Monica

We went to Origins Game Fair for the first time since before the pandemic. We played games.

Wednesday

• Empire Builder "pot luck": this was a general sign-up, specific groups and games to be sorted out on arrival. We ended up in a four-player game of Eurorails, which I enjoyed. It took longer than usual; part of that was one player, but I think part of it was also some unfortunate card draws. (Fortunately, this was the only thing we signed up for Wednesday evening.) The game has gotten some usability upgrades since last I saw it: the goods chits are now colored with corresponding color-coding on the contract cards, and we played on a dry-erase map (single sheet). I asked about the map: that's something the folks running this did, not commercially available "but maybe later". (The organizers had a large art portfolio with all the maps.)

Thursday

• Hamburg: Nominally a city-building game (the veneer is kind of thin), the idea is that you have cards that can be used for different purposes: building (two stages), getting workers (needed for buildings), averting catastrophes, building walls, and (if I recall correctly) getting money. In each of eight rounds, the player with the most advanced position in each of five categories gets to check off an accomplishment (if not already met) for end-game points. There's not a lot of interaction among players. It was ok.

• Fortune and Famine: You're playing leaders in a fantasy setting and your goal is to maximize the grain you have stored by the end of the game. Each round you can bid on new workers: the two fundamental ones are the farmer (pay coins, get grain) and the merchant (pay grain, get coins), and there are several others. In later phases there are upgraded versions of workers, like more lucrative merchants. There are also wizards who perform one-time actions, some of which are attacks on other players, and there are thieves. Sometimes when you draw workers you get famine cards instead and all players lose half their unprotected grain. You can protect (store) grain, so it's safe but no longer available for spending. Each leader has a special ability; mine was being able to protect three grain and/or coins without storing, another was being able to ignore famine effects three times during the game, and I forget what the others were. It's a pretty light, fast game -- I'm going to guess 45 minutes once you know the rules. I enjoyed it enough to buy a copy.

• Familiars and Foes: A cooperative game in which you're playing low-powered familiars trying to rescue your witches and wizards from monsters. The session was led by the game designers, one of whom also played. It felt a little juvenile; I don't know how much of that was the game itself and how much was this particular session. (We were all adults, to be clear.) I felt it was trying too hard to be cute.

• Wingspan: I've been hearing good things about this game, and it did not disappoint! (We bought a copy on the way home.) Your goal is to attract birds to your habitat; each bird type contributes to your score and might have special powers that help either the game engine or your final score. Birds can lay eggs (usually needed to get more birds), and birds require the right food to be brought into play. On your turn you can draw bird cards into your hand, play birds, lay eggs, or collect food. Each round has an additional goal (like "birds in trees" or "eggs in box nests") that awards extra points. The game is well-designed (except for storage), well-made, pretty, and fun.

Having two "F-something and F-something" games on the same day was tripping us up all day.

Friday

• La Familia Hort: Players are competing to inherit granny's farm by building the most profitable plot. Each turn you can buy crops or farm animals, water and fertilize (limited options so you have to choose), and -- when a crop is ready -- either sell it or use it to feed livestock for income. There are also some tools that help you enhance the value of other tiles. You can only have six tiles at a time, though, so you're giving up substantial space to play a tool. The game was light, cute, and pretty forgettable, and did not consume more than half of its two-hour slot.

• Final Strike: Players are gladiators competing for glory points by killing monsters and their sidekicks. You have a hand of weapons (everyone starts with the same hand), which deal varying amounts of damage and can be upgraded for better weapons that sometimes have special powers. You're trying to deal damage but not so much that someone else can "scoop" you for the kill; the killing shot brings a lot more glory. This game was run by the designer.

• Gempire: Zarmund's Demands The novelty of this game is simultaneous play with actions recorded on dry-erase boards for simultaneous reveal. The boards were laid out well so you could easily see what your options are. I am now out of positive things to say about this game.

• New York Pizza Delivery Lightweight resource-allocation game. You're building pizzerias in different NYC neighborhoods to meet delivery orders and collect victory points and maybe tips. Ingredient cards in your hand can be used to match delivery orders, or you can use them to add permanent ingredients to one of your pizzerias (can satisfy an order without more cards), or you can discard them to improve your range. There is a "marketplace" of ingredient cards that, in our game, grew quite large and unmanageable. There are also event cards and other special abilities. I came away thinking "meh", though possibly with a better playing space and fewer players it could be fun.

