Section 2: General Strategy
Now that I knew what to expect, I was ready to dive in deeper. On the second day I checked out the lending library, stayed late, and got to play games I had only heard about.
I started off the day by working on my vendor bingo card a bit. One vendor that wanted to demo showed off Qin, a simple tile placement/area control game. The goal of Qin is to place all of your territory markers. Players have a hand of three domino-like tiles, playing one and drawing a replacement each turn. Each tile has two colored squares on it. If you create a colored area of size two or greater, you place one of your territory markers on it to claim it. If two areas merge, the larger one wins.
I liked this game, possibly because I won. Truns are quick and it's easy to learn, yet there's strategy around where you place tiles and when you attack. My only worry is that it might turn out to be a solvable game (-ish, modulo draw randomness) - first player seems to have a bit of an advantage.
Next I wandered through the main gaming room again. This had quickly become a favorite activity, as there were so many new games to see. At home, whenever one of my friends showed off a new game, there was a good chance I had already played it. Walking around, the vast majority of games being played were new to me; of all the games I had played at the con so far, Money was the only one I had heard about.
I spotted some people setting up Tragedy Looper, which was something I had heard about before the con and actually wanted to try. Tragedy Looper is an anime-themed game that takes the time loop premise (something bad happens, protagonists go back to try to prevent it) and turns it into a game. It's a mostly cooperative game, where the antagonist is trying to trigger various hidden conditions that will cause the loop to end. The protagonists are trying to deduce the hidden conditions and avoid them. The game is played over several loops - if the protagonists prevent all trigger conditions in any loop, they win; if the antagonist causes a condition to trigger in every loop, he or she wins.
In the introductory game, you have three loops (or two, depending on how hard you want to make it) to figure out what's going on. I was on the protagonist team, and by partway through the second loop, we had figured out what was going on. Unfortunately, we lost that loop due to a misplay. In the final loop, even though we understood everything from the beginning, we got outplayed at the end and still lost. It was nice to see that the antagonist side still has a chance even if the protagonists can see things coming.
It seems much harder for the antagonist side than the protagonist side, as they have to create misleading trails on top of meeting their hidden criteria. I'm a little worried about replayability - once you've played a scenario, you can't be a protagonist in it again - but I hear there's a randomization app. Normally with cooperative games I'm worried that one player will take over and direct everything. Tragedy Looper deals with this via an optional rule that protagonists can only discuss things in between loops, but cannot talk to each other during each loop.
I liked this game and will probably pick it up at some point.
In my opinion, there are two major attractions of BGG.con: Being amongst a large crowd of board gamers looking to play games, and access to a large game library. Attendees can check out a game (or game + expansions) from several thousand. Having worked my way up from playing random games others had picked to joining a game I had heard about and wanted to try, the next step was clearly to start a game myself.
I'm not good at StarCraft, but I like it and have been playing since it first came out. Even these days, I get together online with a couple ex-coworkers and play a few games every week or so - it's one way to keep in touch. A while ago I learned there had been a board game adaptation of StarCraft, but it was out of print and hard to find.
BGG.con's lending library was my best shot for ever laying my hands on the game (well, short of blindly buying it on eBay for $100+, which is a little more than I want to spend on a game sight unseen). Fortunately, they did have a copy and I grabbed it.
StarCraft: The Board Game was phsically pretty heavy and large, there's a lot of cardboard in the modular board pieces and there are six sets of miniatures (two for each race). I set up "Teacher wanted" and "Players wanted" flags and sat down to leaf through the manual.
Players secretly issue orders to planets - you can see who is going to do stuff, but you can't see what they'll do. Orders are then resolved in a stack - the last command to be issued is the first to be processed. As in the computer game, there are several things you can work towards - economy (more production allows you to build more units), technology (higher tech units are better), and military (see also more units are better).
Combat is resolved by pairing up attackers and defenders, then players play cards from their hand to determine attack and defense levels. Played cards aren't available until you cycle through your combat deck, adding a bit of "well, I'm pretty sure this card wins, but do I really want to use it now?". Unlike actual StarCraft, the attacker has an advantage - they can bring more units to a fight and draw more cards before the fight begins.
As I was partway through the rules, someone sat down at the table and we stumbled through a Terran vs Terran game. Occasionally someone else would stop by, saying that it was a cool game but they had played it a long time ago and didn't remember the rules well enough to teach.
