The weekend had finally arrived… it was basically my first board gaming convention ever. I have always been a big gamer, both in board games and in card games (and obviously video games but we all knew that) but it was a little over a year ago that I took the plunge and decided to head to a Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) and take in a Board Game night, to check out and become part of “the community” of local board gamers. From the very first night I went I knew that these people were the tops in how friendly and open they were to a noob in their midst. I pick things up fairly quickly and had been playing some games at home from time to time when my parents came to town and with my wife and best friend, so it wasn’t completely like a non-gamer trying to pick up the hobby. But I ended up after a few months of gaming with the same people most nights, getting an invite to a local annual gaming convention. I had heard it was a great event and a nice LONG weekend of gaming so I was suuuuupppppeeerrr excited for the event and I have to say it did not disappoint in one bit.

I am going to attempt to go day by day and remember what I played and in what order but I learned a lesson this year… if you want to remember everything you play WRITE IT DOWN… I saw a ton of people doing the same thing throughout the con, and I intended to do so, but I just never did write down what  I was playing… Basically after the first night I came home and posted what I played on facebook, and so I figured I would do the same thing every day, but when you only sleep roughly 4 hours on those nights, it’s hard to remember to do ANYTHING let alone write down what you just played. So keep that in mind when I re-cap the different days, I will try and be spot on with what I played, and hopefully as I write this it will all come back to me…

Thursday

World Without End-- Good game just not Pillars of the Earth good.

I had just gotten off work for the week, and before I headed to the convention I needed to get my dog’s stitches and staples out from her surgery and then I was going to need my usual nap after a long week of work. So as badly as I wanted to head to get the gaming goodness started I needed to charge up the batteries first. So I woke up had some dinner with the family, and headed up to the convention for night #1. I wasn’t staying up there at the hotel this night so I was going to have to cram in what I could before heading home for the night. I arrived and right away a buddy of mine was setting up World without end, the sequel to the game Pillars of the earth. I love Pillars with the expansion a lot. It’s a great worker placement game with a ton going on. Sure it’s long, complicated and a good bit random with the pulling of the workers from a bag, but I love that crap. My buddy Mike has been trying to get World Without End to the table for a while now so since I saw him setting up I was raring to get the festivities started so I sat down for a game! It was a fun game. It’s got role selection which basically takes the place of the worker placement in the game, and has a mechanic that at the beginning of the turn the lead player for the round decides the placement of a turn round card, and then depending on how the player orients it, everyone gets something for the round. You have to help build projects and pay certain costs in upkeep every round or suffer penalties. A fun game but I still think there is something I like better about Pillars over this one. It’s not bad and I think I wouldn’t turn it down at all which is good, but Pillars is just a stronger game. I finished either last or 2nd to last IIRC (which is a theme in most of my gaming especially with being so new to every game… usually I have to play a game a few times to get it 100% and then I am quite competitive.) The problem I have with me and some games, is when you learn a game you start to check it all out and formulate a general strategy. Of course in most you have to change things on the fly as they happen but you start to get an idea of what you want to do. Sometimes I try to do something which is not 100% what everyone would do. I like to take some chances b/c after all it’s a game and why not have fun right? Unfortunately this is often an idiotic thing for a newbie to do the 1st time you play a game and it usually costs me. BUT, in doing so I often see how this could have worked in my plans and it helps for future plays of those games.

The second game I got into was the Lord of The Rings co-op game. I have this game at home, and it’s a real nice first edition game with some real nice figurines and a heavy Sauron EYE figure for the bad guys counter. I have been trying to trade it for a while since I have only ever opened it and not played it ever, but no takers online, possibly next year I will bring it or throw it into the math trade for the event. Anyway this was to be a 5 player game with us using all 5 hobbits the game comes with. A couple of people had played it before so we had a leg up but it’s still a pretty luck driven game with drawing blind tiles and rolling dice. Which is fine with me since I love cards dice etc. We had a real fun time playing and I was the third hobbit dead but the fellowship kept on going! We all thought we were going to lose as a group but Merry and Pippin were able to get some lucky tile draws and some lucky dice rolls to get the win for the group! Success! The group I was playing with all kinda went off to different games so I was all of a sudden game-less. But I saw 3 players starting in on a game of Egizia so I asked if they minded a 4th, and another game had begun!

