Monica

True Dungeon

2019-07-01T01:54:21Z

Both last year and this year at Origins we played True Dungeon adventures (one each year). I don't want to spoil either of the adventures we played (which they continue to offer), so I'll speak here in generalities.

True Dungeon is something like D&D adapted for physical sets. An adventure consists of a story played out in a series of seven rooms. You play one of a dozen or so character classes and each has some special rules and abilities. Spellcasters usually have to memorize things (cleric: identify this prayer bead to successfully cast your spell, etc). To disarm traps, rogues have to manipulate a gadget that is akin to playing the old board game Operation (move a pointer through a maze without touching any walls). Combat is done on shuffleboards; monster hit areas, including vulnerabilities, are drawn on one end, and you slide disks from the other to attack. (I'm not sure if monster damage is pre-determined or randomized; I didn't get a good look at what the GMs were doing.)

Before the session starts, the players get together to choose classes (no duplication allowed) and equip characters. Equipment comes in the form of tokens; each time you play you get a bag of ten (most common, a couple uncommon, one rare -- this should sound familiar to anyone who's played collectible card games like Magic). Naturally, you can buy specific tokens from them. Both times we played, the assortment we got for that session was not, by itself, particularly useful (I don't think my bag included a weapon, for instance), so you're relying on the experienced players who show up with their vast collections who can say "sure, you can borrow this sword" or "hey cleric, here are some healing scrolls, just in case". At the end of an adventure you get a few more random tokens. "Equipping" consists of laying out the tokens you're going to use (armor, weapons, cloaks, rings, etc) for a GM who records your final stats on a sheet that is carried through the adventure and given to each GM. You can then put most of them away, aside from weapons and any expendables you want to have on hand.

The game can accommodate up to ten players in a group. Last year we had only three, which did not work well. In retrospect we should have asked if the next timeslot's group was also light and, if so, could we combine. This year when we signed up we looked for a timeslot that already had some people and ended up with eight, which worked much better.

An example of "worked better": some rooms have a subtle clue that, once you notice it, helps you in solving whatever that room's problem is. With more people there's more likely to be someone who notices subtle clues. Of course, the flip side is that with more players you can end up in "too many cooks" territory when solving puzzles, but our eight-person group worked pretty well together.

They bill this as a two-hour game, but it's actually both more and less. Each room has a time limit of 12 minutes, so the worst-case scenario for the actual playing is 84 minutes. (That might even be typical, as even if you finish quickly, you've got to wait for the group ahead of you to clear the next room.) But then there's the time you spend equipping; I didn't notice last year, but this year we entered our dungeon at least 45 minutes after our nominal start time. And they ask you to show up 20 minutes early. So while it's listed as a two-hour game, when scheduling at a convention, use a three-hour timeslot.

The game is dark. Rooms are generally lit in green, and when you've used half your time it switches to red. (That warning is a nice touch.) Players are issued small flashlights; I think they intend for you to clip them onto your character card (which is hanging around your neck), but since I needed to be able to read part of my card (the spell list) I ended up tying the flashlight around my wrist. I had a pile of one-use magic items in my pockets that I could in principle use in combat when needed, but as a practical matter, there was no real way to dig through them in that lighting. Anticipating that, I distributed tokens among different pockets in my jeans, but even so, I mostly couldn't use them. I've seen pictures of players with sashes full of tokens (not sure how they're attached), presumably to solve that problem. Last year our third player, who came in costume, had a big shield full of tokens. I've been thinking that something like a triptych might work better for me -- easier to use than a sash and easier to pack than a shield.

Last year I played a monk. The monk doesn't use much equipment but fights two-handed. Well, sort of: you get two disks in each round of combat instead of one, but you launch both with the same hand, one immediately after the other. (The second one has to be underway before the first one stops moving.) That was...ok, but I don't think I did a lot of damage, and actual two-handed combat (with weapons) sounds like a better idea to me (I'm probably about as good with either hand). That's the ranger's ability, and ranger was my second choice for this year.

