried

Starcraft: the Boardgame - we still play Starcraft multi-player at home 7-8 years after its initial release.  Easily in my top 5 computer games of all times, this is the perfect theme to be played at home with Jacob and Matthew.  Then again, so is Warcraft: the Boardgame and it rarely gets played now.  Given the price point and weight of this game, I want to try before I buy and I regret not fitting this in.  I'm hard pressed to identify what I shouldn't have played to fit this in.

Amyitis - the latest Ystari release, I have a habit of ignoring these for some reason then being pleasantly surprised with the quality (namely Ys and Yspahan, though I grabbed Calus right on release).  Maybe I have some inherent bias against the French?  Still, I heard this game is one of their weaker titles so maybe I didn't miss anything.

1960: the Making of the President - this was always in action at the convention and it would have been nice for Jim and I to give it a go to work out the mechanics.  I re-read the rules here on the airplane and I think I'm ready to teach and play this with Jacob (or Julie?) so this is a minor regret.

Galaxy Trucker - For some reason I lacked any desire to play this game, but my regret comes from amazement with how much it was played at BGG.CON.  Is this any good?  Leave a comment and let me know if I should play it.

Conclusions

I think the crop of games coming this year is the best in the last 2 years.  I'm thrilled that I chose BGG.CON over Essen as I wouldn't have had the chance to actually play most of these titles if I'd gone to Germany.  I think Brass, Agricola, Cuba, and Race for the Galaxy compare very well with and even surpass prior years (Caylus, Pillars of the Earth, Havoc and that our gaming hobby is doing just fine.  I'm thrilled that we are moving past the idea of "German Gaming" and "Euro Gaming" to a real blend of styles that take the best of all worlds in terms of mechanics, theme, and replayability.  If you play these games and didn't attend BGG.CON, find a way to go next year!  I may even need a roommate...

I played games for the first time in 3 months last week, a trend I will continue tonight as I make it to my first RipCityGamer session since July.

Carey came over in the afternoon to playtest one of his new designs, a supposed race game called Bridgetown Races. I say supposed because I wouldn't classify it as a racing game - it is more of a logistics or traveling salesman game.

This was a fun experience and reminded me of what I like the most about publishing games - playtesting and collaborating on new designs. I can't design myself out of a box, but I sure can be critical when I need to and Carey was great about taking feedback and innovating on the spot. We played once with his current design then made some drastic changes and tried it again with good results. He's still polishing and enhancing as there's work to be done - the game needs a bit more arc to it the board spacing needs some work.

Ken and Brandon stopped by on Sunday (no baseball due to rain, something we were all hoping for this time around) for some overdue gaming. We haven't picked up our D&D campaign since early this year and we are all anxious to get some free weekend time to dive in again. We had limited time on Sunday so we elected to play Shadows Over Camelot.

We had a good time but the finish was anti-climatic as we non-traitors fell asleep at the wheel and allowed 11 siege engines to accumulate at Camelot, making it easy for traitor Ken to finish us off. Just like that, game over 60 minutes into the game. Bah. At least it left us time to play another.

Iliad has been sitting on my un-played list since I acquired it in a math trade earlier this year so gave that a try. This is a fun (but a bit long) game reminiscent of Havoc and Condotierre. We had a great finish to the game, with a "Gorgon" battle coming up last and a great sudden death battle for the finish.

There was a clear king-maker opportunity at the end for me, especially if I took the chance to do some real analysis. I opted instead to just give Jacob the battle victory and see where the final results would fall out (Brandon was in the lead so letting him win would be a mistake) and Jacob did indeed turn out to be the victor. It was a fun finish to a fun game, though shortening it a bit might be nice. We played for about 90 minutes.

Tonight I'm off to Mike Dean's for our game group's regular Tuesday gaming session so I'll report on that soon.

Chairman Mike did a fabulous job writing up our recent gaming weekend out on the coast, but I still wanted to share some of the impressions of the games I played.  There were no stinkers in the entire batch and I had an amazingly fun time.

Command & Colors: Ancients

Mike and I managed to play 3 two-player games before anyone else arrived, and this was our first.  I continue to rate this game very highly in terms of playability and speed - I haven't had a game run over an hour since my first play.  I continue to have a hard time winning this game, and this one proved no exception.

Drive

One of my favorite 2-player card games.  Mike plays faster than anyone I've played so far (in terms of laying down sets), so I was forced to adjust a bit and managed two have a huge scoring second round.  This put me well out of reach in the third and I won easily.  I think this was one of only 3 wins for me all weekend, but who's counting?

Combat Commander: Europe

We played a fairly bizarre scenario (#7?) with a randomized setup for the Russian player followed by a clustered setup by the German.  This allowed me to position myself to cut off one of Mike's leaders and it was downhill most of the game for him from there.  It didn't hurt that I was able to bring in a crack paratroop squad to steal a couple of control points on the other side of the board.  This is still my favorite game of the year and I'll be anxiously awaiting the first expansion soon I expect.

Mermaid Rain

Doug and Mimi taught this to me and I quite liked it.  It had an Elfenland / King of the Elves feel to me with a few nice twists (such as card play similar to Havoc). 

Bohnanza

Julie and I are expecting to try this at the end of the game class we are teaching (it concludes just before spring break at the end of March) so I wanted to try this again.  What a blast - I did poorly, but this is a great game that I need to play more often.  I'm very concerned about teaching 3-5 graders the game and playing it within 50 minutes.  I wonder if there are any simplified rules out there?

Mykerinos

This game has been on my hope-to-try list for quite some time and I enjoyed it.  Felt very much like a lighter version of Ys and I can see some real depth to the game.  I'm fairly certain Matt won this one.

Canal Mania (x2)

The hit of the weekend for me, coming out twice with 5 players.  The game is taking about 2 hours to play, which is a bit long.  There's also enough downtime in the game to do 3 loads of laundry during two hours (trust me, I know...) so I think I'll prefer it with 3 players in the long run.  I think with three experienced players we can get the time down to 1 hour.  I did OK in both games, finishing about in the middle but very much in the running during the second game.  I'm glad that the second edition is going to balance the benefits of construction and running goods, as I think there's way too much opportunity to get imbalanced scoring on goods as it is (especially if players aren't paying attention when putting goods out).

18TN

This was by far the longest game I played over the weekend, and while it was fun I didn't have the same great feeling as I did after 18FL and 1850 (maybe because I finished dead last?). I think Mimi was somewhat reluctant to play, but she played fabulously and beat us all.  I was too tied into my major line and didn't get enough participation in some other quality rails.

Power Grid - Easter Europe

Power Grid is a game I still love but I'm just not very good at.  The Eastern Europe map is quite different than most - very cheap raw goods but expensive connections.

Liberte

Man, what a great game with miserable components.  I'd love to do a rework of the graphical elements on this game and make it playable.  I think I'm going to take a sharpie to the board and cards to make the regions distinguishable.  Ken Crangle informed me later that we played wrong in a big way - one of the cards (Terror?) requires that the red faction be in charge in order to play, and we missed this.  Boy, did we have a pile of generals' heads built up in the game box!  Our last 2 battles went without a winner as a result, so this was a pretty broken game.  Still fun though.

Agon

Saturday night I ran a quick session of Agon, an indie RPG set in Greek mythology.  I stumbled a bit with the system and made a few mistakes (this was my first play), but I think everyone had a good time.  Wes is a very experience role-player and did a great job as a player, adding good color text and helping prop me up when I struggled.

Die Säulen der Erde

Sunday after lunch Ken, Mike and I played this Essen release.  I only played 1 turn of the game at Essen, standing in for Jim Ginn as he had to run off in the middle of game.  So, I had a basic idea of the mechanics but no sense of strategy.  Mike maintained a solid lead throughout the game, but I think I had a decent understanding of the economic system at play and made mostly good moves.  Ken adopted a strategy of converting gold into victory points, and I'm not sure that's a winnable approach (though I'm glad he tried - it was interesting seeing the economics).  I think I'll want to buy this one when Mayfair ships the English version in a month or two.

Jacob and I have been on a roll lately, playing Combat Commander: Europe twice and Command & Colors: Ancients three times over the past 2 weeks.  I'm most excited about CC:E, so let's talk about that first.

Coming on the heels of trying out ASL SK#1, CC:E hit the sweet spot the game Jacob and I were looking for. The card-driven nature of the game is the right solution to the ASL problem of "oh my there are so many choices I might have... how do I decide?"  This game is nowhere near the ease of play as C&C Ancients or Memoir '44 - this is a real war game folks!  It has counters with little numbers on them, challenging timing rules, and concepts for routing and rallying similar to ASL.

Still, we both found the game very approachable and fast-paced if not short.  Our games are averaging around 2 hours 30 minutes right now, though we may get it down to 2 hours with repeated play.  We started with the Fat Lipki first scenario, with Jacob playing the Germans and me the Russians.

This scenario has a small number of units with both sides on recon.  One thing I really like about the game is the variable / hidden victory objectives which should greatly enhance replayability.  This time around we both had the main building (objective 5) in the middle of the map as our secret objective so that's where all the action was.  I snuck out a marginal victory of 3 points by surrounding Jacob from the woods across the road.  I also brought some units around the back side near his original starting point, which turned out to be a smart move as he marched a unit off my side of the board (that scores VPs for him) then brought him back in the next turn on his side.  I don't quite see how that fits the simulation, but it is an interesting game mechanic.

Our second game was scenario 2, with the Americans and Germans fighting it out in the hedgerows.  This really is a hopeless scenario for the Germans, but the starting conditions are balanced such that it is very playable.  We found this scenario to be much more engaging, especially because the units involved gave us more options from the cards (radio and artillery for Jacob as the Americans and some ordinance for the Germans).  This was another close game but in the end Jacob was able to overrun my position and get the requisite victory points.  I'm rating this a 9 after two plays.

Jacob and I are getting to be pros at C&C: Ancients, with most games finishing in less than 40 minutes.  Friday night we played the Lake Trasimenus scenario, with Jacob playing the Carthaginians and me the Romans.  This is a tough one for the Romans to win I think - or at least that's going to be my ongoing defense as I can't seem to beat Jacob in this game.  He won 6-3.