The board game captured a lot of StarCraft feeling - things cost about what you'd expect, technology worked as you'd expect, units matched up as you might expect. There were some differences - the event deck in the board game has no computer game analogue, while some elements of the computer game (burrow, micro, upgrades) were streamlined away. The miniatures were fantastic, and I want to pick up a copy just to get them if nothing else.
Pro tip: Displaying the game cover prominently (e.g. stand the top of the box up vertically and tuck the bottom in horizontally to stabilize it) helps people easily see what you're playing.
I ended up losing due to a number of misplays - I think I would have won if I had been paying more attention.
Figuring a game out on your own, especially one as complex as StarCraft, takes a while. If at all possible, getting someone to explain is better. Still, I'm glad I took the time to do it. After returning the game, I stopped by to check in on what my coworker's friends were up to and got pulled into a game nearby.
In Seasons, players take the role of mages, summoning familiars and gaining magic artifacts. The game is played over the course of three years (i.e. rounds), each of which is broken up into four seasons. It's a little bit like Magic in that spells are cast with colored mana and there's a drafting element at the beginning of the game, but the similarities end there. Familiars don't attack or have stats.
Available actions for each turn are determined by rolling dice appropriate to the current season. Each player chooses one and passes the rest on. The current season determines what mana is abundant and what mana does not show up, and the unchosen die determines how quickly time progresses.
There are two ways to get victory points - you can gain (and lose/spend) points over the course of the game, and you can score cards at the end. Getting points during the game is more rewarding, but it's also riskier as they're easier to attack.
Overall I liked this game. I did win, which probably helped my impression.
Partway through Seasons we took a dinner break. As we were in the middle of a game, I didn't want to go far, and the hotel's food bar Cash and Carry was nearby. I was afraid things would be insanely overpriced, but it wasn't that bad - $6 for a beef sandwich struck me as in the reasonable range. It turned out to be pretty good. There were also more restaurants upstairs, but I never ended up visiting them so can't speak for their selection or price. If I end up managing to stay onsite in the future, I would check them out just for variety and would also consider shuttling over to Target and picking up supplies.
While vendor booths tended to have a game or two set up, there were always more games than they had space to exhibit. Vendors typically said they had more games set up in the demo room, so I went over to check it out.
The first open table I came across was set up to play Deus, a hand management/area control game. Players build buildings across a variety of board areas, with only one player able to settle in any area. Various buildings have different flavors of effects. Building a new building of a certain type replays the effects of previous buildings of the same time, which means that it's good to concentrate on a particular type. However, building temples, which are worth the most points, is limited by your lowest building count, so you need to diversify too.
Early game two of my opponents both expanded towards my position, which made it hard to build where I wanted. I didn't adjust properly, continuing to try to make it through to a new open area, and probably should have looked for cards which encouraged building up a few areas instead of expanding to many areas.
I didn't enjoy the game, but it may have been due to the lateness or because it lasted much longer than I expected - I had gone in expecting something like Clans, but it ended up lasting 2-3 hours. One of my opponents got distracted easily, and the person explaining the rules got confused occasionally, so that didn't help either. While I'd be willing to try this game again (especially since I kept overhearing how people liked it), it didn't stand out to me.
By this point it was nearing (or past, I don't remember) midnight and I wanted to go home and sleep. As I made one last pass through the open gaming room, I noticed people playing Camel Up. Depending on who you ask, it's Camel Cup - both make sense, and the original designer isn't English and doesn't care, but the ambiguity encourages discussion so I guess it works for the publisher. Anyway, it seemed to be a popular game, and I was talked into playing without much problem.
The last player got back and we got into the game. In Camel Up, players are spectators at a camel race. The goal is to get the most money, which can be done by betting on the first and last place camels as they make one lap and betting on the first place camel for a given leg (after each camel moves once). Finally, players can help or hinder camels by placing movement modifying oasis tiles; these tiles give the player money if a camel lands on them.
The interesting twist is that whenever camels are on the same square, they stack up. Camels on top are considered to be ahead of camels below them, and camels carry other camels with them if they move. If the camel comes from behind, it goes on top, if it comes from in front, it goes on bottom. Because of this, and because of the movement modification tiles, it's easy for the order to switch around even within one leg. The faster you correctly call a leg or the race, the larger your reward, so there's a tension between betting early and getting a higher reward or delaying your bet and getting more information.
The people I played with were a little louder than I prefer (especially at that hour), and the pyramid to roll dice seemed gimmicky and unreliable, frequently not ejecting a die. I'm not sure I like it enough to buy it, but aside from those issues, Camel Up seemed like a good, fast game.