This year I played a bard. I wrote about that a little before the convention, in particular the "bardsong" ability. They describe bards as jacks of all trades; a bard can fight, has some spells (D&D: like sorcerors, not like wizards), can use lore knowledge to get hints, and can sing during combat to give bonuses to other players. It turns out a bard cannot sing while fighting, even if a bard player can demonstrate the ability to do just that, absent a magic item that enables it. So I had weapons in my pocket but I ended up giving bonuses (and casting some spells) instead of fighting myself. I ended up feeling a little too much like a back-end support character without primary contributions, so next time I'll try something else.

We had, I think, three combats (maybe four? I think three). I sang a variety of medieval and renaissance songs not in English, to minimize distraction. (In one fight with a sort of demonic character, I switched to singing psalms. I don't think anyone noticed.) But because the other players and GM needed to communicate about hits and damage, I ended up standing back and singing quietly. Meh on the bardsong ability; I wasn't able to make it sufficiently fun.

I invoked "lore" two or three times. The way this is implemented is that, before the game starts, you're given a set of labeled glyphs to memorize. When you use the ability, the GM shows you a glyph and if you can name it, you get the clue. I thought there would be a lot fewer of these! For some reason, in advance I thought there were 14; there were actually 24 and many of them were not at all intuitive. (I wonder if they randomize the labels for each adventure, or if playing the same class repeatedly lets you build up knowledge.) Nonetheless, I got one or two right immediately, and in one room I initially said I didn't know and then 30 seconds later said "wait, that's X" and the GM gave it to me.

The spells I had were interesting but not optimal for this adventure. In particular, the bard's highest-level spell does mass damage, and we never faced groups of opponents. Last year there was one group.

Half or more of the adventure was puzzles. This year's puzzles were well-done. (Last year's were a mixed bag, though we also had fewer players and thus fewer brains to tap into.) Two of this year's were especially fun to solve and made good use of props and actors. (I think those facts are related.) In one room, the GM said that since we didn't have a rogue, our bard could try the rogue gadget to get a clue. This confirmed my initial impression of the rogue gadget. :-) I gave it a good try, but...not my strong suit. Also, it takes enough time and focus that you miss out on what else is going on in the room at the time, so I suspect playing a rogue would feel somewhat isolating.

The sets were well-done, including the animated big-ass monster in our last room. Another monster was represented by an actor. Last year I think the GMs (each room has one) were also actors; this year there were GMs who were not actors (and not in costume). Of course most of the players aren't in costume either (some are), but it's something I noticed anyway.

I think the GMs had some latitude to make tweaks on the fly. This makes sense; nobody enjoys an adventure where half the party gets killed before the end, after all, and people are paying (substantially) to play. Keeping it challenging but achievable with highly varied player abilities and group sizes seems hard, especially when each GM only sees a group in one room. I wonder if they're issued any heuristics or if it comes down to individual GMs winging it. (An example: in one of our rooms I bumped into a bucket on the floor and looked inside. It seemed empty, but the GM told me it contained holy water and the person who'd been lobbing flasks of same at an undead monster could refill them instead of turning in the tokens. Actually, the GM told me, there was a leak in the ceiling and that's why the bucket was there.)

I had fun. I'm still looking for the character class(es) that will be the most fun for me, but I have ideas. It's expensive enough that I'm not going to play a lot, so equipping is likely to continue to depend on teammate bounty. Which is fine; the hard-core players seemed ready to equip others. If our tokens were organized we might have been able to make some trades, but when what you've got is a bag of misc, it doesn't seem practical.

comments

Origins game con

2019-06-17T03:48:04Z

We played a bunch of games at Origins Game Fair, most of which we liked. Here's my summary of them, in order of play:

Oceans (sequel to Evolution): This game fixes the biggest issues I have with Evolution. You are playing one or more species of creatures (ocean-dwelling this time), evolving them to add useful traits like the ability to gather more food or protection against predators. Some traits are symbiotic in various ways, so you interact with your neighbors. And everything's a carnivore, so anything can attack anything else for food (modulo those defenses I mentioned). The separate tracking for size and population is gone (it's just one stat now), and the traits seem more coherent and not as numerous. With some actions you can adjust the food supply to your creatures' liking. Oceans is a Kickstarter slated for publication later this year.
Spirit Island: You are playing the spirits native to an island that is being invaded by colonists. They keep coming (and building towns and cities); your goal is to drive them off the island before they taint too much of it. It's a cooperative game, with each spirit having some different abilities and some different action cards. We had four players and that worked well; I'm guessing that you remove map segments with fewer players so the balance should stay about the same, but I think it would play differently on a smaller map.
Albion's Legacy: Another cooperative game. You're playing one of the major characters from the Arthurian legends (there were seven or eight to choose from), each of which has different abilities, and you have a common quest on a map that is progressively revealed as you explore the lands around Camelot. (Don't think too hard about why Arthur, Gawain, Lancelot, and others don't already know the lands around Camelot...). The play mechanics were fairly straightforward but the board is busy and hard to see, you depend a lot on the right map tiles coming out (and they're random), and we spent a lot of the game not knowing what to do. Unnecessarily complex; thumbs down.
Arkadia: I liked this one more than Dani did. It's a worker-placement game where you're (collectively) building buildings and ultimately a castle. Buildings are commissioned by one of four guilds and workers are paid in guild tokens when buildings are finished (usually from a mix of players). The player who completes the building also collects another guild token and the right to place a castle piece. Each castle piece contains a guild symbol, pieces can cover other pieces, and the current number of a particular guild showing is what those guild tokens are worth should you choose to sell. You can sell during the game (a limited number of times but you decide when), so you're trying to manipulate prices to your own benefit. This game is probably under an hour without teaching.
True Dungeon Adventures: This is that LARP-style game I've mentioned before, where a team of players go through a series of rooms with puzzles and/or combats. This scenario was called Vault of the All-Father and involved cleaning up a trashed temple to the Norse gods. This year's puzzles were better than last year's: they were all solvable with enough time (which is limited) and cleverness, but they weren't too easy. (Last year one was definitely too hard.) I played the bard, which turned out to be underwhelming so next time I'll try something different. (I hope to write more about this separately. I know I said that last year too.) Followup here.
Dwarven Smithy: This was a nice game. Each player (max four I think?) is playing a dwarven smith (funny thing), who refines raw materials (like silver and gems), uses those materials to craft items either as tools (to improve future builds) or for sale, and is competing to build special secret items for the king. You only have so much room in your workshop for materials and the things you're making, though, so sometimes you have to push things out to your market where other players might buy them to use for their projects. Raw materials and things to build come from two different decks, and you decide how to allocate your card draws each turn. All four players were very close at the end, much closer than the person teaching us said is typical for beginners.
Endeavor: Age of Sail: You're playing European explorers out to explore and reap profits from foreign lands. The mechanic here is nice: each turn you gain some workers, build a new building, collect some previously-allocated workers (not necessarily all of them), and then use your buildings to take actions on the board. Common actions are to plant your flag (claim a land territory) or sail (gain presence overseas somewhere). Each foreign land requires several (I think five?) ships present there to open it up, at which point the majority player gains a bonus and anybody with sea presence can start claiming land. Another action is to take goods (in the form of cards) from foreign lands where you have presence; the cards usually let you advance on the tracks that control how many workers you get, how good a building you can build, or plain old victory points. The game felt well-balanced and, as is typical for worker-placement games, there's always more that you want to do than you have people for. All of the players (we had four; don't know if it can take more) liked this a lot.
Railways of the World: We played this last year too but haven't found it for sale at a reasonable price. This year we had five players (at least one of whom was hardcore) playing on a map of the eastern US. The map is large and we were playing on a large round table, which meant there was no place I could sit and be able to see much, which sucked. The game itself is fun but that session was not fun.
Get Off My Land: Meh. Four players are farmers on a 5x5 board, competing to clear forests, plant crops (or raise animals), harvest stuff at the right time, and defend your holdings. A few tiles have oil for extra bounty (not enough to go around of course).
Power Grid: We bought this game after playing it last year, so we already knew we like it. We had a four-player game this time, playing on the German map. One player was hardcore and it looked like he was going to win, but he didn't. The end felt rushed this time; the game wasn't rushed overall, but the pacing felt weird. Maybe that's the effect of having one player who knows the game inside and out and three more who don't. Still fun, just different.
AuZtralia: On a stylized map of (part of) Australia in the 1930s, up to four players build rail, establish farms, mine raw materials, build defenses, and fight Cthulhu, as one does. This was a lot of fun! On your turn you can take your choice of several actions; each action costs time, and you advance your marker on the time track to reflect that. Play proceeds from the earliest time on the track, so this means a player might go twice in a row, order tends to vary, and you can do that expensive thing but then you'll have to wait. The game starts with an additional marker already on the time track (maybe around a third of the way in?), and when the first player passes it it starts to move too, one space per move. That marker represents the monsters, who are progressively revealed (or occasionally spawned) and move to blight your farms and attack your ports. If any player's port (starting space) is lost then everybody loses; otherwise, players and the monsters score after every player crosses the finish line. We lost, so I haven't seen that part yet.