Today we played back-to-back scenarios of Himera from the 1st expansion. This scenario pits the Carthaginians against Syracuse, and has a great setup: a Syracuse leader and cavalry sneak into the Carthaginian camp then proceed to wreak havoc.  Both of our games turned out to be decent simulations, with the Carthaginian camp getting nearly wiped out in both cases (I played Carthage both times) and solid counter-attacks from the right in both cases.  The first game was over fast, with Jacob taking all 6 flags before I got my first.  I made a few serious tactical errors, attacking without room for retreat when I could have easily left myself some buffer.  On our second go-around I fared much better, losing 6-5.  I think I would have won had I delayed a counter-attack on the right and instead escaped with Hamilcar and the calvary from the camp on the left. 

The three scenarios we played lasted 35, 30, and 40 minutes.  Setup time is down to about 10 minutes.

So the real question is this: because we're having so much fun with C&C: Ancients, should I even consider getting BattleLore?

I'm here in the Messe hanging out in smoke-filled hall 4A between 4 and 5. Sorry for the lack of posts, but it is such a non-stop craze that it is hard to find time to even sit down for 5 minutes.

So far the day has been great (it is 6pm here). Havoc continues to be our best seller and we've nearly sold out of our remaining supply, including the expansions we brought. 24/7 is gaining momentum but wasn't the first day hit that Havoc was last year. The good news is that when people sit down to try it we almost always convert the demo into a sale.

Games I purchased today (I'm on about a $300 budget this year):

• Through the Ages - automatic purchase from the Czech Games dudes
• Turfmaster Deluxe - this is my big buy at 69 euro, but the game is a blast and I love the components.
• The Experiment - a cool little Belgian card game that won a design competition and got a free 1000 copy print run from Carta Mundi.
• 3 copies each of Pickomino and Cartagena for my games class - all of the above for a total of about 50 euro.
• A bunch of small stuff for Peter Loop and Mike Deans.
• Astoria - I don't care if the game is good... 20 euro for an engraved wooden box with 4 glass bottles and gems in it. Great value for bits.
• I pre-ordered the three train games / expansions from Winsome and picked those up today for 75 euro.

One highlight of the week so far is spending an hour in Reiner Knizia's hotel room getting pitched about 6 of his games for possible publication by Sunriver. We are going to try out 3 of them.

We've had great support from our demo team, and many fans have come back to say hi after purchasing Havoc last year. Most ask where my family is :-(.

Hard to tell what the big buzz of the show is. On the Underground is getting some hype but reviews are mixed from the folks I talked to. Gloria Mundi and Perikles look pretty nice. I have room for 1 or 2 more games so I'll be picky and get something on Sat or Sun.

I'll try and get another report out tomorrow!  Check out some photos over at Flickr - I'll keep adding to the set.

The time is quickly approaching where I'll board a Lufthansa flight here in Portland to join a bunch of my partners and friends for the trek to Essen.  Sunriver Games will again have a booth at the fair (hall 4, booth 69) and we'll be selling 24/7: the Game, Abagio, Havoc: the Hundred Years War, and the Havoc Expansion.

Preparing for the show has been nowhere near as involved and tiring as last year.  Ludo Fact handled all of the final production for 24/7 and the first set of copies will be delivered directly to our booth.  Quite a bit easier than hand assembling, shrinkwrapping, and carting the games to Essen in our luggage.

Not to say that we don't need to bring any games with us.  We are going to take about 35 copies of Abagio and KC came up with the brilliant idea of packing 4 Havocs inside each Abagio box (yes, there's an excess of air in the box).  This will allow us to bring about 100 copies of Havoc (supply is dwindling, and what we have leftover after the show will be sold through Funagain).  There are currently no plans for a reprint though we will reconsider in 2007.

We have a few special promotions going on at the show:

• We are giving away some very nice "Gamers Do It 24/7" buttons to folks that try a demo of 24/7: the Game at our booth.
• We will be giving away the very cool Start Spieler spinning fingers to folks that spend 20€ or more at our booth.
• We are running some 24/7 contests and raffle giveaways of a very nice handmade wooden board for the game.  We will also raffle off some spiffy Sunriver Games t-shirts.

We also managed to pack our buttons and the Havoc Expansion into the dead space in the Abagio boxes.

Carey purchased three travel trunks to cart all of the goods.  With my Star Alliance Gold status, I should be able to check all three of the trunks without any extra cost with Lufthansa.  Fortunately (or unfortunately) this should give us lots of space to pack up purchased games on the home trip.

If you are heading to the show, you might enjoy listening to my segment in the Dice Tower, episode 23 where I talk about 10 things you need to know about going to Essen.  See you at the show!

First, in case you didn’t know, fellow gamer Moritz Eggert’s soccer/football composition “Die Tiefe des Raums” will be performed at the opening ceremonies for World Cup 2006.  Moritz is of course most famous for his review of Havoc last year.

Second, Stephen Cole of Star Fleet Universe just published his free book on Running a Game Publishing Company.  There’s some good stuff here, but I have yet to read it all the way through . Almost afraid to as I’ll be forced to face all of the mistakes we’ve made so far at Sunriver Games.  Maybe that will qualify us to help with the second edition of this book.

I joined a few folks at the Starbucks near Washington Square last night for a brief evening of gaming.  Joining some of the regular Rip City folks was Ben Harris, early supporter of Havoc and brother of a co-worker at Corillian.  I arrived a bit late and the crew was just getting started with a prototype under development for Sunriver Games.  Hopefully I’ll be able to talk about it more in a short while.

Mike was very eager to get out Pirate’s Cove, the Days of Wonder remake of Piratenbucht.  I’ve played Piratenbucht quite a bit but had never managed to play this version, despite the fact that I’ve done demos for Days of Wonder at the last two GenCons.  This is partly because they rarely demo this game at their booth, reserving it for scheduled sessions in the gaming hall.

The rules are very close to the original with a few twists, so we were under way without much delay.  The most discussion (of course) was about how to move the pirate.  Of course, we settled on our home-grown semi-random Blackbeard variant, documented by our very own Dave and KC.

Despite getting beat up (by me) a few times early in the game, KC managed to end the game as the most famous pirate, finishing well ahead of the rest of us.  I think I finished second-to-last.

When it comes to gaming conventions in Portland, there’s really only one game in town and that’s GameStorm.  We’ll be running a number of events this year, including a 2–player tournament, a Havoc tournament, our traditional Sunday morning family gaming session, and a Sunriver Games prototype session.  Mark your calendar: March 24–26 at the Red Lion at the Quay in Vancouver, WA.

They are also holding a free game day this Saturday in Portland.  KC and I plan to be there to try out a prototype or two.

I made it to Mike’s “South Tuesday” game night tonight, a good step towards meeting my New Years resolution.  We had a great crowd of 9 tonight and decide to split into 5 / 4, and we would remain in those groups for the evening.

Doug, Chuck, KC, and Rita started things off with Tal der Könige, a game I enjoyed very much when I played at the coast about 10 days ago.  Don’t know much about how this play went but it did look like everyone had fun.  The game lasted about 90 minutes.

Mike declared tonight a “classics” night and suggested the Splotter game Bus along with a few others.  There was a bit of debate about whether or not Bus qualifies as a classic, but I was certainly eager to play it again face-to-face.  I’ve played it 2 or 3 times live before, and about 10 times on Spiel-by-Web.  Only Mike had played before, so the first 15 minutes involved explaining the game to Carey, Tim, and Eric.

The game is a brain burner and it is very easy to make (often crippling) mistakes.  There are so few opportunities to score points in a five player game due to congestion and player chaos that a missed chance or misplayed can easily take a player out of contention.  This makes it fairly unforgiving for new players.  Carey chose the vroom action a couple of times when it turned out he could transport no passengers, probably because he didn’t anticipate some of the other players’ actions.  This is a very common mistake that I still make, though I’m more likely to make suboptimal choices and not think a turn ahead.

The game was very tight, with Mike burning his last cube thinking it was the last turn (there was going to be one more turn) and possibly missing a chance to be in contention.  As it was, Eric and Tim tied for points (2 ahead of Mike, Carey and me, though Mike may have been ahead of us) but Eric winning on the tie-breaker as he had “earned” a stone by stopping time.  A fun game that I’d like to see out more.

While we were finishing up Bus, the other crowd played some David and Goliath.

My last game of the night was 6 Nimmt, my favorite filler game of late. We had an interesting discussion about favorite filler card games, with titles such as Coloretto, Geschenkt, and 6 Nimmt getting mentioned.  Coloretto wore out its welcome with me, and I’m not sure why.  Maybe 6 Nimmt will do the same, but for now I quite enjoy it for what it is – a quick game with decisions to make but nothing too angst-ridden.  I’m sure there are solid strategies to the game, but I use a few basic rules that keep decisions simple and I seem to win about half the time I play.  Maybe I just get good cards.

During 6 Nimmt the other group was playing (what else?)… Havoc!

Saturday and Sunday should involve some RPG goodness out at the beach – I’ll post some details about the campaign I’m running and chat a bit about how to play D&D with pre-teens.

Tuesday night I hosted “south Tuesday”, my monthly turn with the RipCity gaming group.  I was eager to try out Antike again, and as I was expecting about 4–5 people total it seemed likely if the others were willing.  Joining me were Mike, Doug, and Carey Grayson, guest of the group and owner of New Classic Games.  Carey is a designer in his on right and purchased New Classic earlier this year.  They produce Abagio and he has a few other games in the works for publication.

We played four players on the English side of the board, which is the “zoomed in” map focusing on the eastern Mediterranean and middle-east.  Teaching Antike is a breeze – the game is very streamlined, combat couldn’t be simpler, and the game board and reference cards are extremely well designed providing all of the key information for quick reference.

I focused on gold and know-how initially, advancing to Monarchy quickly to get some strong defense.  Doug and Mike began to intrude on my precious territory, forcing me (!) to attack from Athens to push them back and give me some buffer.  I didn’t stop there, taking advantage of some numerical superiority and my sailing improvements to wreak some more havoc near Greece.  I was able to cross the 15 territory threshold, giving me a total of 8 victory points (3 five territory, 1 seven seas, 4 first know-how advancement) and one shy of victory.

Meanwhile, Carey kept Doug and Mike occupied in the middle east, threatening some temples and forcing them to worry about two fronts.  Mike quickly advanced to Democracy giving his cities plenty of defensive strength and discouraging conquest.  The game was starting to drag on a bit, approaching the three hour mark (surprising as my first game lasted on 2 hours) and I was able to do a double advance from wheel to road and win the game snagging my fifth first advancement victory point.  This was not quite fair as I had mistakenly indicated to Mike earlier in the game that you couldn’t double-advance on a turn (there’s no limit to the amount of advancement you can do when selecting know-how).  I corrected myself and we all agreed that we’d rather just see the game end than restrain my advancement.

