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GenCon '06
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Well, here it is, my annual GenCon list. It's a tradition. It is the umpteenth GenCon list you will read, so don't expect it to be groundbreaking or anything. I'll just mention the games I played that made impressions on me, and what I saw that was especially neat. If you want a full-on report of GenCon, I'm sure you can find it at a myriad of places across the web.
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Posted Tue Aug 15, 2006 5:40 am
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Blue Moon City was my personal favorite of the convention. So here's the thing about Blue Moon - if you like the art, which I do, you're going to love Blue Moon City. The art is just phenomenally good. It's honestly the best art I've ever seen in a board game. I could spend hours just looking at the pictures on the cards. The character art evokes this great sense of fantasy and mystery, and in between turns, I found myself imagining what these people must be doing while they're building the ruins of Blue Moon City. I could picture the majestic dragons, perched atop spires, enigmatically watching the creatures below toil away, and dropping a single precious dragon scale as a token of appreciation prior to flying on. I imagined the majestic tower in the middle of the city, and the joy the people of the City felt as it slowly was rebuilt by their collective work. I imagined the intrigue that must be going on - the power jockeying between the various peoples as they worked together, but secretly hoped to edge one another out for reasons all their own.
Then somebody would say, "Hey, Jay, it's your turn, what the hell are you doing over there?" And then I'd play some crystals and move my little dragons around.
Honestly, it was a fantastic game, made even better by the great art. I was surprised that I liked it so much, and I'm disappointed that Thurn and Taxis beat it for the SdJ. Thurn's so dry, and this one is just so thematic. And fun - did I mention it's fun?
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Close behind Blue Moon City was Buccaneer. Does anybody doubt that Stefan Dorra is the filler king? He's really got some great light games. For Sale is probably my all-time favorite filler, and I also love Bucket King and Hex Hex. I played Intrigue for the first time at GenCon as well, and loved it, too.
So for those who haven't tried it yet, here's Buccaneer in a nutshell. You've got this little stack of wooden pirate disks with numbers on them. Then there's a row of ship cards in the middle of the table. Each ship provides a bit of gold as treasure if it is captured by the requisite number of pirates. On a turn, you take one of your pirate disks and put it atop someone else's disk, creating a stack of two with yours on top. You may also claim someone else's stack of disks by putting one of your own disks (or stacks) on top of theirs. When a stack of disks has enough pirates in it, you can choose to take a stack you control and steal a pirate ship instead of building a new stack. You get all the money listed on the ship, but then you have to take that money and pay the other pirates in your stack. A player gets one gold for every point of pirate value in the stack below the first one. In addition, the owner of the stack gets a little reward chip - one of four things is on each ship. At the end of the game, the winner is the person with the most gold. Bonuses are awarded to those who hold majorities of the special rewards that each ship offers.
That's it. It's very easy to understand, and very easy to play. It takes maybe 30 minutes to play, making it just long enough to interest me, but light enough to teach anybody in a hurry. I really dug it. We bought it, of course.
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Here's my surprise find of the Con. I hadn't heard anything about this and didn't even see it until Sunday, where it was hiding at the Steve Jackson booth (along with Sisteray's Recess, which we are refusing to buy until Morgan provides signed copies). My wife (MUGal) and I got to play Seismic with John Nephew, the owner of Atlas games. That was neat.
Okay, so what's Seismic? Well, imagine Caracassonne, but with hexes instead of squares, and only roads on the tiles. You draw a tile and add it to two face up tiles so that you always have three to choose from. Then you play one of those three tiles anywhere you'd like, subject to normal tile-laying rules (attach to the existing structure, roads have to match up with roads). If you want, you can claim an unclaimed road with a little wooden cube. Roads are worth points at the end of the game if both ends have a special terminus hex, which is worth a number of points (I think 1-6). A road scores one point for the value of each of its termini, plus a point for each tile that makes up the road. So a four hex road with a +2 end and a +3 end is worth 9 points.