Egizia is another worker placement game kinda like Stone Age. It’s got the whole Egypt theme with a Sphinx, tombs, obelisks, and a pyramid. The big catch in the game is you start with your boats (workers) at the top of the river and you can only place them down river. Once you place one a few spots down river you cannot go back up them with your boats (exception being one card that allows you to break the rules once a turn and go upstream if you own it). You also have to collect 2 currencies in order to progress. First you need fields to feed your worker “crews” in the game, and then you need stone quarries to have stone to build the structures in the game. You get your points in building the structures but you also get bonus points at the end of the game depending on if you fulfill the objectives on the Sphinx cards you acquire throughout the game. I play a lot of Egizia on Yucata.de so I was real familiar with the game and it was a perfect one to round out the first night of gaming. We could not remember which cards were the overpowered ones in the game, that you usually take out when playing online (which is the one which gives you +2 cards each time you go to the sphinx, and the card that gives you +1 point per every 10 you have in the game) so we played with them. I like playing the 3 and 4 player version a ton more then playing with just 2 b.c you have to make some real decisions in the larger game, and it’s MUCH more strategic. I did fairly well in the game getting a bunch of my cards completed and getting a bunch done in building despite being so far behind in grain fields. But that’s what’s good about games like this, the reaction and coming up with a plan to offset the unexpected. I ended up finishing 2nd in the game. I did well but the guy who finished first got the dreaded +2 to sphinx cards and naturally it paid off in points. I think even without it he might have won but it would have been a bit closer then it ended up being in the end. But I enjoyed it and thought I played well so no harm no foul. Alas, the night had gotten a bit late and I was going to try and spend some time with the fam for breakfast before they headed out for the day and before I packed up and was going to be gone for 2 days b/c I was staying at the hotel on Friday night, so I headed home.

Friday

I got up to the game room late morning and things were beginning to get into full swing. Most people were already engaged in some longer games so I hopped on a table with a couple of friends and played a card game called Bottle Imp. It’s based on some short story about this bottle that gives you unlimited power while you have it but you will go to hell for having it, so you must get rid of it before you die.. the catch? Well other then the whole hell thing, is you cannot sell it for more then you bought it. So translate that into a trick taking game. It means that the person who has the bottle has to get rid of it for a card lower then the one it has under the bottle at the time. Yeah I know it confused the hell out of me as well before I played 2 rounds then it still confused me but I was at least able to play it enough to be somewhat competitive. After playing a few rounds of this we packed it up and started off in a 5 player game of El Grande.

El Grande is actually an older Euro from around 1995. It’s an area control game, with some bidding mechanics for who gets to choose the action card first. There’s plenty of bluffing and screw your neighbor that goes on but all in all this was a fun as hell game to play. We had 5 great people playing who can get along with a wall and all had a blast playing it. Two guys ended up grabbing a run away lead near the end and the other 3 of us couldn’t catch up and were just trying to stay out of last place. I was trying to do my best to stay out of some of the conflicts and still peck away at whomever was leader. It was my first time playing (surprise!) and I enjoyed it quite a bit and also since I finished out of last, hey couldn’t be too bad! I just have to say with games and this whole weekend I don’t really care about winning or losing ever b/c I just love playing. When I don’t know a game I don’t expect to win, but I generally want to be competitive. I didn’t get mad the whole weekend about where I ended up until the last game I played but more on that when we finish up talking about Sat. So anyway, my take on El Grande is, that it’s a fun game. I think I won’t shy away from this at all in the future. It’s got the bidding which I always like, and also has the variability of the cards which is something I LOVE in games. After heading out to lunch we got into a game of Automobile.