Daily food intake: Hotel breakfast, chopped beef sandwich, 1 leftover Chick-fil-a sandwich
I started off the day by working on my vendor bingo card a bit. One vendor that wanted to demo showed off Qin, a simple tile placement/area control game. The goal of Qin is to place all of your territory markers. Players have a hand of three domino-like tiles, playing one and drawing a replacement each turn. Each tile has two colored squares on it. If you create a colored area of size two or greater, you place one of your territory markers on it to claim it. If two areas merge, the larger one wins.
I liked this game, possibly because I won. Truns are quick and it's easy to learn, yet there's strategy around where you place tiles and when you attack. My only worry is that it might turn out to be a solvable game (-ish, modulo draw randomness) - first player seems to have a bit of an advantage.
Next I wandered through the main gaming room again. This had quickly become a favorite activity, as there were so many new games to see. At home, whenever one of my friends showed off a new game, there was a good chance I had already played it. Walking around, the vast majority of games being played were new to me; of all the games I had played at the con so far, Money was the only one I had heard about.
I spotted some people setting up Tragedy Looper, which was something I had heard about before the con and actually wanted to try. Tragedy Looper is an anime-themed game that takes the time loop premise (something bad happens, protagonists go back to try to prevent it) and turns it into a game. It's a mostly cooperative game, where the antagonist is trying to trigger various hidden conditions that will cause the loop to end. The protagonists are trying to deduce the hidden conditions and avoid them. The game is played over several loops - if the protagonists prevent all trigger conditions in any loop, they win; if the antagonist causes a condition to trigger in every loop, he or she wins.
In the introductory game, you have three loops (or two, depending on how hard you want to make it) to figure out what's going on. I was on the protagonist team, and by partway through the second loop, we had figured out what was going on. Unfortunately, we lost that loop due to a misplay. In the final loop, even though we understood everything from the beginning, we got outplayed at the end and still lost. It was nice to see that the antagonist side still has a chance even if the protagonists can see things coming.
It seems much harder for the antagonist side than the protagonist side, as they have to create misleading trails on top of meeting their hidden criteria. I'm a little worried about replayability - once you've played a scenario, you can't be a protagonist in it again - but I hear there's a randomization app. Normally with cooperative games I'm worried that one player will take over and direct everything. Tragedy Looper deals with this via an optional rule that protagonists can only discuss things in between loops, but cannot talk to each other during each loop.
I liked this game and will probably pick it up at some point.
In my opinion, there are two major attractions of BGG.con: Being amongst a large crowd of board gamers looking to play games, and access to a large game library. Attendees can check out a game (or game + expansions) from several thousand. Having worked my way up from playing random games others had picked to joining a game I had heard about and wanted to try, the next step was clearly to start a game myself.
I'm not good at StarCraft, but I like it and have been playing since it first came out. Even these days, I get together online with a couple ex-coworkers and play a few games every week or so - it's one way to keep in touch. A while ago I learned there had been a board game adaptation of StarCraft, but it was out of print and hard to find.
BGG.con's lending library was my best shot for ever laying my hands on the game (well, short of blindly buying it on eBay for $100+, which is a little more than I want to spend on a game sight unseen). Fortunately, they did have a copy and I grabbed it.
StarCraft: The Board Game was phsically pretty heavy and large, there's a lot of cardboard in the modular board pieces and there are six sets of miniatures (two for each race). I set up "Teacher wanted" and "Players wanted" flags and sat down to leaf through the manual.
Players secretly issue orders to planets - you can see who is going to do stuff, but you can't see what they'll do. Orders are then resolved in a stack - the last command to be issued is the first to be processed. As in the computer game, there are several things you can work towards - economy (more production allows you to build more units), technology (higher tech units are better), and military (see also more units are better).
Combat is resolved by pairing up attackers and defenders, then players play cards from their hand to determine attack and defense levels. Played cards aren't available until you cycle through your combat deck, adding a bit of "well, I'm pretty sure this card wins, but do I really want to use it now?". Unlike actual StarCraft, the attacker has an advantage - they can bring more units to a fight and draw more cards before the fight begins.
As I was partway through the rules, someone sat down at the table and we stumbled through a Terran vs Terran game. Occasionally someone else would stop by, saying that it was a cool game but they had played it a long time ago and didn't remember the rules well enough to teach.
The board game captured a lot of StarCraft feeling - things cost about what you'd expect, technology worked as you'd expect, units matched up as you might expect. There were some differences - the event deck in the board game has no computer game analogue, while some elements of the computer game (burrow, micro, upgrades) were streamlined away. The miniatures were fantastic, and I want to pick up a copy just to get them if nothing else.