878 Vikings - Invasions of England: This is a miniatures/military game. Four players play on two sides, English and Vikings; on each side one player's people are weaker but more numerous and the other's are stronger but less numerous. The English get some additional grunt labor when their towns are attacked. The Vikings keep coming, wave after wave. Order of play is randomized each turn (and not known in advance). When it's your turn you're playing your whole side, not just your pieces (in collaboration). This felt pretty brutal and we ran out of time before finishing. Neither of us enjoyed this.
Railroad Rivals: We had signed up for a different game in this slot, but there were two games with insufficient players so we joined this one instead. On each turn you take a city tile and a railroad stock tile (in turn order, which is bid each round). Each city tile has connections on its sides (not necessarily all four) that are the names of railroads. You play a city tile (not necessarily the one you just drew; you have a hand) next to another city such that the railroad names match, mark the connection as yours, and place a specified number of goods on the new city. After everyone has done this you each deliver one good from one city to its neighbor; the owner of the connection gets a point, and the railroad involved has its stock price go up one. Final score is based on the value of the stocks you hold. I think I've played this game once locally but don't know who owns it. We both liked this.
Mare Nostrum - Empires: This is an ancient-Mediterranean civilization-building game. Players claim territories that produce goods, improve them so they produce more goods, build military units to defend them, and sometimes attack because your own lands never seem to produce quite enough. There's a novel trading mechanic and then you use the goods you have (each turn) to build stuff -- those improvements or units, or maybe a wonder or leader that grants special powers. This isn't quite the ancient history we know; while the usual suspects are there, when we showed up I was assigned Atlantis. Atlantis, in case you're wondering, is just through the strait of Gibralter to the west, near both Spain and north Africa. Each position has a special ability; Atlantis's is building triremes for cheap. Rome has a different military advantage, someone else is good at trade, and I don't know what the others are. The game was interesting but the end-game was rushed; in the first turn after the first significant military action, Egypt built the pyramids and won. I expected there to be more of a middle game between initial expansion and the end. (I don't know if our game was typical in that regard.) Putting this in a three-hour slot (especially with having to teach it) was optimistic, I thought; we were out of time when Egypt won.
Railroad Revolution: Another worker-placement game, and fun. You're building the American rail and telegraph network. On your turn you can build rail, build a station in a city that your rail connects to, build part of the telegraph network, or use certain special abilities. Builds other than rail produce various benefits, an important one of which is giving you specialist workers. There are four types of workers plus the generics, and the actions I just listed are modified if you use a specialist (depending on which one). One of them tends to make things less expensive, one tends to give you some additional benefit (like building an extra track segment when you build rail), and so on. This is probably a 90-minute game if you already know how to play. It worked well for three players.
Skylands: Each player has a mat with place to put tiles; each tile has (usually) a piece of (usually) two city types, and you place them to complete cities (Carcassonne-style). Complete cities can be populated and you can then use the people to build other tiles. One type doesn't get population directly; instead you move people there from elsewhere, which generates victory points. On your turn you can choose to draw and place a random tile, buy a tile from a limited set, populate a city, or move people to the special cities for points. You can't keep choosing the same thing; you have to vary your actions each turn. Like in Puerto Rico, when you choose an action everybody gets to do it but you get something extra (like a second random tile). The game is very pretty in a way that doesn't interfere, which is a rare compliment from me. We liked this a lot. (I recognized this when I saw the game but don't know where I've seen it.)
CATS: a sad but necessary cycle of violent predatory behavior: The title is funny and appealing; the game wasn't. It's a simple-minded card game where you compete to catch and eat birds (optionally playing with them first for extra points). Other cats might try to steal your prey. Each round you secretly choose a target location and a target opponent and then choose two actions to be taken in sequence; everything is revealed and resolved simultaneously.
Unearth: Players compete to collect cards (sets are worth more) and harvest resources from those cards that let you build wonders (for points or game benefits). Two mechanics are interesting here. First, the way you claim a card is to keep rolling dice (and placing them on cards) until the value of the card is reached. You have one d8, one d4, and three d6 available; on your turn you roll and place one die. Cards have values ranging from 11 to 17, so it's always going to take multiple dice and sometimes several. If you roll 1 through 3 (on any size die), you collect a resource from the card (or a random one if the card has been emptied). When the total card value is reached, the player with the highest value on a single die gets the card. You can have dice on several cards; each action is independent. (If you run out of dice you reclaim one from a card.) The second mechanic is with the resources and what they can buy: the resources are hexes and you play them in (interlocking) rings; when you complete a ring of six you can build any wonder for which that ring meets the build costs. (There are some generic "any six resources" options so you're never completely screwed.) I would play again.
Call to Adventure: This was a "learn to play" session and we didn't finish. You're playing fantasy characters and trying to accumulate traits like strength and wisdom, which you do by using the traits you already have to complete challenges. There's a "light side/dark side" aspect to the game, and if you're too good or too evil some options become unavailable to you. It seemed ok but nothing special.