Great game still in my book and one I look forward to seeing come out frequently as long as we can get it done in the 2–2.5 hours time-frame.  Three hours is too long for this game in my book.

The Christmas holiday out at Salishan vastly exceeded my gaming expectations – almost everything I brought was played!  Dave/Lisa, Mike, and Geoff were particularly eager to gobble up just about everything I suggested.  Now we didn’t spend all of our time indoors playing games – I’ll post soon about a fabulous hike we took and a grueling “game” of pushups that I somehow got cajoled into.  I’ll do a quick rundown of the games we played.

Julie’s high school friend Karen is a firefighter for US Forest Service – she’s been a member of the hot shots crew and now works at an engine station in Mammoth, CA.  She joined us up through Christmas eve but returned to Reno to join her family for the holiday.  She asked for suggestions of games to purchase her 13 year-old nephew, and after some questions about his likes/dislikes I suggested Settlers of Catan.  I picked up a copy at Rainy Day Games and hauled out my copy so that we could get some plays in to teach Karen.  It was a big hit – the most popular game of the weekend.  Turns out Geoff is the reigning champion in his lab group up at the University of Washington so he was already very familiar with the game.  Settlers came out three times, and I played once.  I wish I had brought out Seafarers and the Das Buch expansion as I think they would have enjoyed some other scenarios.

Of course we had to have a session of Havoc: the Hundred Years War.  I didn’t play but we had a nice crowd of 5 join in, with Jacob providing most of the instruction.

Matthew’s big Christmas present this year was a Carabande set with the Action Set.  These were long on my list of to-buy and fortunately KC came back with them from Essen.  We had a team tournament over two races, including one with a figure-eight jump.

 Not gaming related per-se, but another gift for Matthew was one of those air gun blasters.  Here you see the effectiveness of the weapon at close range.

Having played and enjoyed Settlers, Union Pacific, and a few other heavier games, I thought Power Grid would be a good choice for this crowd.  Mike took to it extremely well, challenging me for the lead throughout the game and winning on a tie-breaker with the most money (we each powered 16 cities).  Power Grid is the kind of game that takes a full play to grasp the strategies, so the others were favorable but a bit confused on how to best play it.  Would have been nice to give it another try.

This was the game of Settlers that I managed to join.  I made a sub-optimal opening placement that caused trouble throughout the game, though I had a fighting chance of finishing a close second (but didn’t).  Geoff played well and pulled off a relatively easy victory with Dave/Lisa finishing second.

We also managed to get in some lighter games, such as Tunebaya.  Tunebaya is similar to Wits and Wagers in that nobody is really all that interested in keeping score – the process of playing is the enjoyment.  My obscure knowledge of music and lyrics continued to haunt me in this playing.

Matthew requested and the group delivered with a fine showing of Bang!, including the Dodge City expansion.  I was an outlaw and was killed first (but not after hurting sheriff Jacob) but still managed to end up on the winning side.

We also played a hand or two of 6 Nimmt…

 and two games of For Sale.

One of the highlights for me was finally getting a chance to play the Knizia classic Traumfabrik, the auction game about producing movies.  The game has very simple mechanics, but is a bit dry and long for what you get.  I enjoyed it but the group felt it was the least of the Settlers / Power Grid / Traumfabrik triad.  Mike jumped out to an early lead, grabbing one of the first genre completed awards and two quarterly best picture awards.  I managed to pull out a victory in the end by grabbing the best in genre and best director awards in the end.  Scores were 30–25–15–10 (I think).

KC, Rita, and I held a Havoc launch event at our friendly local game store, Rainy Day Games.  We did this on Sunday to kick off National Games Week.  Turnout was, well, “meh” but we did have non-stop demos going on and it was fun to just hang out with friends (the Rudes, Loops, Deans’s’s).

We did a drawing at the end and give away a gift card for RDG and a copy of Havoc with all of the expansions.  Steve Ellis, owner / manager of RDG, is such a nice guy and we always have great conversations about game industry trends, distribution, game store profitability, and more.

Ken, Brandon, and Jacob played some CribbGolf, a game I picked up at Goodwill earlier this year for $1.99.  As Ken put it, “this is a great way to ruin cribbage.”  Oh well… maybe I spent too much.

Steve showed a few of us how to play Tsuro, the new abstract release from WizKids.  The production on this game is very nice, and the play isn’t too bad either.  It reminds me a bit of Metro but it plays quickly and should be a big hit for these guys.

What’s amazing is the price-point on this game – about $25.  Just goes to show how volume production can get the cost (and price) down on what looks to be a high quality game.

This will be my final report on BGG.CON.

 We started the morning with a game of Alhambra down in the plaza courtyard (apropos, yes?).  This was a six-player match with KC, Rita, Jim, Jill, and Yehuda.  Sadly, I left my CF card in the laptop and didn’t get any snapshots.  This game is a fun pastime but I’m still mostly convinced it is a luckfest.  I specialized in just a few colors and did fairly well, but couldn’t manage to build a decent wall.  Rita came out ahead by a single point over me for the victory.

KC took another stab at Yehuda’s prototype, which was nice as he was able to get some rules clarifications.  We’ll be giving this one another player over the next few weeks to make sure we give it a fair evaluation.

Mark Johnson and I were finally able to hook up for our pre-arranged playing of Verräter.  Mark did an all-about podcast on this game a while back and it sparked my interest enough to pick up a copy at Essen.  The rules aren’t trivial for this game so I figured this would be a good chance to learn it from an expert.

The game didn’t disappoint – very deep for a seemingly light cardgame.  I can see now how this game has likely influenced a few others (Puerto Rico and Citadels come to mind).  I did horribly but had fun and look forward to trying it with my group.

As the convention started winding down, Ed and Susan wandered over to our booth and I talked them into trying Northwest Trek, one of KC’s prototypes.  This is a very light game that allows for conversation so it was nice to just relax and chat with them.  It is a shame we live so far apart because I think our families have a lot in common and that our kids would hit it off.  Maybe we’ll see them at Gulf Games in the future…

Around noon all of the vendors started packing up their goods for the return trip.  Havoc is easily transported in our luggage… the other vendors boxed up their goods for shipment.

Our flight wasn’t until 7:30pm, so we hung out in the plaza with Kevin Nunn to try out another of his prototypes.  This one is a deeper boardgame that has some real promise and we’ll be taking a closer look at it over the next few weeks.

BGG.CON is a great convention and I think it will get better (and bigger) in the coming years.  The community is so self-selecting that I suspect it has the feel of some of the more prominent exclusive invitations without being, well exclusive.  Great job Derk and Aldie and I hope you outdo yourselves next year.  We plan on returning.

Note: For those of you that have been following the Flickr photo set for BGG.CON, please note that my camera’s date/time was off by about 12 hours (forward), so some of the dates taken are wrong on the photos.  Sorry.  The camera is fixed so things should be fine going forward.

I let KC and Rita sleep in on Saturday morning and took over booth duties during and after the flea market.  My reaction to the flea market was “eh” but several folks found some good deals.  I know Jim picked up a much wanted copy of Battle Cry that should be good fun with his kids.

Around 11am I taught and played in one of my few scheduled events of the weekend – Antike.  Joining me were sedgtroll,  Edbryan, JosephDowell, and sbabcock.

Antike is a relatively light-weight euro-style conquest game.  It does involve conflict between nations (I don’t think you can win this game without attacking) so is technically a wargame, though it clearly isn’t a simulation.  Players take on the role of civilizations.  There are multiple paths to victory as players compete to earn historical figure cards for accomplishments like having 5 (or 10, or 15) cities, destroying other players’ temples, being the first to acquire a certain kind of know-how, or for building temples.

On a player’s turn, a player chooses between 1 of 3 types of actions – produce, build, or maneuver.  The way actions are chosen is, to my knowledge, a unique mechanic in Antike.  There is a wheel on the board where each player places a colored marker indicating their chosen action.  At the start of the game, each player chooses any of the available actions.  Thereafter, you must advance your marker around the wheel clockwise from 1 to 8 spaces to choose your next action.  Advancing 1–3 spaces costs nothing; each space beyond that costs 1 resource per space.  This is significant because the related production / consumption activities are always 4 spaces away.  So if you want to produce marble one turn, then build a temple (which requires marble) the next turn, you’ll have to pay an extra resource to choose that action.  Same thing if you want to maneuver two turns in a row.  This encourages players to pace themselves and work on a diverse set of activities, such as producing gold one turn, expanding their armies the next turn, then increasing know-how on the third (which uses the gold produced two turns ago).  You can see the rondell in the upper left corner of the image:

What I love about this game is that there’s very little downtime for players (though it does increase throughout the game) and it plays easily in under two hours.  The game board comes with two distinct maps, with the player aids on one side in English and the other side in German.  This gives owners of the game two different maps to play, which is a nice bonus.  Definitely consider Antike if you are looking for a short duration, low downtime conquest game.

I talked Eric Hautemont into trying out Havoc mid day on Saturday.  I think he enjoyed it quite a bit and he did buy a copy.  Thanks to Jill for serving as our demo monkey on Saturday.

KC spent some more time with the Beatnik Turtle folks and taught them Basecamp Delta, one of his prototypes that he recently submitted for the Hippodice competition.

More on this later, but I did finally get some time on Sunday to play games with Ed and Susan as well as Mark Johnson.  I managed to get a snapshot of Ed, Greg Wilzbach, and Mark Johnson playing the yet-to-be-released Mission: Planète Rouge with Asmodée Editions.

On Saturday night they held the Texas Hold ‘Em tournament.  I got taken out fairly early while trying to stupidly complete a flush draw.  Rita did very well and ended up taking the seat I vacated shortly after I “went home”.

I was eager to get some rest Saturday night so I opted out of late-night gaming.  I did help Jim, Jill, KC, and Rita get going in their Hoity Toity game, teaching them the rules and explaining in depth why I detest the game.  I think they had the same impression, stopping the game 2 or 3 turns into it.

It’s late but there’s always time for a quick post with some photos and game comments.  Probably more photos than comments today.  Reminder: you can follow my photostream on Flickr to see photos throughout the day, plus extras that don’t show up on the weblog.

