Section 3: Alliances
I had planned to get up early on Friday. It didn't help that I had gotten distracted by FreeCiv again. It also didn't help that the plumbing was noisy and I could occasionally hear an airplane go by. On the theory that I'd rather get as much sleep as needed rather than prioritizing waking up on time, I purposely didn't set an alarm and ended up waking up a bit after 11.
The reason I had wanted to get up early was because most events at BGG.con have limited space, but registration lists only appear 24 hours beforehand. There was a locked room puzzle event on Saturday I wanted to try, so that meant attempting to secure a spot on Friday. Getting up late pretty much meant I missed out, and as expected, by the time I got to the convention all slots had filled up.
I later learned that slots had vanished pretty much instantly, so I felt less bad about this. Only about 80 slots for a convention of thousands wasn't enough, and a puzzle event run by first timers is hit or miss, but all that might just be sour grapes.
I didn't want to leave filling out my vendor bingo card until the last minute, so stopped by the last few booths. Along the way I got a quick primer on Mage Wars and laughed at the quirks concept of Heroes Wanted: each character has some personality quirk (e.g. must console any player who gets incapacitated, must excitedly announce when a player completes an objective, must high-five a player who defeats a henchman). The vendor said people were split between thinking it was a stupid, time wasting mechanic and those who couldn't imagine playing without it. I'm firmly in the latter category, but reserve the right to change my mind if I ever play it and see it in action.
After finishing the bingo board, I dropped it off and went back to my favorite activity: cruising the open gaming room.
The first interesting thing I saw was some people playing Android: Netrunner. I'd heard of the game before, and one of my coworkers had wanted to try it, so this seemed like a good opportunity to learn. It quickly became apparent that two side-by-side games were going on and one person was instructing the other three. He noticed me hovering and invited me to watch, explaining various mechanics. Netrunner is sort of like an asymmetrical version of Magic where the two sides have different mechanics and objectives. After the first game finished and the instructor's opponent left, I got a chance to try playing. I lost due to some misplays and failing to draw icebreakers for a while, but it seemed like a decent game. I think my biggest concern is whether it will have broad enough appeal among my usual crowd - it seems harder to pull new people into a 2-player game. I'll probably still pick it up to play with my coworker.
I thenn wandered over to the hot games/demo area, where the first open game I spotted was Castles of Mad King Ludwig. It's a bidding game where players are bidding on castle rooms, building up their castle with rooms they win. Bonus effects are awarded for completely connecting rooms, and rooms give victory point bonuses depending on what they're connected to. Different room types produce different bonus effects.
I lost, but it seemed like a pretty good game. The tactile aspect of actually assembling your castle was a nice touch.
As I was playing, one of the people at the table seemed familiar. After the game finished, I talked to her and realized she was one of the people from the new attendees meeting on Tuesday that I had played Money with, B.
While playing games with strangers had been working out so far, I was thinking that it would be nice to find a group of people who liked the same kinds of games I did and have a readily available pool of people to play with rather than relying on chance, similar to what my coworker had done the previous year. His group seemed like nice people and I liked the games they chose, but there were a bunch of them and I didn't want to get tied to one group right away. Running into people more than once seemed like a good initial indication.
B and her friend E had seemed like reasonable people. E was off doing other stuff, and in the meantime we went to look for games to play in the library. We each checked out one that looked interesting.
The game B chose was The Little Witches and the Mysterious House, a cute and simple-looking game about students taking a final exam at a wizard school. One player is the teacher, everyone else are students. All the students either pass or fail together. The main gimmick is that each player's character was actually two pawns tied together by a string - you could only move one at a time, and only within the radius of the string. We put up a "Players wanted" sign and soon two others joined us.
Unfortunately, the game was in Japanese. While there was an English rulebook, it was unclear in areas and we were confused about some of the rules. We made stuff up, but the game balance didn't feel right; either we guessed wrong or it's just not balanced. There didn't seem to be much gameplay or interaction. I'd rate this one a pass.