That's a lot of games. They were fun but our pace was too aggressive for me. We need to adjust something next time; I think I want shorter days rather than fewer of them but I'm not sure. We did have some gaps during which we sat and read, but I was still tired -- too many people, too-harsh lighting, general wear and tear, maybe other things.

There's a club that runs most or all of the train games, and unlike with all the other games we played, they don't necessarily teach or, IMO, do even the basic level of support that you expect from a program slot with an admission fee. Some people acted like it was an imposition that we didn't already know games. In the case of Railroad Revolution, we were told that nobody was available to help us because they were having a tournament, but the game's over there and feel free to figure it out yourselves, so we lost the first hour to figuring out rules and setup. Now this would be fine if they were doing their own thing (and notified people), but these games are part of the general list of games you can play and must pay for at Origins, and the baseline expectation of Origins slots is that games will be taught if necessary unless stated otherwise. And the club chose what games to offer when, so it's not like their own tournament was a surprise. I'd like to either see the club change their approach (in any of several ways, their choice) or see Origins break their lock on this class of games. Since I doubt either will happen, I need to remember how this works for the future.

comments

Origins game con

2019-05-01T01:09:51Z

As we did last year, Dani dug through the vast list of games that are being offered for playing and extracted a much shorter list of games that sounded interesting to him and that he thought I'd like. I then sorted that list into four piles: really want to play, want to play, would play, and would rather not. He will put this together with his own preferences, work the jigsaw magic of the schedule, and come up with something that works.

Fairly often, games we want to play aren't available in timeslots that work, or sell out before we can register (more a problem with GenCon, I understand). So you need to go in with more options than you'll need, so there's wiggle room. That all makes sense.

After I gave him my list, I noticed that I had 27 hours of "really want", 47 hours of "want", and 67 hours (what's with the 7s?) of "would play". The convention is (effectively) four days long. I do insist on sleeping.

