Okay, here’s the full rundown on what I did at BGG.Con 2007, also cross-posted from my blog. The short version: played a lot of games, promoted and sold Honeypot a bunch, and generally had a blast with a whole bunch of fine folks. And now, buckle up – here comes the long version.
Thursday 11/15/2007
I woke up at the unholy hour of 5:30am to finish packing and get myself together for the trip up to Dallas. This is my first BGG.Con, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but after hauling way too much crap around on the flight up to Indianapolis for GenCon, I was determined to err on the side of packing too little. I only brought a small clump of clothes and toiletries, my small bag to carry notebooks, schwag, and games in, a medium-sized box of Honeypot games to sell, and a big box of games for the math trade. I didn’t actually bring any of my own games to play, since I figured there’d be more than enough to lay hands on once we got there. Boy, was I right.
I got myself over to Nukes’ house around 7am, just before Drey, and before too long we were on the road. Huge props to Nukes for driving there and back – that would have been one hell of a bus ride. We arrived around 11am or so, found Mischa and our other peeps, got our room situations straightened out, stowed our junk upstairs, registered, and hit the floor rolling. Everyone got some kind of free game as a door prize, and I was lucky enough to show up early and snag Mission: Red Planet. I haven’t played it yet, but I’ve heard good things, and it looks pretty decent.
First thing, I sat down with some of the boys who were just finishing up a game in progress (I don’t remember which), and played a filler game of Honeypot with Peter while we waited to get in on the next one. First up was The Circle. This game has excellent art direction, and that’s about the best thing I can say about it. Took forever to untangle the rules, set everything up, and finally get started, and then the first several turns took another forever to grind reluctantly up to speed. By the time we figured out what we were doing and had a sense of how the game worked, we realized that it was pretty crap, and bailed. This was extra sad for us, because we could see the potential in the game, but it just wasn’t there for us. Not an auspicious start to the gaming, but everything was up from there.
After a brief interlude in which we ate some tasty greek delivery, someone brought out Saturn, a gorgeous dexterity game from the Theta line. Basically, you have these three rings around the center sphere that balance along various axes, and you have to place differently-sized balls in slots on the rings, without making them all tip over. It seems easy, but it was mildly challenging, and the scoring system was simple and elegant, and all the players were fairly engrossed the entire time. I’d definitely pick this up if I could find it cheaply, but it’s one of those rare games that will probably wind up costing more than it’s worth.
We cleared the big plastic planet off the table and set up Ruse and Bruise. Fast to learn, fast to set up, and fast to get started, this was a tight little card game that was simple, but still had a good bit of complexity to it. You have a deck of twenty cards or so that represent members of your court or something along those lines. You play these under a bunch of treasure cards that you want to claim – each treasure is worth a different number of points, and each requires a certain number of cards to be played under it before the round is over. When all the slots are full up, you count the total number of points that you’ve played under a treasure to see who gets it – aha, but many of the cards have special powers, which affect the outcome greatly. It’s easy for a cunning play that you’ve set up to be shattered by the wrong card played by a crafty opponent. It was one of those games with just the right amount of chaos to make things really fun – lots of banter and laughing, and quite often, someone would reach for the rules to check something out, and everyone would almost cheer, because we knew they were up to something. I’d like to pick this one up very soon.
The group broke up and some of us reconvened in another part of the gaming hall, and tucked right in to our next game, Patrician. Much more sedate than our last game, but still quite good. Basically, you play cards to either build two stories on one of two towers in one of the cities, or build one city and do a special action. The cards tell you where you’re allowed to build, and where you pick up your next build card, so although it doesn’t feel like there’s much choice at times, you can still shoulder your way in the direction that you’d like to go by basically choosing where you’ll be sent next. Some of the cards also have faces on them, which are worth points at the end of the game if you can collect sets of three of them. The game ended relatively quickly, scoring happened, someone won, we were all happy with it. Not world-rocking, but still fun.
Next up was Burg Appenzell, a sweet German game about mice trying to collect cheese in a castle with sliding floors. I loved this game – the bits and pieces are all very well done, the construction of the castle out of the box is awesome, and even the little mouse pieces look and feel perfect. The gameplay is kind of light, but still quite engaging – it’s kind of a cross between The Amazing Labyrinth and Stay Alive. You get three actions per turn, which include moving your mouse, sliding a row of floor tiles, or removing roof pieces to reveal a section of floor that you can enter. The floor tiles are either blank, contain a piece of cheese (which you can collect if two of your mice are on the same kind of cheese), or have a hole in them that you can fall through, losing your mouse. The game is over when someone collects three different kinds of cheese, or someone loses all but one of their mice. Lots of fun. There should be an English version out there somewhere (called Castle Roquefort or something), and it’s another game that’s high up on the wish list.