Automobile is only a couple of years old and is from famed game designer Martin Wallace (Brass, London,Steam, Age of Steam etc). Now I haven’t played any of Wallace’s train games but I have played London. I enjoyed London a bit, it’s a bit puzzle-y in a game form which is pretty cool. (I saw 2 copies of Few Acres of Snow circulating around the weekend but I was unable to play it). Anyway Automobile, as you might guess, is about the rise of the automobile industry. It’s an economic game in which you select roles each turn (named after famed auto producers) and must open factories and produce cars and be able to sell them based on a variable demand. This was one in which I tried to go out of the ordinary to start. Everyone was doing the same exact thing on turn 1 so I didn’t want to be a Lemming so I went a bit different. However, it seems this is what doomed me from the start and be

Automobile--- This should be more fun then it is.

comes (as we will see) the main reason I didn’t enjoy the game at all. I tend to like to play the variable role selection type games. I like being able to pick your “powers” and roll with them for a round. That was a good part. The bad part is, none of them had enough of said powers. Sure you don’t want to screw up balance but it seems like there really wasn’t too much to those roles to make any of them much ebtter at times then the others. Also for a game that has 3 different  types of cars (high end/luxury, mid level, and mass market) with different times where each of them are in demand it doesn’t seem to reward you for going for it all. If you go for the bottom two levels you can make money no matter what others are doing. If you go for the luxury cars the only way you are going to win or make your money is if NO ONE else is doing the same thing. There simply never is enough demand, and it’s quite rare there ever could be, to make it worth it. I say it ruined the whole experience for me. The other thing that ruins it, is there are times in the game where you just can’t do anything else and have to just Pass. Sure that’s pretty normal for games when you do a ton of things you have ot pass to end your turn, but it just felt like I didn’t do much on my turn and then just passed at the end. I finished second to last but we were so close it might as well have been last. Peter did an excellent job explaining the game and the people I played with were great and fun, but the game is REAL flat to me. I won’t be playing automobile again any time soon. So it was just about dinner time but I was still full from lunch so I was going to have Mrs GeekJock meet up with me and have some dinner while she brought up my toiletries (yeah I always forget SOMETHING at home). So I knew I had about 90 mins to kill. So I was walking around and Greg says to me… “Hey want to play Marvel Heroes?” Apparently he has been trying to get people to play this with him every year and has little success. So I ask about how long and the famous last words of the weekend were born “Oh only about 60 mins!”.

So on to Marvel Heroes we went. Peter from the Automobile game before us, Greg, who’s game it was and had played before, myself and Ken all picked out a super hero team. I went with the X-Men. The game took right at 60 mins itself just to explain the rules, but I was already liking the make up of the game, so maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. The game is LONG. The problem isn’t really with that, but the rules are written awfully and if you don’t have Boardgamegeek.com handy you might miss out on something critical. It turned out that it was so long I wasn’t going to be able to eat with the Mrs., which was fine with her b/c our son wanted to come up to see us instead of staying home with my mother in law (who was in town), so the Mrs didn’t mind just dropping off my stuff and saying hi for a few mins and then I finished the game (or else I would have had to bow out of the game for a while b/c I was wanting to see them and hungry as all hell— To be honest I would have eaten and only ended up missing about 1 turn in the game b/c of how long it is hahah). Ok basically without getting into a 2 hour long novel about the rules, you have both the ability to do an overall scenario which the game comes with a bunch, or just play to a certain victory points. We just went to 15 ourselves. Each round you spend these “plot points” to activate your heroes and then they go off to fight crime which amounts to going to a spot where random cards say there is a crime and you roll some dice to see how much power the crime ends up being. The other players then play cards worth certain power to make up who you will fight at the crime spot and you see who wins different dice roll offs. That part is long-ish but a ton of fun. The problem I have with the game is it costs too much in plot points to try and ready your guys and they are real hard to come by. One false move and you could end up getting less in a turn b/c your heroes are not back to “ready” in front of you and you have then screwed a whole round of the next 5 turns of your play. That’s the big problem of the wonkyness of the game. Not the game itself. It plays well when you get going and know what you are doing, but before you get there you could end up with turns that have you doing next to nothing. I ended up having to save up a round and half of plot points just to make a big attack so I could take out a crime then take on Magneto (my arch villain). Once that was done (and I WON THE FIGHT!) I had to try and get my guys back to “ready” which I was only able to get about 1/2 of them back, and then I ended up with not enough points to do much of anything for the WHOLE NEXT 5 TURNS. That’s just piss poor game design. You simply cannot have a long game where you need one resource which is less then scarce to act. You then end up with the potential of one player (which was myself and one other earlier in game), who simply cannot do anything, and that sucks the fun out of it. What ended up happening, is myself and Peter had to take “story action” b/c there wasn’t anything else to do, but the unluckiness of it was our story cards were not out and we kept helping the other two with VPs and only getting ourselves some hero cards. So we were basically tied in last and the other two who kept benefiting from it fought it out for 1st place. Not a bad game just pretty poorly designed and felt a bit like they just stopped working on it and threw it out to release. I think something could be done about the readying of the heroes so you can better play. There is a guy working on a variant or re-tooling of the game on BGG and from looking at his cards I think he might really be onto something with his designs. A cool game overall that I might end up playing next year at the con but I will know full well I am in for a 3-4 hour game.