So that's it.
Oh, except I forgot one thing - EARTHQUAKES! If you draw an earthquake tile, some of the structure is destroyed! The earthquake has a value from 1-6. You start at the center hex (San Andreas) and count which of the six cardinal directions has the longest line of hexes. The longest one is the target of the earthquake. Starting next to the middle hex, you count a number of tiles equal to the value of the earthquake, and remove them from the game, along with the cubes that are atop them. Thus, the really long road network you've been making can be destroyed due to the whim of Mother Nature.
There's a surprising amount of strategy in this game, as you try to lengthen the side of the board with your opponents' best roads, hoping they'll be targeted by earthquakes. But you also try and build your own road networks, and try to manipulate the roads so that you can steal the best roads of your opponent (just like in Carc!) And since only the rows directly extending from the center are vulnerable to earthquakes, you really try hard to claim the good spots that are in the nether regions between the cardinal rays.
It's fast, with minimal downtime, and plenty of agonizing as you try and decide whether it's worth it to claim a choice spot or if you should try and meddle with your opponents instead. And those earthquakes do tend to come up at the worst times!
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This was the best value at GenCon. Sarah and I got to play Take Stock with Simon Hunt, the designer, and we bought the very last copy at the Z-Man booth, helping him to sell out at 3:30 on Saturday. For this, we got his autograph, a picture with him, and a very enthusiastic "WHOO-HOO!" that I'm sure they could hear all the way over at the miniatures hall. The game is great value because it's really fun, and I felt like I got exactly what I paid for. You get two decks of cards and a bunch of chips, packed in a very nice, sturdy box, for only $15. That's what a game like this should cost - not $30 like a few other certain companies charge (who shall remain nameless...)
Anyway, Take Stock isn't really a stock market simulation. Instead, it's a card game with some investing mechanics. You've got five commodities, and a handful of cards. Each card has a value on it. On your turn, you can play a card on the appropriate commodity, causing its value to increase. You can only increase a commodity's value (not decrease it) and you can only step it up by 4 at a time. The higher-value cards have, on the bottom side, a number of stock symbols on them. If you'd like, you can choose to spend your turn "investing" in a company by laying out the stock card with the symbols facing up, and thus earning 1-3 points multiplied by the highest value on the commodity. Or you can take your turn to draw a random event card, which you can set aside and use at an opportune moment. Finally, you can decide to play risky and draw TWO event cards, but then you must choose one of those and play it immediately (and they're about as likely to hurt you as help you, meaning that 25% of the time you're going to get screwed if you do this).
The thing that makes it cool is that the cards that you invest with are the exact same cards you use to drive the value of the commodity up. And of course if you start driving up commodity values, others will avoid investing in that commodity, and use random events to crush your hopes and dreams. So you try to bluff a little, pretending to be interested in one stock when really you're hoping to crash it, and so forth. It's really a neat little game that I think I'll review as soon as I'm finished with this list.
It's fitting that a game about investing is such a smart buy, isn't it?
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Not everything I played was brand new. I brought my copy of Wallenstein (and it survived the trip home) and I was able to play it twice. I really love this game a lot. The cube tower is just neat. Even so, I've never won - although I think I hit upon a strategy near the end of the second game I played that might help me a lot next time I play (so St. Louis area gamers, BEWARE!)
I mention Wally (as I affectionately call him) for a few reasons. First off, whenever I get it out to play, every person who walks by has to stop and marvel at the wonder of the cube tower for a few minutes. It's hilarious when they realize that cubes are going in, but different cubes are going out. One guy that I didn't know actually crawled up on top of the table we were playing at just to see how it worked. Second, I got a look at the new Rio Grande version, which will be published later this year, entitled Shogun. It looks pretty neat. The game looks about the same, but the cards are language-independent and the board is Japan instead of Germany. I think the Japan map will make for different strategies, as it's long and skinny instead of blobby like Germany, but the game will be essentially the same. In other words, before you go and pay a lot of money for the out-of-print Wallenstein just so you can get a cube tower, wait to take a good hard look at Shogun.