Saturday

Origins has activities other than board games too. Saturday morning we went to a lecture called something like "why you don't want too much realism in your game". This was put on by a wargaming group, so this realism was about battle plans and stuff. The presenter was an Army logistics officer who talked a lot about the stuff that needs to go onto the map that isn't "pieces shooting or blowing things up" -- stuff that's essential to an army actually functioning, but not very much fun for most people to play out. I wasn't the target audience but I still found it interesting. Apparently it was immediately followed by a presentation about making games more realistic (drawing from experience in Desert Storm, it sounded like), but we had somewhere else to be.

• Mistwind (not published; that's a Kickstarter link): Players are competing to deliver goods to places where they're in demand, using flying whales (if there's a reference here I missed it) to navigate from place to place and building outposts to reduce costs. On each round you will play four of your five numbered tokens, discarding one at the beginning of each round. Each token can, in turn, be played in one of four places: a row of options that give you resources in different combinations, a row of cards that let you build outposts in specific locations, a row of action options (like building whales and outposts or taking the first-player position), and a row of cards giving special abilities or end-game scoring. The trick here is that each of these four areas has five numbered positions, and you have to play your corresponding numbered token. So you can only play one "3" position, for instance, among those four choices. That all sounds complicated and there was definitely a learning curve, but I was getting it by the end of the game and the next one would be smoother. We were playing a prototype and the session was run by the designer, who was taking detailed notes and asked us for feedback. I like what I saw and expect to back the Kickstarter when it goes live.

• Railways of the World: Rail-building and goods delivery. We've played this successor to Steam twice at past Origins conventions and had one good and one terrible experience (which seemed to be players not the game itself). This time was a good experience; the map for the six-player game is huge and the convention gave them a big round table, which leads to visibility problems for me. The bad experience (last time) was other players basically saying "you'll have to cope"; this time, in contrast, the other players were willing to move the map toward an edge and let me choose my seat to maximize what I could see, at the cost of others having to work harder, and people were happy to help with reading things I couldn't see, and it was all very friendly and positive. With six players there's a lot of contention for routes; each player also has a secret goal that encourages building in different places, which helps mitigate that. You have to look at where the goods come out at the beginning of the game and think ahead to where you might be able to deliver them and what track you'll need to build to do that. It's more forgiving than Steam and we now own a copy (which we will not play on a big round table).

• Obelisk: Cooperative puzzle-style game. You have a 5x5 grid of tiles, each with an exit arrow on one side, one of which is the monster-spewing portal. During the players' phase you can rotate tiles to build a path (one rotation per tile ever), build towers at intersections to capture monsters from the adjacent four tiles, mine resources needed to upgrade towers, and do those upgrades. During the monsters' phase, a random assortment of monsters (three different types, varying in speed and strength) emerge on the portal and start to move along the path. If you have a strong-enough tower when a monster passes by, you can capture it (one capture per tower per phase). If a monster escapes the board or visits a tile for a second time, the players lose. It's a quick game, maybe 20 minutes; we lost our first game, declared the second layout untenable from the start, and won a third game with effort. We bought a copy. This game, too, was run by the designer.

General

We had more gaps in our schedule than in past years, some by design and some by games running short. We planned for some of that and got a hotel room across the street from the convention center. That location turned out to be noisy, but the convenience of being able to go back to the room for an hour instead of finding a place in the convention center to sit and read was a big win. And the hotel room didn't have annoying fluorescent lights.

In the past there have been some "general game-store" vendors, but this year we didn't see that -- general vendors for trading-card games and lots of individual publishers, along with the usual assortment of auxiliary vendors (dice, art, t-shirts, special-purpose gaming tables, costumes, etc), but no general stores for board games. Fortunately, we have a local game store we can support, and they even had Wingspan in stock so we didn't have to wait.

We were on the fence about True Dungeons this year, and then learned they wouldn't be there -- dilemma solved. :-)

Attendance was a lot lower than what I remember from 2019 (and some vendors commented on this too). I'm guessing half?