The secret assignments used in the advanced rules weren't translated at all (the BGG entry does have translations). This didn't matter to us since we played the simple version which doesn't use them, but it's another measure of the translation quality.
One of the players stuck around for a bit, the other one left after the game was over.
The game I chose was Lost Legacy: The Starship and the expansion Lost Legacy: Flying Garden. Both are similar to (and inspired by) Love Letter. I really like Love Letter, and so hoped that Lost Legacy would live up to it. The basic mechanic is the same - one card in hand; draw one, play one. Instead of trying to hold the highest card at the end, you're attempting to identify the location of a particular card (which translates to both having the card with the highest priority guess, i.e. low-numbered card, and having some idea where the target card is).
I liked the idea of two goals instead of one. Unfortunately, in the couple games we played, Lost Legacy didn't grab me. Lack of experience with the cards was a definite problem, but my impression was that they didn't interact with each other as well as in Love Letter. There were interesting cards, and maybe I need some more playthroughs to appreciate them, but for now Love Letter remains my favorite micro game.
We met up with E and went to the library to return our games and pick out a new one. Since E hadn't picked one yet, we let him suggest something. His choice was Incan Gold, a press-your-luck game. Players share a common potential pool of rewards, and your payout is affected by how many other players choose to remain in the pool. Stay in too long and you'll likely hit traps and die, gaining nothing. Leave too early and you're passing up potential rewards.
Because of how rewards are divided up, playing with a lot of players (e.g. 5) feels very different from playing with fewer (e.g. 3). With more players, a larger share of rewards is left in the common center. People who leave the pool early get a share of the common center, giving a larger reason to leave early in larger games, but at the same time in a larger game multiple people are more likely to leave on the same turn. Some rewards cannot be divided and can only be claimed by a single person, and it's hard to judge if you'll actually be able to get it or if other people are having the same thoughts, so it's much harder to predict whether you'll get these unique rewards in larger games.
Incan Gold was pretty fast and simple. I liked it and may pick it up.
As I was getting ready to go home, I again checked in with my coworker's friend group. They were getting ready to play Camel Up, so I explained the rules and played a game with them. I think this was the first time I was on the teaching side during the convention.
Daily food intake: Chopped beef sandwich, 1 leftover Chick-fil-a sandwich
The reason I had wanted to get up early was because most events at BGG.con have limited space, but registration lists only appear 24 hours beforehand. There was a locked room puzzle event on Saturday I wanted to try, so that meant attempting to secure a spot on Friday. Getting up late pretty much meant I missed out, and as expected, by the time I got to the convention all slots had filled up.
I later learned that slots had vanished pretty much instantly, so I felt less bad about this. Only about 80 slots for a convention of thousands wasn't enough, and a puzzle event run by first timers is hit or miss, but all that might just be sour grapes.
I didn't want to leave filling out my vendor bingo card until the last minute, so stopped by the last few booths. Along the way I got a quick primer on Mage Wars and laughed at the quirks concept of Heroes Wanted: each character has some personality quirk (e.g. must console any player who gets incapacitated, must excitedly announce when a player completes an objective, must high-five a player who defeats a henchman). The vendor said people were split between thinking it was a stupid, time wasting mechanic and those who couldn't imagine playing without it. I'm firmly in the latter category, but reserve the right to change my mind if I ever play it and see it in action.
After finishing the bingo board, I dropped it off and went back to my favorite activity: cruising the open gaming room.
The first interesting thing I saw was some people playing Android: Netrunner. I'd heard of the game before, and one of my coworkers had wanted to try it, so this seemed like a good opportunity to learn. It quickly became apparent that two side-by-side games were going on and one person was instructing the other three. He noticed me hovering and invited me to watch, explaining various mechanics. Netrunner is sort of like an asymmetrical version of Magic where the two sides have different mechanics and objectives. After the first game finished and the instructor's opponent left, I got a chance to try playing. I lost due to some misplays and failing to draw icebreakers for a while, but it seemed like a decent game. I think my biggest concern is whether it will have broad enough appeal among my usual crowd - it seems harder to pull new people into a 2-player game. I'll probably still pick it up to play with my coworker.