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So if you've heard anything about GenCon, you've probably heard about this ribbon-collecting thing that Mayfair was doing. They had a deal where when you played certain demos, you'd collect a ribbon. When you collected all five ribbons (sheep, brick, ore... you know the rest) you were Knighted (in an official ceremony by a very bored-looking woman with a wooden sword). But far more important than your title (since you didn't get any land) was a 50% off coupon for one item in the Mayfair booth.
Well, I bought Elasund. I didn't get to play a whole Elasund demo, but the few turns I did play were fun. I had a blast playing with my fellow demoers, especially when one of them suddenly caught on that 6's and 8's were rolled more often than 2's and 12's (this made me laugh out loud - not because I was making fun of them, but just because I thought it was genuinely funny when he suddenly realized why some of the buildings were getting rolled all the time!) I figured that Elasund is a $50 game and it's a good idea to save $25.
My wife has a different strategy, and actually used her coupon to buy a game she LIKED MORE! The horror! So she bought Weinhandler, which I think was her favorite game of the weekend. As we said, "We like auction games, and we LOVE wine, so what's not to like?" Plus the stacking mechanic reminds me of Bucket King, which as I've already mentioned, is like one of the greatest games ever.
Weinhandler definitely wins the award for "Most Creative Way to Choose a Start Player." You take one of the plastic wine bottles that comes with the game and spin it - whoever it points at does not get kissed, but does get to start. (Well, I guess you COULD kiss them, but if you've been to GenCon you know what a risk THAT would be.)
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If you were knighted, you got entered into a drawing for a 10th Anniversary Catan set! I think this alone kept almost all the boardgamers around until 2 PM on Sunday - I know we were leaving at noon until we found out when the must-be-present drawing would be!
The ribbon collecting game was a great idea, and I'm sure that Mayfair's booth probably ran through more demos than ever before thanks to the program. We liked it a lot, and played some Mayfair games we probably wouldn't have otherwise (which, I suppose, was the point). If the other game companies are smart, they'd be wise to consider this same sort of deal...
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At the Mayfair booth, we bought Beetlez, which is a kid-friendly real-time memory game, and also Station Master, which is another stock-collection game. I played Intrigue and REALLY liked it, but then I forgot to buy it on Sunday. Oh well - there's always the next game order, right?
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Okay, so I saw it, but I didn't get to play it. Usually at GenCon, FFG has a few copies of their next great thing, and they sell through those few in a hurry. It's always an advance shipment, and the rest of the games are on a boat on the way to this continent from China or something. I always take advantage of this - I got Arkham Horror last year, and Game of Thrones three years ago. But this year I guess Marvel Heroes didn't quite make it, which is really too bad. In fact, even the demo copy almost didn't make it, and didn't arrive at the Con until Friday afternoon! They had three copies to give away, and they did this with a raffle, which I (sadly) lost. Personally, I think the world has missed a great opportunity in letting me have this game first, because I would've reviewed it and told you guys all about it.
But anyway, it was cool-looking. The minis looked very nice and were full-color. The mapboard was a little bland, but I'm assuming that won't matter too much. The game itself looked great! I can't wait to get it. I'll throw it on the next game order, too, along with Intrigue.
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So what's up with all these companies not showing for GenCon? I know that ADB has been there a lot in the past, but this year they were AWOL. So was GMT, who I think has always been at GenCon. I was pretty disappointed in both of these companies choosing to bail on the Con. I was looking forward to checking out Federation Commander, as I used to play SFB but just don't have the patience anymore. And I was hoping to check out Conquest of Paradise, too. I'm not a huge wargamer, but I could learn. I never will if the games aren't there, though.
I did find a few random copies of some ADB stuff at the Ad Astra booth, but nobody there knew a thing about the game, and had no idea if they had copies of Fed Commander or not. Too bad - they missed out on what was probably an easy sale to me.