After a quick workout and some breakfast in the morning, we headed over to the south tower, level 5, to check out the facilities.  Derk and Aldie were actively engaged finalizing details, trying to find chairs, and handling general logistics concerns.  I think they were most worried about getting chairs.

We setup our Havoc demonstration area in about an hour or less. KC and Rita did most of the work… in fact they probably did 90% of the work for the whole day.  I’ll make it up tomorrow.  By about noon we were giving our first Havoc demos.

 Yehuda arrived about this time as well and spent some time sorting out some game materials.

I bet Eagle Games, Z-Man Games, and Days of Wonder were all thrilled to be located close to the Sunriver Games booth – I’m sure the Havoc draw will bring a lot of traffic to their lesser known games.  I told Eric and Mark (below) that they are welcome to try and sell me any of their games but that, unfortunately, I already own all of them so there’s really no use.  Eric decided I needed to buy a 2006 calendar.

Derk and Aldie did an amazing thing – they setup three prize tables with an instant raffle upon badge pickup.  I drew the lowest valued ticked (red) but picked up Plunder, a game I’ve been wanting to try for some time.  AMAZING how much they can fit in that small box.

A bit after noon a couple (Numskull and BilboAtBagEnd) of gamers stopped by the Z-Man Games booth and asked to play their only copy of Siena. I overheard the request, asked if I could join in, and we headed over to the open gaming area.  Gilby and EdBryan joined us so we were set with five players (gilby, edbryan, numskull, and bilbo in order left to right below).

The games was incredibly difficult to read, learn, and teach on the spot.  I wish I had read this before trying to digest the English rules.  The game is good, maybe excellent, but unfortunately I ran out of time and had to bail out before ending.  Players take on the role of peasants that move up to be merchants and finally bankers.  There are some creative mechanics in the game, but I’m not sure how they all fit together.  I didn’t get to observe enough of the final banking phase to see how that played out.  Oh, and there are prostitutes in the game.  Seriously.  And they entice your banker to join them in the inn.  And you can distract them with girlfriends.  This lead to some interesting color commentary during our play.

The game is well produced with some very nice artwork.  I’ll probably pick up a copy of the game once it ships.

I then taught Antike to two groups, but did not play myself.  I’ll get a chance to play it on Saturday and will let you know what I think.  General impression was that it is a solid conflict / empire game with very little player downtime.

After dinner at an Irish pub with Rita, Jeff DeBoer, and Baldboy_1, we returned to have Jeff teach KC, Rita, and me Lost Valley.  This is an exploration game I picked up at Essen for a mere 10 euro based on a recommendation from Ben Corliss.  I’m glad I did, because this is a great game.

Players take on the role of explorers trying to find glory through gold panning and mining.  There’s an exploration / flip the tile element to the game, but the fun is in the resource management and dealing with other players’ actions.  KC played a superb game and wiped us clean, finishing with something like 28 points to my 15, with Rita and Jeff tied at 12.  Wasn’t even close, but it was still fun.

Tomorrow we’ll sell some more Havoc and I hope to get in a playing of Indonesia.  I also hope to pick up a copy of Railroad Tycoon – Eagle Games thinks they’ll have stock by the morning.  I just need to make sure we sell enough Havoc to make room for it in my bag!

KC, Rita, and I safely arrived in Dallas tonight for BGG.CON.  This will probably be our last convention to exhibit until Essen next year, and our goal is to play games as much as we sell Havoc.  I’m scheduled to play at least Antike and Indonesia this weekend.  Also hoping to get in at least one game with Mark Johnson and I need to spend some time with my friend Yehuda from Israel. 

(I may add photos more frequently than I blog.  You can follow the photostream on Flickr to see cool pics as I upload them.)

We had a brief lay-over in Denver on our way to Dallas so I brought out Gloom.  I bought this because of the cool see-through card mechanism and the mostly positive review over at Have Games Will Travel.  We also like to sample print quality, and I noticed that the game was made in India – I suspect PlayingCardsIndia manufactured the cards but I could be wrong.

We only got a single turn into the game,  but I think we understand how to play.  Simple game with a great theme: inflict as much misery on your family before delivering untimely deaths to them all.

We are very unimpressed with the quality of the box and the cards.  Much of the text is unreadable, the cards show creases and streaks right out of the box, and it seems like the game is unlikely to last for more than 10 plays or so.  Apparently some folks on the geek agree with this assessment.  Now I’m not saying we could do better – this has to be a difficult design and production challenge.  I just wish the end result looked better.  Maybe we’ll get a chance to play through it tomorrow.

The hotel here is very nice, other than the fact that we got stuck with smoking rooms.  They ionized the air pretty well and I can’t detect a trace of smoke in the room.  So I guess we are a step ahead of Essen.  Here’s the view from my room.

Tomorrow morning we’ll setup our meager Havoc display at around 11am in anticipation of the vendor area opening at 1pm.  I’ll be teaching a group how to play Antike around 4pm and hope to get in a good amount of gaming tomorrow night.  We also have a batch of prototypes from KC and others to try out each evening at 7pm.

I forgot to post a link to this cool article in the Sherwood Gazette (our local small-town rag) about Havoc.

For my first Essen Spiel report I thought I’d focus on the Sunriver Games booth.  This was such a learning experience for us rank amateurs, but I think we pulled it off with very few snafus.

Julie, the boys, and I arrived in Essen just after noon on Tuesday, October 11.  We checked into our room at the Hotel Arosa and started to notice some other gamer folks hanging around the hotel, including Lorna, Doug, and Mimi.  After grabbing a bite to eat, we walked over to the Messe so that I could check out the booth and see if our rented furniture had arrived.

It was a bit strange finding my way into the hall – I figured one of the main doors would be open to those with exhibitor passes.  I finally approached the security guard at the drive-in gate near the south entrance, showed him my pass, and he let me through.  I was surprised at how little had been setup yet – most notable was the Settlers of Catan Bus, but very few of the smaller exhibitor booths showed signs of any action yet.

I quickly found the way to our booth (4–52) but was slightly disappointed to see no furniture there.  I was stumped about how to resolve this, so I wandered around for a while looking for someone official.  Nobody looked official.  The most common site was folks drinking beer while constructing booths.

Eventually I referred to my layout map and discovered the service center over by Hall 5.  Inside the center I found a very helpful woman who noted my request for furniture, confirmed my reservation, and spent some time on the phone with someone.  About five minutes later she told me the furniture would be there within an hour.  I wasn’t going to setup Tuesday anyway, so it was good to know it would be in place for setup on Wednesday morning.

Wednesday morning we used our rental car to drop off all of the Havoc product.  You can drive a car into the parking setup area if you have an exhibitor pass and a 50 euro deposit, which you get back as long as you leave within an hour.  We hauled our goods the short trip through hall 5, through the 4A hallway, then to our booth in hall 4.  Still no furniture.  I walked back to the service center and they were surprised the furniture wasn’t there, got on the phone, and indicated that perhaps it was left at the wrong booth and that they would fix it promptly.  By the time I returned to the booth, a mover was carting our tables to our booth – they were sitting just behind our booth at another (4–62 I think).

Booth setup took very little time as we didn’t have much to do.  The biggest challenge was cutting down our fabric table covers to fit the tables.  In hindsight we wish we had brought a larger hanging tarp or cloth to drape from the booth wall.  To this we could have attached banners, price information, etc. without risk of damaging the walls.  As it was, we taped them to the booth walls but had a hard time getting the residue off at the end.

KC and I took a break from setup to attend the press event.  There were definitely some lessons learned here.  You need to let the Spiel folks that (1) you have a new product you are releasing at Essen, and (2) register to show that product at the press event. This would have allowed us to setup a small table on Tuesday or Wednesday morning with our goods and have a formal presence at the event.  As it was, we lurked, passed out cards pointing to our booth, and left some press flyers for folks to take (they were all taken within about 15 minutes).  So we did OK, but lesson learned for next year.

We stayed around the hall till early evening as we had a decent amount of traffic without the show even being open – we probably sold 10–20 copies of the game on Wed afternoon.  It was also a chance to checkout the used game vendors in hall 4 and see if there were any good deals.

Thursday morning presented a few logistics issues as we tried to coordinate pass purchases and get as many of our demo team in as early as possible.  I was able to buy three more exhibitor passes and hand those out, but there was no easy way to buy 4–day passes for general admission ahead of time.  Things worked out fine despite the huge crowds on Thursday morning.  By 10:30am our demos were in full swing.

We sold about 80 of our 310 games on the first day, which was a big surprise.  We extrapolated this out with some projected growth and though we might sell out as early as Saturday evening.  Thursday would turn out to be our best day, which I think is indication of some of the pre-show buzz we worked up and the niche attraction of Havoc: the Hundred Years War.  We would do reasonably well with walk-up sales, but due to the remote nature of our booth most folks that came by were looking for us.

We had a number of “celebrities” come by the booth.  Mik Svellov…

Andrea Meyer…

and Derk Solko came by and interviewed Jacob and Julie.

KC, Julie, Jacob, and I would have been overwhelmed giving demos were it not for the help of our demo assistants.  Doug, Mimi, Lorna (all pictured below), Mike, Richard, and Ben: thanks for your time and dedication to making this event work.  Ben and Mike both knocked our socks off by giving demos in German.  I think Mike even surprised himself.

Cleanup on Sunday evening was more about getting a TON of boxes ready to ship back with Funagain than actually cleaning up our booth, though we did need to expend some serious energy cleaning the booth walls of residue.  We wrapped up by around 7:15 and worked our way back to the hotel for a final evening of gaming.

Well, that about wraps it up.  The event was a great success on so many levels, new friendships were forged, and we met our objectives with Havoc.  We are already planning for our trip next year, and if things go well we might even have a booth again with another game to sell.

If I’m already this far behind on Germany / Essen posts, it won’t hurt to insert a post with some weekend gaming.  Plus, three of these games are Essen releases that many of you are probably interested in.

Saturday and Sunday were spent assembling another batch of Havoc releases – we are in a pretty good rhythm and should finish the rest of the product by next weekend.  Saturday evening we took a break, left Matthew in charge of Jacob and Brandon, and headed for nearby Newberg to visit our friend George’s new digs at a house-warming party.  George is a gamer, so of course we brought games.  And Havoc.