We had friends over Saturday afternoon/evening and one of the games they brought, unopened, was The Guild of Merchant Explorers. Players (up to four) have individual copies of a map for exploration. You start in a central city and explore from there. When you explore all of the hexes of the same terrain type in a cluster, you get to establish a settlement there. In future rounds, you can explore from the city or from any of your settlements. Some hexes contain riches (coins), and some of the sea hexes contain ruins (shipwrecks) that hold treasure. There are three randomly-chosen objectives that score extra points; these are things like "have settlements on three continents" or "explore three ruins at the edges of the map". In the remote corners of the map there are towers that you get more points for exploring.

The game mechanic is interesting: in each of four rounds players simultaneously take the same actions (plus one per), which are known in advance but come out in a random order. Actions are things like "explore two grassland spaces" or "explore three sea hexes but they have to be in a straight line". In-progress explorers are cleared at the end of each round, so one of your goals is to complete exploring regions so you can build the settlement. You know what's coming, so you can look ahead and see that you'll be able to fill those last two desert hexes or whatever -- but sometimes you're not yet in position when the card comes out, so you have to plan for that. I can see how you could get mired in analysis paralysis, but it's not a long, complex game -- box says 45 minutes, which feels about right after you learn it. (I didn't time our first game, but I know it was longer than that.)

There's one unpredictable element in each round: a special card that means you draw two cards with more powerful actions, keep one, and use it. You then keep that card for the rest of the game, so the one you chose in round 1 will come out again at least two more times. (In the fourth round, instead of drawing a new card you choose one of your existing ones to use again.) These cards usually let you explore more spaces or more kinds of spaces, like "explore one grassland and all the hexes around it" or "explore one of each type plus two sea" or "explore five contiguous desert hexes".

There are several ways to earn victory points that are always available. The three special goals add more. And the treasures you find can award victory points based on conditions, like "one per mountain settlement". You don't have enough actions to do everything, of course, so you'll choose which paths to pursue based on all of those and perhaps by what your special action cards enable you (alone) to do. The game comes with four maps, some of which have special rules we haven't explored yet, so there is additional variability. I assume this means there will be expansion sets in the future.

The game is not very interactive; what you do does not affect other players and vice versa, aside from the races to the special goals (first person to do it gets more points) and competition for treasures. This won't be enough interaction for some, but it works for me.

We all liked the game a lot. After we'd played twice one of them asked "do you like this game?" and we both said "yes, very much". He then asked "would you like this copy?" -- turns out they'd both been at the same playtesting or preview event and thus each got a copy of the game, so they were happy to pass along a gift. Nice!

On Sunday we got together with different friends to play games and took this along. We played a few times with different people throughout the day, and everyone we introduced it to liked it a lot too.

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.

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.

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.)

A couple months ago I listed some games we played at Origins. We've now played a few more new-to-us games, some that a friend brought back from GenCon and some that coworkers introduced me to.

Orleans is is a worker-placement game with decent interaction. A novel feature is that workers are not generic; there are seven different types, and at the start of your turn you draw a designated number of workers from your bag. What shows up is what you have to work with that turn. Different assignments require different combinations of workers. As with games of this type, there is always more to do than you have time and resources to do. You can recruit workers, and each type of recruitment has a beneficial game effect like giving you resources (farmer) or advancing you on the knowledge (scoring) track (scholars) or increasing the number of workers you draw (knights). You can travel from town to town, building guild halls, which act as score multipliers. You can go after "citizen" tokens on various tracks, which are also score multipliers. You can focus on income or goods production, which add to victory points. You can permanently send some of your workers away to work on communal projects for various dividends. Every turn an event is announced at the beginning and enacted at the end -- taxes, plague, income, and more. When you've enacted the last of the 14 events, the game ends. I think a four-player game works best, though a two-player game is possible.