Wicked Witches Way was next. It had a cool box, and some custom dice with neat symbols on it. Other than that, meh. There’s some speed/memory stuff in there, a little card play, and some moving your little witch pieces back and forth on the race track. It didn’t really grab anyone, so we put it up after a handful of turns. We could totally do better with what was in there, but we repressed our re-designer instincts, and pressed on.
More building! Die Saulen von Venedig – or The Columns of Venice – was on the table next. In this game, you get to simultaneously lay down cards that tell you what occupation you’ll be playing in the current turn – you can grab columns or city pieces, sink columns into the water, build city on top of columns that are there, grab points off of someone else’s occupation card, beg or steal someone else’s occupation, or even blow up a piece of city that’s already there, and benefit when someone builds on the empty posts. Cards played are passed to the next player when the round changes, so everyone gets a chance to play everything, even if they get an initially crappy hand. Points are accumulated during the game for building and laying posts cleverly, and play ends when you run out of columns to build on. It ran about an hour or so, which was just about right – I enjoyed playing, and I’d definitely play again if it came up.
We broke for dinner at a wings’n'beer place across town – and by that, I mean “drove through the barren waste of the Dallas outlands until we hit a clump of neon and grease where we could get something that resembles food”. But, hot wings, cold Shiner, and a table full of geeks geeking out in a non-con setting. Good times. After, it was back to the Westin for more gaming – we assembled a group of ten or so to throw down with a game of Die Kutschfahrt zur Teufelsburg, or Coachride To Devil’s Castle. This game is always awesome, and I’ve never played a round of Kutschfahrt that wasn’t followed by the players talking about it for some time afterwards. Basically, it’s Werewolf on steroids – there are two factions, each of which needs a certain set of items to win, but nobody knows who’s on which side, or who has what. Each player has their secret affiliation and occupation cards (your “junk”) and a bunch of item cards (your “stuff”) – occupations and items give you different abilities in the combat or trading portion of the game. Each player in turn either challenges another player to a duel, or offers one of their items in trade. Combat is resolved relatively simply, with the other players supporting one of the duelists, after which the winner gets to look at the losers “junk”, or their “stuff”. Through strategic fisticuffs and wily trading, players slowly learn who is on their side, and attempt to gather their items to declare victory. If you declare wrong, your side loses. It’s an intense, exciting game, even though it doesn’t appear to have much going on when you look at the surface of the play. Kutschfahrt really requires a group of eight players who are down with the intrigue to really shine, but I will virtually never pass up a chance to play, if presented with the opportunity.
(I liked the game so much that I ordered ten copies from a German game company to sell/trade/distribute, in hopes of seeding some more play out there. Since then, a few American retailers have picked it up, but it can still be tricky to find. If you’re having trouble getting your hands on a copy, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do about hooking you up with some Coachride.)
After Die Kutschfahrt, we wound down over Fire, another very pretty game by the same folks who did Saturn. Very, very nice to look at, but not super enthralling with the play. It’s basically a slant on Jenga, only with round pieces of different sizes stacked in a U-shaped wooden support piece. The hour was late at this point, and interest was waning – pieces were drawn, pictures were taken, bits fell down and were re-built, people wandered off, and the evening ended.
Ah, yes. At several points during the day, I stood at the Pirate Billiards table in the main common area with various folks as we waited for people to assemble for food, or debated about what we would play next, or just loitered aimlessly. “Piratenbillard” is a game where you whack a canvas-bottomed board from below with these long mallets, and try to bounce your little balls from one end of the table to the other. You can capture other players’ balls, or destroy them with the cannonball or pirate ball or whatever it’s called. There’s some way to score points, but nobody really ever paid attention to that (except in one exceptional game, where we actually got it totally together), and we mostly just had fun trying to get the little colored balls to go somewhere near where we wanted them to go. I may have mentioned elsewhere that I might have a go at building one of these. Yay, fun.
That’s a lot of games, and it’s only the first day. Plenty more to come, directly.
