Stage 4: End of Game Conditions
Saturday was the last full day of the convention. The major event of the day for me was a puzzle hunt, but I still got in a number of games.
The first game was Temporum, a new game from the guy who designed Dominion. Players are time travelers in a shifting timeline. By changing events in the past you change what downstream events (locations) are reachable; anyone not in the current "real" timeline gets moved over into it. Different locations on the timeline allow you to do different things, but the main goal is to advance all your tokens from the past to the present. Somewhat counterintuitively, you get money by playing cards (our expectation was that you had to pay money to play cards); you pay money to advance tokens. The catch is the cards you play for effects are the same ones you use to advance tokens but you can only use any given card for one of the two things.
Replayability comes from selecting a subset of cards to make up the timeline. The timeline is only made of 10 cards (1 in age 1, 2 in age 2, and so on for ages 3 and 4), and there were a bunch of ones we didn't play with (maybe 20-30? not sure). The set of cards you buy from is the same between games.
You can easily imagine expansions which add more timeline cards, purchasable cards, or add more layers to the timeline.
Overall I thought this was a pretty good game. Despite all of the players being beginners and not knowing what we were doing, everyone was within a turn of winning at the end (which I attribute to us all having good game sense rather than being able to do anything and having the same result). I'll probably pick it up eventually, but will wait for a price drop as there are so many games I want.
The main event of the day for me was the annual puzzle hunt. I really like puzzle hunts in general, but each has their own style and conventions and I wasn't sure what to expect. Unlike other events, signup for the puzzle hunt was unlimited and posted at the beginning of the convention which hinted at the puzzle hunt's popularity.
Teams were limited to 4 people and could use internet resources. Answers were self-service in the sense that you would know when you got an appropriate answer. The theme this year was that aliens had come to Earth and stolen our fish, and it was up to us to get them back. The theme already had me hooked.
Since I had come to the convention not knowing anybody, my plan was to just join a random team. My coworker's friends were all on a team together, and I figured that since I didn't know what was going on, being on a random team wouldn't be that bad.
As the event was getting ready to start, I was chatting with my coworker who mentioned that a member of their team, V, had thought they could puzzle downstairs in the main gaming room. This was pretty obviously not going to work, so they had an open spot. I made a split second decision to join them and ignored the call for unattached puzzlers, but a few minutes later V showed up after all and they were full. I made my way over to GC and they found me a team to join who turned out to be a pair (husband/wife?) of puzzle newbies.
The puzzle packet consisted of 24 pieces of paper, approximately one puzzle per page. Some were intended for later use (and text hinted at such), but most was immediately workable. The puzzles I saw were pretty straightforward; only a few had a small twist in them, such as the fish puns or finding hidden fish in clued words. I approved. Well, of the fish; I prefer a-has with my puzzles.
Unfortunately, being on an underpowered team with a very parallelizable workload hurt, nor did it help that my teammates were newbies. I should have done a better job explaining general theory to them, but wound up saying tactical things like "order the presidents by number and read off the letters" or "take the opposite of the cluephrase and match it against the wordbank".
We ended up running out of time and didn't actully finish, though we had done most of the puzzles and knew where the meta was going. I considered it a moral victory given our handicaps.
For reference, the top team finished in about 80 minutes (I'm not sure exactly when we started, I'm assuming it was when we were supposed to at 2 PM). The organizers continued accepting answers for about four hours, though we gave up at the official end time of around 2 hours.
After the event it occurred to me that I should have done a better job wrapping things up for my teammates. I could have explained more about things to look for, I could have talked about metas, I could have tried to make them better puzzlers in the future. Maybe they would have wanted to learn more, maybe they wouldn't care, but I missed a chance to teach.
Oh well. I'd rather be with a group of known puzzlers, so this hopefully won't come up again next year, but if I'm ever in a similar situation I'll try to remember.
After the puzzle hunt I wanted something lighter, and while wandering the main gaming area got pulled into Hearts of AttrAction. This is a dexterity/party game where players take turns flicking/tossing/throwing magnets towards other magnets scattered over the table. You keep one group that sticks together (if you manage to create two or more clumps, you only get one of them). The game ends when all magnets have been picked up, the winner is whoever has the most. I won, but the others had been playing for a while and none of them had seemed to be making a serious effort.
It's a really simple and fast game. I'd be worried about losing pieces (and because my main table is glass, which seems bad to be throwing stuff at), so would personally pass on the game. I'm also a little dubiuous about the premise of smacking around magnets - they might break - but the person who owned the game said they were pretty sturdy.
Afterwards two of the players pitched me their kickstarters, which I think was their actual goal of pulling me in.
I wandered around a little more and ran into E from the previous day explaining Alchemists. I was curious about the game and tried to listen for a while, but there was a lot going on and I didn't really pick up the rules.
A little while later, as the explanation was still in progress, B wandered up and we decided to let E explain and go check out the library in the meantime. E would catch up, as he was only explaining the game, not playing it.