By this point it was time for a fast food run for dinner so when I came back it was time to find something shorter to play (shorter being 90 mins to 2 hours hahah).After wandering around the room a little with a couple of friends I saw a copy of Can’t Stop in someones collection, so it was time for some dicey goodness! I love Can’t Stop. It’s push your luck goodness to the max. You roll 4 dice and have to keep the first of 2 each time and put up markers on those. Then you get one more number you can work on, for a total of 3 each round. The board has the numbers 2-12 on it and you have to get a certain number of rolls in each, which correlate to how hard it is to roll the number. For example you only have to roll 3 12’s to lock it up. The catch is for each turn you can only work on 3 numbers at any one time and they have to be ones you rolled this turn. So if you have some bad luck rolling for a couple of rolls you can end up working on 3’s 4’s and 10’s and those are not easy to work on! But after you roll a couple of times you can bank at any moment you want and you cannot go any lower on the track. If you do not bank and you roll where you cannot move up any of the three tracks you are working on then, you bust and have to start back where you last banked or at the bottom if you haven’t banked. The first player to close out 3 numbers is the winner. I managed to finally WIN A GAME this weekend woo hoo. Sure it’s a luck fest but I will just think that it’s got some skill to it and I had a good strategy (yeah right). But I like the game and it was fun so I cannot complain one bit really.

My copy of Quarriors! had been circulating around the room quite a bit, being one of the new hotnessesof the summer, so since someone mentioned playing it to me, I was REAL happy to play it. I knew it and loved it so no chance of not having a good time. and it’s more dice a

Quarriors Set up (image borrowed from baordgamegeek.com)

nd we all know I love some dice! So Quarriors! is basically Dominion with dice. Yeah save me all the ranting about it being too random or not very strategic. It’s just plain fun as hell. I love the game and cannot wait for expansions to come out. You start with 12 basic dice. Every round you draw 6 dice out and roll them. You can then buy a dice from the card of the 10 available and add one to your discard pile. Next turn you draw six more etc. You try and get a die to come out that has a monster and have said monster live until your next turn so you can score points. Again, it’s pure dice rolling fun. Don’t take it serious just have a great time! We played 2 or three games of this until it was then time to pack up and head to bed for the night. It was 4am and I was supposed to be back at a table for a 10am long game of Descent with 2 expansions! Ohhhh Sat is going to be great as well!!!

But I will have to save the stories of Sat for part 2 of  That Board Game Thing! weekend recap…. Special thanks to Boardgamegeek.com for images.

–GeekJock

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