Pro tip: Displaying the game cover prominently (e.g. stand the top of the box up vertically and tuck the bottom in horizontally to stabilize it) helps people easily see what you're playing.
I ended up losing due to a number of misplays - I think I would have won if I had been paying more attention.
Figuring a game out on your own, especially one as complex as StarCraft, takes a while. If at all possible, getting someone to explain is better. Still, I'm glad I took the time to do it. After returning the game, I stopped by to check in on what my coworker's friends were up to and got pulled into a game nearby.
In Seasons, players take the role of mages, summoning familiars and gaining magic artifacts. The game is played over the course of three years (i.e. rounds), each of which is broken up into four seasons. It's a little bit like Magic in that spells are cast with colored mana and there's a drafting element at the beginning of the game, but the similarities end there. Familiars don't attack or have stats.
Available actions for each turn are determined by rolling dice appropriate to the current season. Each player chooses one and passes the rest on. The current season determines what mana is abundant and what mana does not show up, and the unchosen die determines how quickly time progresses.
There are two ways to get victory points - you can gain (and lose/spend) points over the course of the game, and you can score cards at the end. Getting points during the game is more rewarding, but it's also riskier as they're easier to attack.
Overall I liked this game. I did win, which probably helped my impression.
Partway through Seasons we took a dinner break. As we were in the middle of a game, I didn't want to go far, and the hotel's food bar Cash and Carry was nearby. I was afraid things would be insanely overpriced, but it wasn't that bad - $6 for a beef sandwich struck me as in the reasonable range. It turned out to be pretty good. There were also more restaurants upstairs, but I never ended up visiting them so can't speak for their selection or price. If I end up managing to stay onsite in the future, I would check them out just for variety and would also consider shuttling over to Target and picking up supplies.
While vendor booths tended to have a game or two set up, there were always more games than they had space to exhibit. Vendors typically said they had more games set up in the demo room, so I went over to check it out.
The first open table I came across was set up to play Deus, a hand management/area control game. Players build buildings across a variety of board areas, with only one player able to settle in any area. Various buildings have different flavors of effects. Building a new building of a certain type replays the effects of previous buildings of the same time, which means that it's good to concentrate on a particular type. However, building temples, which are worth the most points, is limited by your lowest building count, so you need to diversify too.
Early game two of my opponents both expanded towards my position, which made it hard to build where I wanted. I didn't adjust properly, continuing to try to make it through to a new open area, and probably should have looked for cards which encouraged building up a few areas instead of expanding to many areas.
I didn't enjoy the game, but it may have been due to the lateness or because it lasted much longer than I expected - I had gone in expecting something like Clans, but it ended up lasting 2-3 hours. One of my opponents got distracted easily, and the person explaining the rules got confused occasionally, so that didn't help either. While I'd be willing to try this game again (especially since I kept overhearing how people liked it), it didn't stand out to me.
By this point it was nearing (or past, I don't remember) midnight and I wanted to go home and sleep. As I made one last pass through the open gaming room, I noticed people playing Camel Up. Depending on who you ask, it's Camel Cup - both make sense, and the original designer isn't English and doesn't care, but the ambiguity encourages discussion so I guess it works for the publisher. Anyway, it seemed to be a popular game, and I was talked into playing without much problem.
The last player got back and we got into the game. In Camel Up, players are spectators at a camel race. The goal is to get the most money, which can be done by betting on the first and last place camels as they make one lap and betting on the first place camel for a given leg (after each camel moves once). Finally, players can help or hinder camels by placing movement modifying oasis tiles; these tiles give the player money if a camel lands on them.
The interesting twist is that whenever camels are on the same square, they stack up. Camels on top are considered to be ahead of camels below them, and camels carry other camels with them if they move. If the camel comes from behind, it goes on top, if it comes from in front, it goes on bottom. Because of this, and because of the movement modification tiles, it's easy for the order to switch around even within one leg. The faster you correctly call a leg or the race, the larger your reward, so there's a tension between betting early and getting a higher reward or delaying your bet and getting more information.
The people I played with were a little louder than I prefer (especially at that hour), and the pyramid to roll dice seemed gimmicky and unreliable, frequently not ejecting a die. I'm not sure I like it enough to buy it, but aside from those issues, Camel Up seemed like a good, fast game.
Daily food intake: Hotel breakfast, chopped beef sandwich, 1 leftover Chick-fil-a sandwich