The first of the games we picked up was Cheaty Mages!. Players are mages betting on the outcome of gladiator fights, but aren't above applying a little (or a lot of) magic to affect the results. However, it's not always clear what spells opponents are casting and judges are keeping an eye out for any extremely obvious cheating, so going overboard with spells may backfire, wiping out spells or disqualifying combatants. Of course, that might be your goal in the first place...
By the time we figured out the rules, E had come back and we played a game. It seemed short and simple. I may pick it up at some point.
E had to leave (getting sleep or catching a flight or something silly like that). The closing ceremony was coming up, so we hurried to play of the other game we picked up, Red7. Sometime earlier in the convention I had watched my coworker's friend group play the game and had picked up the rules, so we dove right in.
Red7 is a card game with 7 colors of cards, each of which comes in values 1-7. Cards are ordered so that higher numbers are better, with ties being broken by color (longer wavelengths are better). The best card is therefore the red 7, hence the game's name. Each player has a hand of 7 cards and is attempting to be the last one in the game; you never draw replacement cards and running out of cards is bad. You lose if you are unable to make a move that results in you being the winning player. You can play a card from your hand to your palette (i.e. in play area) and/or you can play a card from your hand to replace the previous goal. The initial goal is to have the highest card, other goals include things like having the most even cards, having the most cards of the same color, or having the most cards below 4. If you have no cards, you cannot improve your situation and will lose since by definition the previous player was winning; not running out of cards turns out to be an important part of the game.
This seemed like a very short and simple filler game. From the few games I saw, most of the outcome is due to the luck of your initial draw, but there's also a little bit of strategy in what you choose to play. I might pick this up because sometimes it's nice to have a fairly brainless game.
The closing ceremony consisted of announcements about upcoming events and changes (e.g. a family-oriented version of BGG.con in 6 months), but the most interesting part was the raffles. A lot of prizes were raffled off - most were a set of games, maybe 3-4 per set. There was some artwork that had been produced for the convention as well as some crokinole boards (with custom art) that had been out in the dexterity game hall for people to play. I was a little confused by the final raffle prize, which had a design I didn't recognize as either being out in the hall or notable in any fashion. It became clear when someone was called up to translate some text on it and it turned out to be a marriage proposal to the "random" winner. Nicely done!
Just because the closing ceremony had taken place didn't mean that gaming stopped. B had bought a couple of games, including one she wanted to try, Sheriff of Nottingham. Sheriff of Nottingham is a bluffing game where peasants are trying to sneak contraband (mixed in with ordinary goods) past a corrupt sheriff. The goal is to have the most money at the end of the game. Each player takes turns being the sheriff; the game is over when everyone has been the sheriff twice. Players can swap goods from their hand either with unknown cards from the deck or face-up cards in one of two discard piles. They then place a number of cards into a pouch, seal it, hand it to the sheriff, and declare the contents. The sheriff can either hand it back or open it, and is allowed to discuss or make a deal (even with other players) before doing so. If the sheriff hands it back, the player keeps all the contents. If the sheriff opens it and the declaration is not exactly what's in the pouch, the player pays a fine. If it does match exactly, the sheriff pays a fine. Deals can range from the straightforward ("Give me $X and I won't open this") to complex ("Give me an apple from your market stand and one random card from this bag and I won't open it" or "Give me $X and I'll open this other player's bag").
I don't like bluffing games. I'll typically pass on Mafia, Werewolf, Coup, and so on - lying is not something I find easy or enjoyable. I was mostly playing the game because B wanted to and because it seemed like a popular game. I was second player, and by the time I was sheriff, help came from an unexpected source. One of the other players, without prompting, presented me with a pouch and 5 money as an incentive to not open it. I suddenly realized that in addition to being played as a bluffing game, you could play it as an economic game, which I was much more comfortable with. I knew the player was lying about the contents - she had admitted as much with the bribe - but it would work out for both of us if I let her through. I accepted the bribe, and on her turn, presented her with a similar offer, which she accepted. I did similar things with other players. This was much easier and less stressful.
I did feel like I was generally able to read when people were bluffing, which surprised me a bit. On the other hand, some of them were pretty obvious, and I let some of them through even though I knew they were lying because I felt sorry for them. Probably not how the game should actually be played, but we were learning.
Of course, the potential payoff for an economic game isn't as great as for a bluffing game (though I'm not sure if it still loses out when people know each other better), and I ended up losing. B had been having a tough time with the guy who had been teaching us the game; he had managed to deceive her both times she was sheriff, but she still managed to edge him out at the end (helped along by my lassiez-faire approach to being sheriff).
B and I wandered upstairs to check out the game show event, but we had gotten the start time wrong and the second run hadn't started yet. We ducked into a nearby room that had more games going on, and sat down to play Mysterium, a mix between Dixit and Clue. Mysterium is a cooperative game where most players (psychics) are attempting to interpret art-filled cards (dreams) that the remaining player (a ghost) is sending them. The ghost is not allowed to talk and can only communicate through dream cards.