First up was the new Railroad Dice 2 game from Wassertal, a remake of the original game that is apparently quite different (I never played it).  I tried this once at Essen, but the game was aborted as we played it so horribly wrong that, well, we weren’t even playing the game.  The main objective is to build connections from your home station to each of the other stations, and transport passengers from remote stations back to your own.  This earns “money” (the same tokens are used to track passengers and income).

In my aborted game, we didn’t realize that all connections had to be direct and couldn’t pass through other stations.  This made the process of reaching all the stations rather simple and anti-climatic.  Anyway, we appeared to play correctly this time around and I found the game to be solid and enjoyable.  Space is very tight and the economic system of buying locomotives, connecting towns, using complex dice, and transporting passengers made the game feel like a very light weight and streamlined Age of Steam.  Our main complaint – replacing a simple die with a complex die when it is in the middle of a cluster.  We are thinking of using a pencil with gum on the end of it next game.

Next up was a large group game of Liars Dice, one of my favorite light party games.  We played with a Perudo set and Newberg rules.  Ask me about them sometime.

This game was a load of laughs – I held strong for a long time but lost some dice quickly and ended up in bad shape for a final showdown with Mike (3 dice to 1).  This is a near impossible situation to be in and he pulled out the victory.

Julie, KC, Rita, Ken, and I then drove back to Sherwood.  All of us but Julie were still up for one more game, so we pulled out the Essen hit Shear Panic.  I sort of missed out on buying this game – Peter Loop asked me to buy a copy for him at Essen, but they had sold out before the show and only had pre-orders left.  I was lucky enough to snag a copy from Tom (who lucked into his copies as well) but unfortunately this copy needs to go to Peter.  I say unfortunately because this is a pretty nifty little game.

I didn’t know what to expect, though I had an inkling after playing Leapfrog at a work lunchtime event with Eric.  The game oozes them – how can you not love these little sheeps?  The game passes through several phases where you try and maneuver your two sheep into a position to score the most point. The most important scoring round is the last one, when the sheep are being lined up to be shorn.  You don’t want to be near the front of the flock at this point.  Witness my yellow sheep in the photo.

Players have a card of actions they can take throughout the game that allow them to change the configuration of the flock.  Sometimes the flock gets segregated (as in the photo above), forcing a regrouping of the sheep according to certain rules.  This is not a light game, though it needs to be taken lightly. I really wish I had picked up my own copy, but with KC, Eric, and Peter (and Mike?) owning copies I guess I’ll be able to play it enough.

Sunday afternoon after finishing assembly, KC, Rita, Ken, and I sat down to try the much hyped Caylus, another Essen release.  You can learn about the mechanics in a review at the ‘geek – I’ll just share some first impressions here.

At first we all had the impression that this is an excellent game. Sometimes you just get that feeling – the mechanics work well together, things just make sense.  We all struggled with our choices, experimented with different (mostly unsuccessful) tactics, and made huge mistakes (well, everyone but Ken I think).

As we hit the mid game, I started to feel a little less enamored, mostly because Ken was far out in the lead and appeared unstoppable.  This is more a result of how the rest of us played the game, I think, then a flaw of the game itself.  There were no luck dice rolls, no arbitrary reasons why he jumped out.  He focused on getting building ownership early on, while the rest of us were probably a bit too preoccupied with the castle.  This provided a strong annuity in prestige for Ken that he carried to victory.

Money is very tight in the game and must be watched carefully – I was reminded of both St. Petersburg and Oltremare in that regard.  I made very similar mistakes in my first play of those two games and I suspect I’ll play much better the second time around in Caylus.

I really do hope this game is as good as everyone is claiming it to be, but I’ll reserve judgment for a bit.  I’m sure it will come out again this coming weekend.

Our flight from Portland to Frankfurt was uneventful and everyone managed to get at least a few hours of sleep. We picked up our huge luggage stash in Frankfurt – 6 bags in all, some weighing in the 70–80 pound range and hauled it over to the Budget car rental office.  I reserved about the biggest car I could short of getting a minivan – an Audi Estate wagon – knowing we would have so much to carry around.  Why so much?  We were carrying 200+ copies of Havoc with us for Essen!

Our first day of travel would be our longest, about 200km drive down to Tübingen.  The autobahn made travel go by quickly as I was able to average about 120–140km per hour, well below the speed of some of the large Mercedes flying by at 200kph or faster.  We were hungry for lunch so turned off into Sinsheim, a cute little town not far from Stuttgart.  Here we found a nice bistro with a helpful waiter and ordered some bratwursts and drinks.  This was also the first chance for Julie and the boys to converse in German.

Sinsheim was a nice little town in which to stroll and people watch, so we were in no rush to get back on the road.  We indulged in some gelato and shopped a bit, of course checking out the game selection in one of the small department stores (Zug um Zug Europe seems to be very popular). We arrived in Tübingen around 5:00pm and proceeded to search for our hotel, the Katharina.  Tübingen is not the easiest town to navigate, but fortunately there were helpful signs directing us to our hotel up on the hill above town.  The room was small but adequate and about what I expected from a European hotel.  Tubingen has a famous gothic-renaissance town hall.

By 6pm we were ready to drive back downtown to meet with Chris Marquardt, the host of the popular Tips from the Top Floor podcast.  TftTF is an outstanding show about digital photography – if you are trying to improve your skills and knowledge about shooting and post-processing, make sure you check out his show.

We had some great conversation and Chris introduced us to some delicious Swabian food and, of course, German beer.

Having traveled overseas quite a bit, I know that the first night away is usually the toughest.  The boys managed reasonably well, but Julie and I both woke up around 1–2am and had a very hard time sleeping after that.  This would be the pattern for both of us for the next few nights, but we still seemed to get enough sleep each night to be functional.  Amazing how adaptive kids are.

Next up: Burg Hohenzollern and a Roman villa in Hechingen.

Last Saturday was a very meaningful day for me and a number of my closest friends.  You see, HAVOC: The Hundred Years War from Sunriver Games made the final turn from concept into reality as we completed assembly of the first 400+ copies of the game. Julie, the boys, and I head for Frankfurt tomorrow for about a week of touring and another week of Essen Spiel.  We couldn’t have cut things much more closely.

For the past two weeks Julie has been hard at work assembly our boxes, which were produced by LithoFlex aka The Box Co-op.  These guys aren’t really in the business of producing game boxes, but we were impressed by their quality and wanted a box that was something like the Great Dalmuti box that you may remember.  One challenge was the insert that holds the cards in three separate sections in the box – the little dividers don’t like to stay folded tightly, causing the insert to bridge out of the box a bit.  Julie solved the problem with a little bit of glue on the inside of the insert.  Here you can see Julie removing the clothes pins from the inserts after a round of drying 60 of the inserts.

Julie managed to get over 600 of the boxes prepared before the cards or rules arrived, putting us in good shape for an assembly party that we held on Saturday.  KC, Rita, and Jenna arrived early afternoon on Saturday to get started while Julie and I watched Jacob’s afternoon football game.  By around 3:30pm we were in full production swing, with Jenna and Julie assembling the boxes with the three decks of cards (from Carta Mundi USA), the scoring token insert, and the rules.

After a bit, our “friends of Sunriver Games” started arriving. Mike and Matthew helped out with assembly while Jenna took over the sorting of our cool bonus cards (more on that later).

Shortly thereafter, Doug and Mimi assumed assembly duties.

Ken Rude showed exceptional mastery of the impulse sealer, which we used to seal the 6”x11” shrink wrap bags.  We purchased the shrink wrap equipment from Plastic Bags for You – they had a great deal on a starter set that included enough bags of the right size for us to do around 500 copies.  This package originally showed up on my doorstep a week ahead of time, but the impulse sealer didn’t work (no heat!) and I had to convince them to send me a replacement ASAP without returning the defective unit.  They had GREAT customer service and got the unit out that Monday; unfortunately train delayed the UPS shipment and it didn’t arrive until 4:55pm on Friday.  The cards arrived the Wednesday before that, the rules on Friday morning.  Talk about just-in-time delivery…

After sealing the bags, I was the master of the heat gun (and I’ve got the second degree burn on my under-arm to prove it) and applied the final touches to shrink wrap the boxes.  Jacob and Jenna were my two main “feeders” throughout the day.

At 3:34pm on Saturday, we finished our 1st box of Havoc, which of course went to designer KC.

At about 7pm we stopped production for the night, with our original batch of 440 games boxed and about 100 left to shrink-wrap (shrink is the bottleneck).  It was of course time for a celebratory toast…

And a team photo in our t-shirts.

Here’s the final product.  We are very proud of the game – the production values surpassed our expectations and we hope other gamers agree that this is a first-rate production.  It plays pretty well too.

So what’s the deal with the extra cards?  We are offering a mini-expansion with all purchases made at Essen!  This expansion adds a nice little twist to the game, making it a bit more chaotic but in a fun way.

Make sure you follow my posts over at the Gathering of Engineers site – I’ll be doing a detailed financial analysis of the game in a few weeks.

There’s been just a little bit of gaming around our household over the last few weeks.  High time for a post with a few photos.

About a week ago I returned from a business trip in Memphis and joined Jacob, Nick, and Julie in a game of Ticket to Ride: Europe on a late Friday afternoon.  Nick was new to Ticket to Ride but picked up the rules easily.  Maybe there is some correlation with having two football players play the game, but this was the most confrontational game of TtR I’ve ever played.

This was mostly due to Nick focusing on very small routes and doing whatever he could to disrupt our progress (mostly Julie, but he got after Jacob and me as well).  While it wasn’t very successful, it did make for an entertaining and tension-packed game (mostly positive energy) as Nick tried to figure out who to mess up next.  I think he learned that this isn’t really a viable strategy but he sure did have some fun along the way.

The next day KC and Rita joined us at our home for an overnight and some final planning for the launch of HAVOC: the Hundred Years War.  We did manage to squeeze in a bit gaming though, including a couple of our new games from SimplyFun.  Saturday night we played Walk the Dogs, my first play of it with the family.  The kids really liked the game, though I somehow managed to pull off a surprise win by collecting five consecutive puppies.  This is a pretty chaotic game but  enjoyable nonetheless.

We also gave the junior version of Eye to Eye a try, and this was an even bigger hit.  As easy to play as Apples to Apples, I think this game is a bit more fun.  I you are a fan of Scattergories give this one a try.  It does seem to be a bit overpriced for what you get, but maybe I’ll find some other use for all those little wooden cubes.