Istanbul (the dice game, not the card game) is a dice-allocation game. The goal is to collect six rubies. Rubies are available on several tracks; on each track the price increases with each one taken. On four tracks you buy rubies with resources of one of four types; on one track you buy them with combinations of resources; on one you buy them with coins; and on one you get them (for free) when you build five mosques. On your turn you roll a set of customized dice that give you resources, coins, or card draws. (Cards usually give you either resources or money, but not always.) After you roll you can take two actions based on the die rolls (take resources, take money, etc). After that you can buy rubies (as I described) or mosques, tiles that have prices and game effects. For example, one mosque might cost one resource of each color and give you an extra die. Another might cost three red resources and give you a red resource whenever you use the "take coins" action. One might cost three green and give you an extra action. You can also buy re-roll tokens to use when you really don't like some or all of your dice. A friend brought this over and said it works well for two players.

Trainmaker is a quick "push your luck" dice game. There are city cards; each city produces one of six types of goods and requires some combination of railroad cars to get there and get the goods. You are trying to collect cities, and win if either you collect all the goods types or you satisfy a secret victory condition. (Mine, for example, was to collect three corn or three coal.) On your turn you roll a bunch of dice that have, on their faces: locomotive x2, the three car types, and a caboose. (I didn't notice how many dice there are -- 7 or 8?) To start you must play a locomotive and at least one car; you then reroll the remaining dice and must play another car. Iterate until you play a caboose to end your train or run out of dice/rolls without doing so and derail. If you don't derail and the cars you played match one of the three visible cities, take it. If you're feeling lucky, you can start all that by playing two locomotives, which means that after you finish your first train, you get to go again -- but, of course, this means you took a die out of circulation for that first train. With learning, this was maybe 20 minutes -- a good filler game when one group has finished a game and is waiting for another group to finish theirs so we can shuffle players around.

I described First Class in my Origins post. We've played it a few times with two and three players and like it. Thus far we have only played modules A and B, the ones they recommend for new players. We'll explore some of the other three, though one of them sounds wholly uninteresting to me so maybe not that one.

Magical Treehouse is a card-drafting, engine-building game with a speed element. In each of four rounds you draft five cards, one of which you will use to bid for turn order and four of which you can play in ascending order within "suits" to build one or more treehouses. Some cards let you place "familiars" on a board to collect resources; some levels of your treehouses require resources as inputs. There's an extra score-influencing reward for finishing quickly. After four rounds of this you score -- visible cards have points, plus things you can actually make based on the resources you've claimed score points, plus there are some "have the most of resource X" points. Meh; I don't expect to play again.

Shards of Infinity is a deck-building slugathon for up to four players. The mechanic is similar to Dominion: draw cards from your deck, optionally buy cards that are for sale, play cards from your hand, deal damage to other players or their champions (cards) based on the cards you played, discard and draw a new hand. One thing I like about this game over Dominion is that card "affinities" are easier to see; there are four colors of cards and many of them give enhancements within color -- e.g. playing two green cards gets you something that playing one doesn't. (For one color, there are some enhancements if you play all three other colors.) I suspect that, like Dominion, this game will generate gazillions of expansions, none of which we'll buy.

madfilkentist recently pointed me to this article about writing characters with disabilities by Kari Maaren. It's a thoughtful piece, well worth reading. Here's a taste:

So when I see fictional disability, I recognise the tropes. I’ve heard Matt Murdock described as “a blind man whose power is that he can see,” and yeah, that’s a common one. The “blind seer” is a particularly frustrating trope because its purpose is so dazzlingly clear: you want a blind person in your story because that’s so tragic, but you also don’t want the inconvenience of, well, having a blind person in your story. So he’s blind, but it’s okay! He can really see through his magical powers! He’s been compensated for his disability! Yay!

I tweeted a link, and somebody replied there asking for tips on including disabilities in role-playing-game systems without being disrespectful or creating broken player incentives. I said a few things there, but I think my readers are likely to have useful thoughts on this and why should we do it in 140 280-character chunks? So please comment, share useful links, etc. I'm going to share a link to this post.

Game (or other fictional) characters have a variety of traits. We gamers sometimes over-focus on a few stats, but a real, rich character is much more than ratings for strength, intelligence, endurance, dexterity, and so on. That's true whether the extra richness comes from the character's family background, formative experiences in wizard school, handicaps, affinity for fire, compassion for small furry animals, or whatever. So to me, three-dimensional characters depend on the players wanting to play that kind of game. I think these tend to be the same players who are interested in story-based games.