So, yeah. I'll be interested in seeing what subset actually works. :-)

(This was out of a list of about 60 games. We mostly aim for shorter games -- for me it's damage-mitigation, in case something turns out to suck -- but our list did include both Advanced Civilization and History of the World.)

comments

Origins games rundown

2018-06-18T03:20:09Z

I went to the Origins gaming convention for the first time this year. (Dani's been before and asked me to try it with him.) We chose games we've never played before that sounded interesting from their blurbs and BoardGameGeek pages. Here's a rundown on games we played:

Pathfinder Adventure Card Guild: Season of Factions' Favor: cooperative card-based adventure game. We've never played the Pathfinder RPG on which it's based. Solid meh.
Lancaster (Queen Games); worker-placement game with competition (your workers can kick others' weaker workers out). Shorter and less complex than Caylus, a game we want to like and usually like when we actually play it but we often resist playing it because of those factors. We bought a copy of Lancaster after playing once.
First Class: card-based train game that initially looked simple-minded but has some nuance to it. We enjoyed it and plan to buy it (didn't find it for sale there). The actual running of this game at the con was poor, but the game itself is good.
Aventuria Adventure Card Game: another cooperative card-based fantasy game. Ok but not novel; probably would have felt better a few years ago. I don't have strong memories from this now and might edit this entry after I refresh my memory at BoardGameGeek later.
Too Many Bones (Undertow): also a cooperative adventure game, futuristic this time and not card-based. You use dice to attack and defend against the monsters, and each character has specific skills which are also dice-based. We played through a scenario where the group had to make decisions along the way to fighting the big boss-monster. We ran out of time before the boss fight but had several others. The GM/teacher here was very active, treating it as more of a demo than an actual game session, which made it hard to evaluate. So dunno, maybe? Not a priority, but I'd play again. Also, the company has a very nice solution to the problem of needing to roll lots of dice without disrupting stuff on the table; this is way better than box lids. They're supposed to have their gizmo available for purchase in a couple weeks.
Mare Nostrum: Empires: we played Mare Nostrum once years ago and it didn't work well for us, but it's been redesigned since then so we signed up. Two things then happened: (1) we needed to resolve a scheduling conflict elsewhere, and (2) we saw the dread phrase "all expansions available" in the updated description. Piles of expansions tend to weaken games in both of our opinions, so we punted.
True Dungeon Adventures: this is sort of "live RPG" with abstracted mechanics and a lot of scenery and props. This deserves an entry of its own.
Sword & Sorcery (Ares Games): yet another cooperative fantasy game, this time with cards, miniatures, and a dungeon layout. They were apparently running a campaign (or at least a series of games) over several sessions, so we played "part 3" but it didn't matter that we didn't have the prior context. The characters (I played a dwarven cleric with a big-ass hammer) were well-balanced and play was not too complex. My character had a couple pieces of equipment and a healing spell, each of which was tracked with a card, which wasn't bad at all. Others were similar. I would play this again.
Railways of the World: tile-based train game where you build a network of tracks to move goods around the board. You start with no money and take out bonds as needed to build track and upgrade your engine. You pay interest on those bonds every turn, so you have to balance investment (at 20% interest per turn) against getting left behind while others build the stuff you wanted. Both Dani and I collected more bonds than the experienced player who was teaching us; that player interpreted the style as aggressive (it might have been more of "we don't know what we're doing") and said "I like the way you guys play". He won anyway, but not by a lot. We played on a map of Mexico. This game is more forgiving than Age of Steam and less complex than the 18xx games, which puts it right in our sweet spot. I want to get this.
Quest for the Antidote: the king and all of the players have been poisoned, and the goal is to be the first one to collect the ingredients needed for a cure and deliver them to the palace before you expire. The score counts down and is measured in "breaths". This sounded cute but turned out to be overly simplistic; probably good for families but it didn't do much for us.
Power Grid: yeah yeah, I know -- how have we gotten this far without ever having played Power Grid? We keep hearing good things about it but as far as I know nobody in our gaming group owns it. That will change as soon as we can order it (sold out at the con). Players are competing to power cities on a map (we played on a map of Germany). To do this you need power plants (which are auctioned), fuel unless you manage to get wind or hydro plants, and connected cities (which cost money). Each turn you get income based on how many cities you can power. We both enjoyed this game a lot, and I came within a few dollars of winning (which apparently impressed the GM). There are lots of maps available.
Evolution: you are playing and developing one or more species of animal. Everybody needs to eat, food is limited, and some species are carnivores which isn't much fun for the prey. Cards each have a numeric value and a trait; traits are things like "long-necked" (gets first shot at food others can't reach), "climbing" (protection from non-climbing carnivores), "body fat" (can store food), and, perhaps most important and fairly elusive, "intelligence" (which lets you get food in other ways). You use these cards either as their traits, as discards to improve your population or body size, as discards to start a new species, or -- one card per turn -- as your contribution to the watering hole (food), which is where the numbers matter. You can replace traits. I liked this game and felt it was what American Megafauna should have been; Dani was more lukewarm on it. This must be played on a table where everybody can easily see everybody ele's cards, which was not true of the large round table we played on.
Pulsar 2849: space exploration/colonization game with dice drafting. You have competing needs -- improve your technology, claim new galaxies, claim pulsars and use them to get power. When you choose dice that are either above or below the median roll for that round, you pay (or gain) position on your choice of two tracks, one that helps with technology and one that establishes turn order. This seemed like a well-balanced game; we ran out of time before finishing so we jumped to final scoring but missed some of the late-game stuff. I would play this again.
Freedom - the Underground Railroad (Academy Games): cooperative game set in 19th-century America. You are trying to move slaves from the plantations to the north and ultimately to Canada, but (almost) every time you move a slave, one of the slave-catchers moves in that direction. A new ship arrives every turn, and if there aren't enough open spaces in the plantation those slaves are lost. Your goal is to get a certain number to Canada before you lose a threshold number. (Or run out of cards, or some other losing conditions.) To move you need to buy "conductor" tokens, and to get money you need to do fundraising. You also need to pay support costs. There are also event cards. Each player has a (different) special ability. The game felt well-balanced (we barely won a beginner-calibrated game). We both liked it (Dani more so). I felt a little weird about the setting in a way that's hard to explain; it felt wrong to be playing a fantasy-hero game for recent horrific history that still affects people.
Flow of History (Grand Gaming Academy): card-based civilization-building game. Fairly light and quick. Acquiring improvements is a two-step process that other players can interrupt, so it's decently interactive. The ending felt rushed.
Dungeon Draft: punted so we could sleep in a little on Sunday. I guess it sounded good at the time we signed up, but last night we decided we didn't need yet another card-based dungeon game.
Atlantis Rising: the residents of Atlantis have angered the gods, who are responding by flooding the island. The players win if they can build a portal and escape before the whole island is gone. To build it, you need to gather resources from the tiles on the island. If the tile you're on floods, no resource for you (but you don't drown). The rate of flooding increases as the game goes on. Each player has some special ability. We won but not easily. I enjoyed it.