I thenn wandered over to the hot games/demo area, where the first open game I spotted was Castles of Mad King Ludwig. It's a bidding game where players are bidding on castle rooms, building up their castle with rooms they win. Bonus effects are awarded for completely connecting rooms, and rooms give victory point bonuses depending on what they're connected to. Different room types produce different bonus effects.
I lost, but it seemed like a pretty good game. The tactile aspect of actually assembling your castle was a nice touch.
As I was playing, one of the people at the table seemed familiar. After the game finished, I talked to her and realized she was one of the people from the new attendees meeting on Tuesday that I had played Money with, B.
While playing games with strangers had been working out so far, I was thinking that it would be nice to find a group of people who liked the same kinds of games I did and have a readily available pool of people to play with rather than relying on chance, similar to what my coworker had done the previous year. His group seemed like nice people and I liked the games they chose, but there were a bunch of them and I didn't want to get tied to one group right away. Running into people more than once seemed like a good initial indication.
B and her friend E had seemed like reasonable people. E was off doing other stuff, and in the meantime we went to look for games to play in the library. We each checked out one that looked interesting.
The game B chose was The Little Witches and the Mysterious House, a cute and simple-looking game about students taking a final exam at a wizard school. One player is the teacher, everyone else are students. All the students either pass or fail together. The main gimmick is that each player's character was actually two pawns tied together by a string - you could only move one at a time, and only within the radius of the string. We put up a "Players wanted" sign and soon two others joined us.
Unfortunately, the game was in Japanese. While there was an English rulebook, it was unclear in areas and we were confused about some of the rules. We made stuff up, but the game balance didn't feel right; either we guessed wrong or it's just not balanced. There didn't seem to be much gameplay or interaction. I'd rate this one a pass.
The secret assignments used in the advanced rules weren't translated at all (the BGG entry does have translations). This didn't matter to us since we played the simple version which doesn't use them, but it's another measure of the translation quality.
One of the players stuck around for a bit, the other one left after the game was over.
The game I chose was Lost Legacy: The Starship and the expansion Lost Legacy: Flying Garden. Both are similar to (and inspired by) Love Letter. I really like Love Letter, and so hoped that Lost Legacy would live up to it. The basic mechanic is the same - one card in hand; draw one, play one. Instead of trying to hold the highest card at the end, you're attempting to identify the location of a particular card (which translates to both having the card with the highest priority guess, i.e. low-numbered card, and having some idea where the target card is).
I liked the idea of two goals instead of one. Unfortunately, in the couple games we played, Lost Legacy didn't grab me. Lack of experience with the cards was a definite problem, but my impression was that they didn't interact with each other as well as in Love Letter. There were interesting cards, and maybe I need some more playthroughs to appreciate them, but for now Love Letter remains my favorite micro game.
We met up with E and went to the library to return our games and pick out a new one. Since E hadn't picked one yet, we let him suggest something. His choice was Incan Gold, a press-your-luck game. Players share a common potential pool of rewards, and your payout is affected by how many other players choose to remain in the pool. Stay in too long and you'll likely hit traps and die, gaining nothing. Leave too early and you're passing up potential rewards.
Because of how rewards are divided up, playing with a lot of players (e.g. 5) feels very different from playing with fewer (e.g. 3). With more players, a larger share of rewards is left in the common center. People who leave the pool early get a share of the common center, giving a larger reason to leave early in larger games, but at the same time in a larger game multiple people are more likely to leave on the same turn. Some rewards cannot be divided and can only be claimed by a single person, and it's hard to judge if you'll actually be able to get it or if other people are having the same thoughts, so it's much harder to predict whether you'll get these unique rewards in larger games.
Incan Gold was pretty fast and simple. I liked it and may pick it up.
As I was getting ready to go home, I again checked in with my coworker's friend group. They were getting ready to play Camel Up, so I explained the rules and played a game with them. I think this was the first time I was on the teaching side during the convention.
Daily food intake: Chopped beef sandwich, 1 leftover Chick-fil-a sandwich