That's not all players. That's ok. You can't, and shouldn't, force richer characters where they're not wanted.

Regardless of game mechanics, players who want to play characters who are disabled in some way -- really play them, I mean, not use them as jokes or sources of offsets for abilities -- will do so. I had a player once who played, well, a vision-challenged character -- a challenge that the player proposed as a logical consequence of the character backstory he'd invented. He wasn't looking for any offsetting benefits.

Now, the game system can help or hinder this, and the person I'm talking with is interested in developing game systems that support disabled characters in a meaningful way. Game systems, like players, come on a spectrum. At one end it's all about optimization; at the other end it's all about good story. At the optimization end, you get players saying things like "I'll take the blindness penalty in order to get extra points for spellcraft". Champions was like this. I never actually played; I went through character creation once and decided it wasn't my style of game. But people did (and I assume do) play, and not all of them are only focused on points optimization, so I'm interested in hearing how they roleplay rich, sometimes-disabled characters in that kind of game system.

At the other, story, end of the spectrum you get games like Dogs in the Vineyard, where characters are nothing but collections of interesting backstory, traits, and growth. I only played a few times and not recently so I might have this wrong, but I don't think there even are stats for things like strength. What you have is things like "I had this formative childhood experience that made me really afraid of guns" (minuses to shooting, panicking under fire, etc), and during the campaign as you have to interact with guns that characteristic might gradually change. You know, just like people often do. Meanwhile, during the game you have other experiences, which might be character-affecting too... There's not a lot of bean-counting, of tit-for-tat -- I took fear of guns, so I'm allowed to be extra-good at riding. It works if the group wants it to work. Dogs has a system (and I'm told there's a broader "Fate" system that uses the same mechanic, if you're not into the setting built into Dogs), but it's not a very pushy system. When we played Dogs, we were mostly telling a collaborative story with occasional dice-rolling.

A story-oriented game system can support character disabilities well. Willing players can support disabilities in any system. What I don't know is how game systems not already at the story-oriented end of the spectrum can facilitate good treatment of character disabilities. Or is this something that is best left out of rules systems and placed in the hands of players?

Thoughts? (If my Twitter correspondent is reading, you can log in using any OpenID credential, create a Dreamwidth account (easy, no spam), or comment anonymously.)

siderea

Your goal is to play conservatively, lock up more resources, and let the other players lose by attrition. If you want to see these people again, I recommend not gloating, but simply state that you're playing to win, and that it wasn't your idea to play Monopoly in the first place.

Do some research on BoardGameGeek.com, and head down to your local gaming shop, where more often than not, you'll find knowledgeable staff and even demo sets for you to try before you buy. It shouldn't be too hard to convince your friends to try something new, especially if you offer to play another round of Monopoly.

alaricmacconnal

blackpaladin

2013 was getting off to a great start but then I had to go back to work. Powerball, you have failed me. :-) (Ok, I've never actually bought my own lottery ticket, but when a group is forming at work I always buy in because I'd sure feel stupid if I didn't and half the company won buckets of money and left.)

Resolution? 1280x1024, but maybe I'll get a new monitor this year. (I think it was merle_ who inspired that idea.) Though I'd rather keep the aspect ratio I have now (i.e. I'm not so thrilled with the widescreen monitors that are all the rage these days).

Orlando is currently chasing his tail. I thought that was a dog thing. (He's got one white pixel on the end of it, but I don't think it's that in particular that he's chasing.) More generally, he and Giovanni seem to be settling in, though I still can't pick either up for more than a few seconds and I had only 50% success on last week's vet visit. Giovanni has gained a pound in the last month, so I guess Orlando isn't being as pushy about the food dishes as I thought.

Netflix only gives you about a week's notice when something is going to disappear from their streaming service. Last week I noticed that Farscape, which had been languishing there for a while, was slated to disappear, so I watched the first eight episodes to decide if I want to queue up DVDs. It looked to me like interesting characters and underwhelming plots, but I'm mindful that some good shows (like B5) took a while to settle in. To those who've seen it: does it get better?

Apparently I can't post comments on LJ tonight, so some of you will probably get some belated comments when that changes. Let's see if I can post an entry.

unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

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