comments

no GenCon

2017-06-11T19:57:14Z

Dani has gone to GenCon, a huge gaming con, a few times and enjoyed it. (He started going after Origins, a large gaming con, took a quality dive some years ago.) He asked me to go with him this year and I agreed despite its size. (It is, literally, an order of magnitude bigger than any SF con I've been to.) We talked about things I would need from him to help me not be overwhelmed by it, and he was fine with making those accommodations.

Then the schedule of events came out at the end of May and I realized that a convention an order of magnitude bigger than any I've been to also has a program an order of magnitude bigger than any I've seen. Even after Dani sorted the spreadsheet into categories and suggested some pruning mechanisms, I stared at that "board games" tab and kind of wilted.

But I don't need to find All The Best Games; I just need to find enjoyable games. So Dani made a pass through it for things he thought were interesting, and I reviewed his picks and gave him a short "no" list and a short "meh" list and said everything else was fine. (I'd already reviewed some other categories, including "spouse activities" (yes they have "spouse activities"), for things I could do while he was doing things I didn't want to do.) The general plan was to attend most things together, splitting only on these differences of interests. This is all very kind of him. We were going to mostly attend this con as a couple, which is cool.

Then he took all that data and went to sign us up for things, and... almost everything on the "A" list, both games and other things (seminars, concerts, brewery tour (ok that one was for me), etc) were booked already. He started to assemble a schedule based on the "B" list but it was hard and, anyway, it was the "B" list. He said this has not been a problem in the past, but this year is GenCon 50 and that probably has something to do with it. So we bailed. We'll try this another year, when he can show me his con in a better light and not be feeling "meh" already before even getting there.

comments