Convention report: Gamex 2011

[emurphy42]

Just me and Matthew this time; Alex sat it out in favor of BotCon next weekend.

Friday: Hostage was full, so went for Cthulhu instead. We played agents of FBI, Scotland Yard, and a similar agency in France, raiding the compounds of the Knights for Racial Purity a few days before their rumored next round of domestic terrorist acts. After putting up moderate resistance, all three cells collapsed, but some unusual findings - a dozen white men subjected to ritual mutilation, with associated graffiti - pointed to a headquarters in Vienna with stranger motives. Relatively distant from the creepiness, but still decent, with Tom Cummings (who's great at portraying Creepy Old Cultists when GMing) playing the British agent this time around.

Saturday:

• One Paranoia session was canceled due to car trouble, the other was full. Toyed with running Mister Bubbles again (I've got a copy of it on my phone), but by that point the extra players had wandered off, so I went to play Give Me the Brain instead (hosted by the SJG MIB who ran Revolution! last OrcCon). We have the original Cheapass edition; the new cards added since then are interesting, but I agree with the folks at boardgamegeek.com complaining about the loss of color-coding and artwork.
• Risk was full.
• Agricola 101. Didn't actually play, but got an idea how it works.
• Settlers of America. 11 players, largely due to the Puffing Billy tournament spanning various train games (SoA was in a category by itself).
• Improv with Bill Chott and the Improv Trick. Victoria knows him from Wizards of Waverly Place (Matthew got his autograph for her); I looked him up later and turned out to remember him from the CSI episode "Dog Eat Dog", playing a guy who entered an eating competition because he had a medical disorder and could never stop feeling hungry.
• Cash n Guns live action.
• Are You a Werewolf?. Matthew was lynched right off the bat for being bloodthirsty, but not before claiming that he was the seer and I was a werewolf; he was, I was, and they came after me the next day.

Sunday:

• Tunnels and Trolls. With a revolution distracting the town defense, the Thieves' Guild decided to do some ambitious looting and let the rebels take the blame. Not my cup of tea, as there was little decision-making or variety:
  
  • The entrance to the noble quarter is over there.
  • Scare off a couple guards. (All the competent guards were off elsewhere, actively engaging the rebels.)
  • Cover some ground, whack some guards.
  • Cover some more ground, whack some more guards.
  • Break into a place, whack a noble and his personal guards.
  • Grab a load of loot, spot and avoid a poison needle, split up the magic items by who could make best use of what, decide how much could plausibly be concealed from the Guild (who gets a 50% cut).
  • Good enough, run back out.
• Cloud 9.
• Watched a round of Press Your Luck, basically a LARP of the game show with a computer and projector providing a realistic game board and sound effects, and a couple guys acting out the Whammy animations and voices.
• Dread had the GM and a couple players no-show. One of the players (who was in the T&T game earlier) offered to run something else, but after he complained about such things as "I don't like heavily dice-dependent games because I always get bad dice rolls for important stuff and good rolls for minor flavor stuff" and "I don't like Paranoia because everyone decides I'm an easy target", I politely declined. (There was also just one other guy there besides him and me, and he also mentioned being more in the mood for board games at that point.)
• Utopia.
• Are You a Werewolf?. Lynched around day 3 when a few minor suspicions happened to converge (someone suggested going around the circle and asking "if you were the hunter and the wolves killed you now, who would you take out?").