On Sunday morning we played a 5–player game of Parthenon: Rise of the Aegean.  We again were able to play in just over two hours and response was overwhelmingly positive.  We did run into a kingmaker decision on the last turn, where Jacob was the Archon and could choose another player to damage pretty seriously (no commodity production that turn).  He chose to hurt KC, possibly because KC had been a bit more vocal in stating his ability to win that turn (I was in the same position).  This allowed me to win the game, but it was a hollow victory.

I coached Jacob a bit after the game, suggesting that it might have been better to hurt Matthew or Rita, who were unlikely to win that turn.  This is a tough call and raises some concerns about the game, but maybe this was an unusual occurrence.  In any case, we had fun and I look forward to playing again soon.

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!).

Jacob and Matthew teach For Sale to ginn5j’s (website) three sons.  This was a big hit and was followed by Pick Picknic.

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!

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.

Another group of BGG’ers play St. Petersburg.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unknown gamer learning Pirate’s Cove from the DVD.

As I mentioned before Jacob and I spent last weekend at Game Storm, the annual gaming convention on the north side of Portland.  The newly renamed Thunderbird Hotel is a fine venue for this event, a bit dated but very affordable with decent amenities.  This year we spent quite a bit of time in the RPGA section, but more on that in a bit.

I'll post day 3 later, then review the sights and sounds of the con (mostly games I watched other people play) in a final post.

Jacob and I arrived Friday evening around 5:15pm.  After checking into the hotel, my first task was to deliver a stack of two-player games (some of them mine, some Eric's) to KC and Jay for their annual two-player tournament.  I had planned to enter the tournament, but Jacob and I ran into Ken and Brandon in the lobby (they shared a room with us) and learned that they were going to try a Living Greyhawk RPGA adventure.  Jacob, Matthew, and I played in a Living Greyhawk adventure last year at GenCon, so this sounded like a fun way to continue with characters we had already made.  One problem: I left all of the materials at home.  Fortunately, we had an accomodating DM that allowed us to mock up our characters for one adventure (we made them as similar to the originals as we could, based on memory).

Our first adventure was a Living Greyhawk intro module.

The party did a great job killing all the bad monsters and stuff and we all survived, with Jacob and I advancing to second level (woo hoo).  The next morning I drove home very early to check on the cats and retrieve our RPGA materials, allowing us to transfer the information from Friday night's adventure to our "real" characters.

Our final game Friday evening was Colossal Arena, which Ken had not yet played.  I'm always happy to bring this game, and I think Ken and the boys enjoyed it as well.  If memory serves me, Jacob came out on top in this battle.

Like I said before, Saturday morning started out for me with a 90 minute round-trip to home.  Jacob stayed at the convention and joined a group playing Car Wars card game and Battle Cattle (combined).

Jacob enjoying Car Wars and Battle Cattle.

Jacob apparently had a blast playing these games, but I don't think they would be my cup of tea.  I probably shouldn't be too quick to judge but will definitely want to try before I buy.

I signed up to play Gettysburg: Badges of Courage, one of the newest Columbia Games block wargames.  I recently picked up this game (along with Eastfront and Rommel in the Desert) largely based on the high praise of Chris Farrell.  Jay and Ken were excellent teachers, setting up a day 2 scenario that played well as a 3v3 scenario.

Ken Crangle, on the right, was our teacher as well as the Union field general (our Meade, I suppose).

While this game shares many similarities with other Columbia block games, it has a very unique command / control and leadership influence system.  Columbia excels at adding twists like this to a base system that helps bring new flair to what could be a tedious model (new setting, same game).

Love those blocks.

Unfortunately we only had 2 hours to play, including instruction, so we barely made it through 2 turns.  I can't wait to play out an entire scneario.

While I was playing Gettysburg, Jacob sat through a 2 hour (!) panel discussion on how to be a great dungeon master. I checked in on him about every 15-20 minutes, and every time I looked in the room he was sitting attentively and very engaged.

Jacob sits enthralled in the dungeon master panel discussion.

Apparently he learned some solid tips that he hopes to apply soon as a DM, including:

• Make the rewards match the effort
• Don't play a PC as the DM
• It is about the fun of the players, not the fun of the DM
• Keep the focus on the story and the players.  Don't get wrapped up in the rules.

Next up was a Havoc playtesting session that KC and I ran.  I bet over 10 games of Havoc were played throughout the convention and we continue to hear excellent feedback on the game.  Perhaps you'll see it published before too long...

KC teaches another group how to play Havoc.

We were all ready for some lighter fare, so KC and Jay brought their collection of knick knacks (I'm not sure how it is spelled).  These are little robot-looking guys that you can play a stacking game with, trying to mimic the player to your right.  We had quite a bit of fun playing the game initially.

Jay tries to outdo us in knick knack.

Then we just started to try and make crazy or unusual stacking patterns.

This was my favorite of the day.  Nice work Ken.

While I finished putting stickers on my Gettysburg wooden blocks, KC teaches Ken, Jay, and Jacob the square version of NW Trek.

Jay ran a friendly session of the leaky lifeboat game.  Jacob loved this game.

Ken, KC, and I then decided to try and tackle Antiquity, the limited print run game published by Splotter Spellen last year.  I had only heard bits and pieces of this game but the scope and detail looked very appealing.  This is a tough game to play straight from the rules - we were an hour into it before we felt comfortable starting our first turn, and that first turn went slowly as we started to figure out the key mechanics (e.g., how do you build a farm if you need seed, when seed is produced by a farm.  Oh, you can explore to find seed.  Got it.).  The best analogy I can give for this game is that of an empire-building RTS computer game like Civilization or Age of Empires.  Each player begins spread out from the others, so there's little to no player interaction early on so we were mostly playing solitaire.  I had to leave after the fourth turn for an RPGA event and Jay took my place.

KC and Ken try and figure out Antiquity.

I came back about 3 hours later and they were still going at it.  I was enjoying it very much when I left and would like to play through an entire game.  I can see how it could be fiddly and slow, but something about it appealed to me.  I just need to find a full Saturday to devote to it (and get down to Albany to play Ken's copy).

I left the Antiquity game for another RPGA Living Greyhawk adventure. This one was a bit more challenging as we had to defeat some dervishes and an Ogre (hey, that's a big deal for 1-2 level characters!) but we all survived to fight another day.

Ken makes an attack roll for his half-orc barbarian.

I had this brilliant idea to teach RoboRally to Ken and Brandon at 10:30pm after about 15 straight ours of gaming action.  Nothing like a light game to close out the evening.  If there was ever a brain-burner game, this is it. Not only do you need to have great geometric spatial awareness, you need to think like a programmer and anticipate what the other robots will do.  I think everyone enjoyed it but it was certainly frustrating when robots got mis-programmed due to fatigue and newness to the game.  We'll give it another try when we are all fresh.

Ken, Jacob, Brandon and I trying out RoboRally.

All in all, a great start to the convention.  More to come soon on the Sunday action.

Mark Johnson poses the question “what's right for 2005?” in terms of year-end reports (games played, 5/10 reports, etc.).  I don't know either, but I can say this: my inbox is filled (well, not exactly as I used gmail to auto-archive and label them) with 117 unread spielfrieks messages that are mostly end of year reports that I probably won't ever read.  I also decided not to track my games played this year - that quantitative summary isn't very useful to me.  I prefer to rely on a subjective retrospective.

I am a fan of the aggregated 5/10 summary reports that should be coming out soon so that I can see broad trends (other than the fact that, surprise surprise, a lot of people were playing Ticket to Ride last year).  The problem, however, with the aggregated report is that you lose some of the value of the individual reports where you might find tidbits of surprise.

Looking back on 2004, what games do I subjectively recall playing a lot?  Here goes:

• Memoir '44 - at least 10 of these plays were at GenCon teaching others on behalf of Days of Wonder.  Even with that I played the game around 20 times I suspect.
• St. Petersburg - fun, easy to learn, great depth/time played ratio.
• San Juan - same comments as St. Pete.
• Acquire and Union Pacific stick out in my head not because I played them a lot, but because I played each about 3-4 times and would love to play them even more next year.
• Magic: the Gathering - still, in my book, one the best games ever designed.  And yes, you can play this game without taking out a second mortgage.
• Havoc, Pizzza, NW Trek, and Tres Amigos - KC Humphrey designs that I played frequently for a good reason (we are likely to publish one of these in 2005).
• O Zoo Le Mio - I think this is the best gateway game for kids ages 6-10 and I expect to see it come out even more frequently in 2005.

Beyond this list there are probably 50 or more games that I played once or twice.  There's good and bad in this approach, but mostly I love learning new stuff and surveying the landscape.  If it happens again next year that will be fine, though I'd like to explore a few games with depth and play them 5-10 times.

My unplayed but owned list isn't all that big any more.  I hope to play all of these in 2005:

• War of the Ring - Played 2 turns with Jacob, so we have a decent handle on the rules.  Time to play it through.
• Europe Engulfed - Played 1 or 2 turns in an aborted email game with Doug Walker (sorry Doug).  I need to reserve a 12 hour day to play this through face-to-face.
• 1830 -Considered one of the best of the 18xx games, and I haven't played any of them yet.
• Iron Dragon
• Silverton

Julie, the boys, and I drove out to Salishan today for Thanksgiving weekend.  Jan and David came out on Sunday and we are all very excited to have our first extended time here with a furnished home with very little work to do.  Plus... yesterday we had broadband cable internet setup and we are stylin' with wireless internet access here.

Yesterday we had some old, nearly dead trees removed so I've got some updated pictures of the house that give a better view.

This is the view from adjacent to the driveway.  That's the roof of the carport in the lower left, and you can see the non-functional elevator with the weathervane on top.

We don't have any big plans for the weekend other than watching some football, playing some games, and getting in some beach touch football action.  What games did I bring?  Here's the list:

• New England (it's Thanksgiving, after all)
• Domaine
• Betrayal at House on the Hill
• Foppen
• Attribute
• Middle Earth: the Wizards Challenge Decks
• Too Many Cooks
• Electronic Catch Phrase
• Buyword
• Havoc: The Hundred Years' War

View from the back of the house.  There's a great ocean view from the picnic table.