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11.
Board Game: Titanic
[Average Rating:4.81 Unranked]
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I should probably mention a few random things that sort of set up "Con Ambience." I like to go to GenCon because, as I put it, I like to revel in Geek Culture. I don't like anime that much myself, but I sure do enjoy seeing all the anime folks get so excited and dress up in funny hair. I'm not a LARPer, but the roving Gangrel make the Con a little more entertaining. I'm not a minis gamer, but the setups that people build are simply amazing.
But this year, the oddest thing happened. Our hotel flooded. The Westin has its pool on the third floor, and the main ballrooms are directly beneath it. I don't know what happened - either a water pipe broke or the pool cracked or something, but before anybody knew what was happening, thousands of gallons of water were gushing from the ceiling and pouring out of the chandeliers above the escalators. Water was coming down the escalator, and the skywalk from the Convention Center to the Westin was shut down. It reminded me - vividly - of being on the Titanic!
My first thought was, "Oh great, some really obnoxious gamer broke the hotel, and they'll never invite us back again." Then I realized that even if an overweight LARPer destroyed the pool with an ill-advised cannonball dive, the Westin was still making money hand over fist on parking alone ($96 for my four nights of parking! Holy *!@#!) And hey, the dousing that a few people got was very likely their only shower of the whole Con!
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Eventually the Con had to end. On Saturday night, my extended gamer family (there are about 30 of us that meet up each year at GenCon, with more joining us each year) played Time's Up. I drank a little too much (damn Irish Car Bombs) but managed to play well enough anyway. (My clue for Leonid Brezhnev: "Okay, this guy is a Russian dancer... ballet I guess... first name is a Zodiac sign that's a lion... last name is the same as a Soviet premier...") Okay, maybe I drank a lot too much. ("I don't care if Cthulhu is what they guessed, it's close enough to H. P. Lovecraft that we're keeping this card, and if you don't like you'll have to come over here and take it from me!") Regardless, my all-drunk team managed to win BOTH our games of Time's Up, and in my drunken state I was even able to convince the Hyatt's Hall Captain that we belonged in the conference room that we randomly took over and started using for our game.
So here are my closing thoughts. There is always talk that GenCon is dying, that it's too big and bloated, or that it caters too much to one group but not another. I've heard, most recently, talk of doom because Peter Adkinson is going to invite more computer gaming companies to the convention. Somebody here on the Geek was even offended that board games are referred to as "tabletop games," and used that as evidence that the Con was just not for board gamers.
But I enjoy it every year. I played a LOT of games (27 in all) and tried more new games in four days than I usually do in four months. I got to see new product that's not out yet, talk to designers I respect and enjoy, and meet new friends from BGG. I got a couple of good deals and was happy to pay full retail for some other stuff that's hard to find locally. I got to bask in Geek Culture and cross-pollinate a little, stopping in various booths to see what was up in the worlds of collectible card games, minis, and role-playing. And I got to play Time's Up while silly-drunk.
If you read these post-con reports every year and have never gone, but wonder if you'd have fun, the answer is almost definitely yes. There is certainly a way to go about attending the Con, and I highly advise that you preregister, get your hotel early, and ask around here for advice on how to best enjoy yourself while there. I wouldn't listen to the doomsayers and Negative Nellies that are convinced that GenCon LLC is out for nothing but to get your money and try to screw you over as much as possible. There's a magic to GenCon that you won't find anywhere else, where all manner of geek mingle freely and take over an entire major metropolitan downtown, to the point that the frat boys and jocks run quaking in fear when a bunch of Klingons in drag come sauntering down the street discussing their last game of SFB. There's just nothing like it.
To risk sounding like a totally cheesy fanboy, it's really true: it really is the best four days in gaming!
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Posted Tue Aug 15, 2006 5:40 am
If you're thinking will I have fun at GenCon, the answer is YES. Just do it, I'm glad I did.