KC, Rita, and I ran two playtest sessions here in Portland in November.  Our goal was to get feedback on four of KC's designs and narrow down a list of publishing possibilities.  We had a great turnout, solid participation and feedback, and we now feel ready to move to the next step with one or two games, which is blind playtesting.  The following is a photo journal of the two playtest events.

The Events

The first event, held on November 6, was at the Midland Library on Portland's east side. This is a fantastic location for gaming and we plan on using it quarterly with our regular gaming group.  The event was from 10am - 6pm and we had 12 playtesters attend.  The second event, held on November 13, was held at my home with about the same number attending.

The day was fairly structured, divided into four sessions with KC teaching the game followed by a play of the game.  Each player would then fill out a feedback form on the game.  KC and I would stroll around jotting down notes on suggestions and complaints mid-game.

Pizzza

Pizzza was the first game tested each event.  This is a lighter family game where players have secret recipes and try to build pizzas that maximize the scores of their secret ingredients.

We made some changes to the board layout before the second week, putting the ingredient scoring tracks closer to their respective pizzas.

Havoc: The Hundred Years' War

Havoc is the most strategic of the four games, and my personal favorite. This is a poker/rummy style card game where players fight in a series of battles. Strategy comes into play as players decide what battles to fight and what battles to avoid.

We tweaked the rules for the Dogs a bit in the second week of testing as they seemed a bit too powerful.  Dogs, which are wild-colored zero rank cards, allow players to take cards back from the battlefield after a battle is resolved.

Northwest Trek

Northwest Trek is a tile-laying game where players try and collect snapshots of animals in a nature park.  The original version of this game uses Cairo tiles, which creates a very distinct geometry but can create some confusion when orienting tiles for placement.

Ever the adjuster, KC made some more tweaks for week 2 and tried an offset square-tile version of NW Trek which rated much higher relative to the other games than in the prior week.

Tres Amigos

Tres Amigos is the lightest of the four games - a trick-taking game with some similarities to euchre.  The game is a blast to play for those that like games in this genre.

There was a great finish to one of the games in week 2 - the last hand was played with at least three players in striking distance of a victory.

I took off for the east side of Portland to help Rita setup for a games playtest day we are running today to showcase and evaluate 4 of KC's game (Pizzza, Havoc, Northwest Trek, and Tres Amigos).  I'll post a report tonight or tomorrow on how things go today.

After setup, I joined KC, Rita and their kids along with Jeff and Jason, who drove up from Medford, for some Thai food.  Afterwards, we hopped over to KC's home for some gaming. I requested something shorter so I could get back home across town at a decent hour, and KC suggested we try his new design, currently named Metro 2.  This game is an extension and rework of the fine Dirk Henn game Metro.

Rita, KC, and Jeff (still munching on some Pad Thai) playing Metro 2.

KC happened upon the design while working on a square-tile variant (as opposed to the original cairo-tile design) of his tile placement game Northwest Trek.  This variant uses offset squares, leaving smaller squares distributed throughout the board (see the closeup of the board below).

Closeup of the Metro 2 board.

These smaller squares either represent 2x ending points (like the central station in Metro) or, if blank, waystations that can be built out as the game proceeds.  These waystations provide both a way to score more points and diminish the points earned by your opponents.  The geometry is also quite a bit different than the original metro, allowing the potential for head-on collision's (only allowed at the end-game if there's no other option).  Everyone that played enjoyed it, though it is a bit more cut-throat than the original game.  I think this is a positive as it leads to a bit more player interaction than Metro.

I've got a bit of gaming to write up.  If BGG is back online by the time I finish this, you'll find links to the games.  If not, well, I guess you'll know why there aren't any links.

On Friday I was able to participate in some lunchtime gaming at work.  This was the first Friday I'd been in the office for three weeks and it was nice to take a break during what was otherwise a very busy week.  Jason, Paul, and I got in two games: La Strada and Metro.

La Strada is a great game to play over lunch - short duration, easy to teach, and the decisions are never too difficult (hence little downtime).  This game was tight - Paul looked like he was in the lead, but on my last turn I took a gamble and connected to one of Jason's markets.  This turned out to be the right move, as he and I ended up tied for the lead with me winning by a tiebreaker (5 resources vs. 4).  Don't know the exact final scores as we didn't count markets where all three of us reached.

Next I taught Metro (though Jason recalled that he had played once before). Another enjoyable, light game with short playtime but enough depth to be interesting.  I believe Paul was the victor in this game.

Friday night the boys and I were home alone, so we took a look at the game closet and decided to pick out an unplayed game - Cosmic Encounter.

Matthew, Jacob, and I playing Cosmic Encounter.  Note the authentic Australian Football jerseys.

Now most of you reading this have probably played Cosmic before - it has been around for a long time.  We weren't disappointed, though we did spend most of the game wading through the rules.  I suspect this game will play much differently with adults, especialy when it comes to negotiating outcomes.  Both Jacob and Matthew are eager to play again, which is a good sign.  They even asked if it was possible to play with more than 4 players.

On Saturday afternoon we drove out to Salishan to do some work on the house and take delivery of some furniture.  The weather wasn't very pleasant so on Sunday we got in a decent amount of gaming.  Matthew and I played Battle Line a few times; this was a recent acquisition from Boards and Bits.  I'm glad this was reprinted, because it appears to be a winner.

Matthew facing off in Battle Line.

Battle Line has similarities to a number of games I've played recently, including Lost Cities and KC's Havoc prototype.  Lots of tension - do I play this card and start a battle?  Will I draw the third card I need to complete this wedge?  The tactics cards add an additional (but enjoyable) complexity, though in the first game we played we didn't realize you couldn't play another tactics card if you've already played more than your opponent.  Matthew enjoyed our plays, though the strategy is a bit much for him (I won both games easily).

Finally, on Sunday morning all four us decided to give Betrayal at House on the Hill.  I agree with Chris Farrell's confusion about the name of this game, but I (mostly) disagree with his assessment of the quality of the game.  We had a blast! I think our family is definitely in the target market for this game - it is heavy on theme, light on strategy, and there are plenty of opportunities for role playing and general silliness.

Cool minis in this game.  This is near the end of the game - our haunt was #1 - The Mummy.  Julie's character and the mummy are chasing Matthew's character, who is escorting the girl.  Unfortunately, the good guys weren't able to save the girl-bride from the mummy.

Players choose, or randomly draw, a character play.  The game happens in two phases: pre-haunt and post-haunt.  Pre-haunt, everyone is hanging out, exploring the house, gathering items, and waiting for really bad stuff to start happening.  As more omens are uncovered (cards drawn at particular rooms discovered randomly), the odds of the haunt starting increase.

When the haunt starts, the triggering player consults a table to determine which haunt scenario will play out (keyed off of the room and omen).  I like this mechanic in that it ties the theme of the haunt into something that happened in the game.  Eventually we'll run out of these (or hit a duplicate), but it should have good replayability for a while.  Post-haunt, one player is the traitor and all of the others are trying to stop the traitor from achieving her (secret) objective.  This is also when the monsters get unleashed, which are under the control of the traitor.  The heroes also have a secret objective, and team together to defeat the traitor.

I found there to be a decent amount of strategy and tactics - I certainly didn't feel like the game was playing itself, or that I wasn't able to control any of the outcome.  It was disappointing to lose the game to Julie because of a dice roll (I rolled a 5 instead the required 6 to banish the mummy), but we all came away excited to play another one.

GenCon is now over, it's hard not to be a little saddened by how quickly it wrapped up and how much I hoped to do/see but didn't have time to.  No worries; there's always next year and we have plenty of good memories from GenCon 2004.

Scheduled Gaming

I figured some folks might like to see an outside view of the convention center.  There's no way to depict the entire size of the place, but trust me it is rather large.  We never even made it to the CCG hall, which is supposed to be almost as large as the exhibit hall.

Our only scheduled event of the day was a Living Greyhawk adventure, hosted by the RPGA.  It is a bit difficult to describe what these living campaigns are about, but if you are interested I encourage you to head to the Living Greyhawk home page and explore a bit.  Think of it as a massively multiplayer RPG without the computers.

Our adventure was Castle Greyhawk, a module that is designed to handle a wide range of player levels.  We created our characters over the weekend, so we were very inexperienced.  We joined up with three other characters of similar level to try the ruins of Castle Greyhawk.  We had one problem though - our party was cleric-less!  How can you have a D&D party without a cleric!?  So, using the magical abilities of a pencil and eraser, I changed my character from a monk to a cleric in less than 10 minutes.  Even though the difficulty of this adventure was tunable to our average player level (APL), it was still quite difficult and we didn't get very far.  But we survived and gained some good experience and gold and are ready for our next Living Greyhawk adventure!  Matthew was a bit disappointed - he had fun, but in comparison to the awesome time we had playing BESM / Groundhog Recess, this was a bit of a letdown.

Demos

Jacob, Matthew, and I sat down for a demo of the Neopets TCG.  I wasn't impressed at all, but I suppose it could be a solid entry-level game for young children who you'd like to get adicted to money-sucking hobbies like CCG.  Is this a good thing?  I think Pokemon and Harry Potter are much better intro CCGs, and play very well with starter decks.

One hit for the three of us was MLB Showdown 2004.  I grew up playing tons of APBA Baseball, so this game was right up my alley; we are all baseball fans as well.  They've done a nice job simplifying the learning process, with a very simple intro game with little strategy leading to the advanced game where meaningful decisions can be made (stealing, advancing for an extra base, relief pitching, etc.).

For some reason I had a hard time convincing Jacob and Matthew to try out Heroscape, the miniatures game from Hasbro with configurable terrain.  The game is very easy to learn and has a number of scenarios included.  Most of the game is combat with miniatures, but the quality of the components and the variability of the different figures is very appealing.  This was too big to purchase and carry home, but this is a likely acquisition for us.  Perhaps a birthday present for Jacob?

As the convention drew to a close, we had about an hour of free time before driving to the north side for dinner with family.  I decided to break out Havoc, the new prototype card game designed by KC and teach it to the boys.  We had another boy join us and got through about 1.5 games.  Everyone enjoyed this poker/rummy style game very much.

Sites and Sounds

Here's a shot of the Face2Face games booth.  They have some interesting new titles out that I haven't yet had a chance to play.  They should make their booth more demo-friendly!

Here's Jacob getting ready to roll a giant d20.

This is a cool dragon that was built during the show starting from the ground up.  Sort of a paper mache thing with chicken wire.

We were well overdue for hosting a game day at our house, so we opened our home on Sunday to a day of gaming with the ripcity folks and more.  Turnout was outstanding - Doug & Mimi, KC & Rita, Kevin Graham, Ken Rude, and Mike Deans were all on hand.  Also joining us was Tim Isakson, a recent Portland transplant from Dallas.  I gamed with Tim last year in Dallas, and Tim is already well acquainted with several folks in my gaming circle.

Jenna and Charisma provided plenty of entertainment for Jacob and Matthew.  Here's their rendition of YMCA after a bit of dress-up play.

Doug, Mimi, Kevin, and Tim were first to arrive.  I knew several others would be arriving shortly, so I set them up with La Strada and explained the rules.  This is a very easy game to teach and is quite enjoyable (I've played it once so far), and response was favorable from the crew.  The usual first reaction when someone finishes this game is “wow, I can't believe it's over already.”  It does play very quickly (about 20-30 minutes) and you can't sit idle waiting for your chance to score.  Great enjoyment/time factor in this game though.  Kevin was the victor with 26 points.

Kevin (the unknown gamer), Doug, Mimi, and Tim finishing up a game of La Strada.

KC, Rita, and Kevin arrived shortly after I started the La Strada game, and we brought out one of Rita's favorites: Gold Connection (see also this article) by Sid Sackson.  This is a press-your-luck game ala Can't Stop, but with a bit more strategy.  Players cruise around a series of gold vaults stealing gold bars and trying to build sets of a particular color (!) of gold.  Within a vault, you can choose to steal as much gold as you like, but you must roll two dice and get a number higher than the sum of the face values on the gold bars plus the distance from your starting location.  So if I'm 1 space away, and want to steal two bars of gold with 1 & 2, I need to roll a 4 (1 + 1 + 2).  If you are successful, you get to add these to your collection.  Fail and you not only lose those but any others you've accumulated this turn.  You do get a consolation token if you fail, which can later be used to add to a die roll.

Ken, KC, Rita and I play Gold Connection as Julie looks on.

There's a bit more to the game than that, particularly around the scoring and building sequences within a color, but you get the idea.  I was the winner this time.  Very much a luck-driven game, but the same tension found in Can't Stop and I'd love to play this one again.

Doug, Mimi, Tim, and Kevin played Desert Oasis next.  This is a solid game with 4 or 5 players.  I taught this one to the group as nobody had played before; Doug pulled out the victory.

Ken, Julie, KC, Rita and I then played KC's card game Tres Amigos (and here).  KC has made some great tweaks to this Euchre-style trick taking game themed with the great Chevy Chase movie.  The reward for going nill (El Guapo) is not as high, and the player choosing this must take the turned-up trump card.  This makes for a much more balanced game and creates tougher choices.  In one case, I had a hand that I was fairly certain would win all the tricks.  The challenge is you must bid with the highest card to get the right to score this way, which means you are giving up some hand strength.  I didn't quite bit high enough, and Rita was able to overbid me and try and go for El Guapo.  With my hand as strong as it was, it was a sure thing for her.  In hindsight I should have layed down one of my higher cards; I take it out of the game and would still have taken 4 tricks easily.  I still managed to win the game, though it was very close.

Tres Amigos!

Rita, Kevin, Mimi, Julie, and Ken play San Juan.  Ken was the victor.

The one game I wanted to be sure to play was Goa, the new “gamer's game” designed by Ruediger Dorn.  Goa has had very favorable reviews (currently ranked at about an 8 on the 'geek), and has the sort of depth I really like.  Doug, Tim, and KC had all played before; Tim apparently A LOT, so I had some good teachers to bring me along.

When playing a game with this much depth, I typically tune out about half the rules explanation at the start, figuring that I'll learn as I go and folks will help be along the way.  There's a learning curve for this game, but everything makes intuitive sense and the pieces fit together nicely.

Goa reminds me of Industria and Princes of the Renaissance.  Auctions serve as the primary mechanic, and there appear to be many routes to victory.  Like Puerto Rico, it seems (first blush - not sure if this has proven itself) that a highly adaptive strategy is required.  The best approach most likely will not be the same from game to game.  I thought this game was much better than Industria though, and at least as good as Princes.  I kept wanting to do more on my turn - very tough choices.

A fumbled my way through the game and held up reasonably well.  Tim was the runaway winner with 43 points, Doug 37, KC 36, and Chris 35.  I can't wait to play this one again - it is at least an 8 for me.

Doug, Tim, KC and I played Goa.

I was a bit disappointed to miss out on a playing of Princes of Florence, a game that has been sitting unplayed on my shelf for about six months.  Kevin was the teacher and the winner.

Mike showed up later in the afternoon after refing some soccer.  He challenged Jacob to a home & home contest of Memoir '44.  They played the Sainte Mère-Eglise scenario, alternating Axis/Allies.  Jacob won both times.  According to Mike, “Jacob rolled lots of grenades, I rolled lots of flags.”  Sure...

My final game of the day was a first try at KC's latest card game titled Havoc.  This is the most strategic card game KC has designed, and will likely become my favorite.  I hope to get in a few plays at GenCon this coming weekend.

Players try to build their hands rummy style, trying to produce strong poker hands of up to six cards that will be used to fight a series of battles (the backdrop is the 100 years war).  At any time on a player's turn, he can cry havoc and engage in the next battle.  The winner of the battle will always win victory points, and depending on the battle 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. may also win points.  When a havoc is declared, a player must play at least two cards that will end up as all or part of their poker hand.  Each player in turn then either passes or lays down at least two cards.  If a player opts out of the battle, he draws a card as consolation.  Once all players pass, the played cards are compared for the best poker hand (6 card straight flush, 6 of a kind, etc. all the way down to high card).  The best hand wins the battle.

KC also added an interesting twist - the “dogs of war”.  In the midst of a battle, a player may play a special dog card that doesn't count toward the player's hand, but at the end of the battle can be used to fetch a visible card.  A nice addition that adds a strategic element.

Our game was close - KC finished with 27, Chris 26, Tim 17, and Doug 13.

Doug, Tim, KC, and Chris cry Havoc.

Ken, Rita, Mimi, and Mike play Too Many Cooks.  This particular round was funny - everyone bid to take no tricks!  Ken was the victor.

Well, we were able to able to pack in a ton of high quality games in an afternoon.  A nice prep for GenCon - expect to see daily reports from me over the weekend.

This game sat on my shelf too long - in fact, it was the only "big box" game remaining in my game closet that I had yet to play. I know, compared to many that isn't a bad track record - I've seen a number of game collections with 10 or more games still in shrink wrap.  Still, I'm a gamer not a collector and I want to play what I have.  Ken Rude and I arranged a late evening during the week where we could get together to try this one out.  Brandon, Ken's son, joined us for a three player game.

Serenissima is not a new game - it was released in 1996.  I picked up because, well, I'm still a wargamer at heart and I find it hard to resist games that can be played in a single sitting but still harken back to the days of youth playing Avalon Hill war games.  That's why Wallenstein is at the top of my list of games right now.

This is not exactly a wargame though - economy is at least as important, and it is through the trading and shipping of goods that money and ultimately victory points are earned. Each player takes on the role of one of the great nation-states on the Mediterranean - Venice, Genoa, Turkey, or Spain.  In a three-player game, Turkey is not played.  Each player starts with 2000 ducats, 10 sailors, and two galleys.  Each turn starts with bids to determine player order.  This turn order is used within each of the turn phases, which are:

1. Buy trade goods, build ships and fortresses, hire sailors
2. Movement
3. Combat
4. Capture and control ports
5. Sell goods and generate income

The goal is to control shipping ports and to fully populate their warehouses with a diversity of trade goods (there are 7 in all).  There are three kinds of ports - large (6 goods in the warehouse), medium (4), and small (2).  Players score 10 points for each large town with a filled warehouse, 5 points for each medium town with a filled warehouse, and 2 points for each small town with a filled warehouse.  Towns with unfilled warehouses score 1 point each, and if you control your main city you score 10 points.

Combat between ships or from ship to port is a function of the number of sailors on each side.  In ship to ship combat, each player attacks simultaneously and rolls a d6, adding the number of sailors on the galley to the roll.  Divide the result by 3 and round down, and that is the number of sailors on the opposing galley that are sunk.  It is possible to capture opponents' galleys if you eliminate their sailors and have enough of your own to move over and capture (each galley must have at least 1 sailor).

Within each galley there are five holding slots, and these can be filled with any combination of sailors or trade goods as long as there is at least 1 sailor and no more than five total items on the galley.  A ship's movement range is equivalent to the number of sailors.  So it is clearly an advantage in both movement and combat to have more sailors on board; however, this will limit the number of trade goods that you can carry around.  You can check out the complete rules right here.

Ken played Genoa, Brandon was Spain, and I played Venice.  Things started off nice a peaceful - I expanded east into Turkey and was getting a decent diversity of goods.  Ken capitalized on some goods that Brandon had not yet traded yet in any of his ports by trading that good to his major town.  Twice he earned a 1000 ducat bonus for these trades!  While it helped brandon populate his major town with goods, this was clearly a good move for Ken since it allowed him to quickly get an advantage in both ships and sailors.

As so often happens in three player games, the first to get aggressive often pays dearly.  I decided to attack an ill-defended port of Ken's (I believe it was one of his gold ports) and successfully capture it.  Unfortunately it brought on his wrath and not only did I lose that port back to him the next turn, I also lost two ships in the vicinity.

Ken played very well - he intuitively figured out (I suspect now that this is a common game strategy) to diversify his fleet by keeping some trade ships around with few sailors (usually 2) while building a separate fleet of combat ships with 5 sailors each.  These ships, with their extensive range, were able to wreak havoc on my ships and ports.  We decided to cut the game a bit short (I think we played only 8 turns instead of 10), and though I did a pretty good job of holding off his final attack, he did manage to take a port away from me at the end.  It didn't matter much though - Ken had filled a good portion of his medium ports (because of the shortened game, nobody got a completed large port) and beat us handily.  I don't have the final scores in front of me, but Ken beat me by at least 10 points, with Brandon finishing behind me by about 10 points.

Fun game - I suspect it can be played in 2-3 hours and I look forward to playing it again.  One criticism of the game is that it often follows the same pattern - trade or the first 2/3 of the game, then just start hammering the opponents by attacking.  Ours certainly played out the same way.