Each player has a person, a place, and a weapon assigned to them that they must correctly choose from a common pool using only the dream cards as guides; after all players have identified this mapping, they must identify which player/place/weapon combo was the ultimate murderer. That was a little confusing, because it's really cooperative even to the end; there's no penalty for being the murderer and so everyone works together. If the murderer is not identified before 7 rounds are over, everyone loses.
The game was very asymmetrical - it's very easy for the psychics, as they can discuss things, but there's a lot of pressure on the ghost to pick good cards. I'd estimate that 80-90% of the time we spent playing the game was waiting for the ghost. Still, it was fun coming up with (very wrong) theories and having the ghost frustratedly send us more and more dreams until we finally caught on.
If you like Dixit, I'd definitely give this a try.
Daily food intake: 2 leftover Chick-fil-a sandwiches
The first game was Temporum, a new game from the guy who designed Dominion. Players are time travelers in a shifting timeline. By changing events in the past you change what downstream events (locations) are reachable; anyone not in the current "real" timeline gets moved over into it. Different locations on the timeline allow you to do different things, but the main goal is to advance all your tokens from the past to the present. Somewhat counterintuitively, you get money by playing cards (our expectation was that you had to pay money to play cards); you pay money to advance tokens. The catch is the cards you play for effects are the same ones you use to advance tokens but you can only use any given card for one of the two things.
Replayability comes from selecting a subset of cards to make up the timeline. The timeline is only made of 10 cards (1 in age 1, 2 in age 2, and so on for ages 3 and 4), and there were a bunch of ones we didn't play with (maybe 20-30? not sure). The set of cards you buy from is the same between games.
You can easily imagine expansions which add more timeline cards, purchasable cards, or add more layers to the timeline.
Overall I thought this was a pretty good game. Despite all of the players being beginners and not knowing what we were doing, everyone was within a turn of winning at the end (which I attribute to us all having good game sense rather than being able to do anything and having the same result). I'll probably pick it up eventually, but will wait for a price drop as there are so many games I want.
The main event of the day for me was the annual puzzle hunt. I really like puzzle hunts in general, but each has their own style and conventions and I wasn't sure what to expect. Unlike other events, signup for the puzzle hunt was unlimited and posted at the beginning of the convention which hinted at the puzzle hunt's popularity.
Teams were limited to 4 people and could use internet resources. Answers were self-service in the sense that you would know when you got an appropriate answer. The theme this year was that aliens had come to Earth and stolen our fish, and it was up to us to get them back. The theme already had me hooked.
Since I had come to the convention not knowing anybody, my plan was to just join a random team. My coworker's friends were all on a team together, and I figured that since I didn't know what was going on, being on a random team wouldn't be that bad.
As the event was getting ready to start, I was chatting with my coworker who mentioned that a member of their team, V, had thought they could puzzle downstairs in the main gaming room. This was pretty obviously not going to work, so they had an open spot. I made a split second decision to join them and ignored the call for unattached puzzlers, but a few minutes later V showed up after all and they were full. I made my way over to GC and they found me a team to join who turned out to be a pair (husband/wife?) of puzzle newbies.
The puzzle packet consisted of 24 pieces of paper, approximately one puzzle per page. Some were intended for later use (and text hinted at such), but most was immediately workable. The puzzles I saw were pretty straightforward; only a few had a small twist in them, such as the fish puns or finding hidden fish in clued words. I approved. Well, of the fish; I prefer a-has with my puzzles.
Unfortunately, being on an underpowered team with a very parallelizable workload hurt, nor did it help that my teammates were newbies. I should have done a better job explaining general theory to them, but wound up saying tactical things like "order the presidents by number and read off the letters" or "take the opposite of the cluephrase and match it against the wordbank".
We ended up running out of time and didn't actully finish, though we had done most of the puzzles and knew where the meta was going. I considered it a moral victory given our handicaps.
For reference, the top team finished in about 80 minutes (I'm not sure exactly when we started, I'm assuming it was when we were supposed to at 2 PM). The organizers continued accepting answers for about four hours, though we gave up at the official end time of around 2 hours.
After the event it occurred to me that I should have done a better job wrapping things up for my teammates. I could have explained more about things to look for, I could have talked about metas, I could have tried to make them better puzzlers in the future. Maybe they would have wanted to learn more, maybe they wouldn't care, but I missed a chance to teach.
Oh well. I'd rather be with a group of known puzzlers, so this hopefully won't come up again next year, but if I'm ever in a similar situation I'll try to remember.
After the puzzle hunt I wanted something lighter, and while wandering the main gaming area got pulled into Hearts of AttrAction. This is a dexterity/party game where players take turns flicking/tossing/throwing magnets towards other magnets scattered over the table. You keep one group that sticks together (if you manage to create two or more clumps, you only get one of them). The game ends when all magnets have been picked up, the winner is whoever has the most. I won, but the others had been playing for a while and none of them had seemed to be making a serious effort.
It's a really simple and fast game. I'd be worried about losing pieces (and because my main table is glass, which seems bad to be throwing stuff at), so would personally pass on the game. I'm also a little dubiuous about the premise of smacking around magnets - they might break - but the person who owned the game said they were pretty sturdy.
Afterwards two of the players pitched me their kickstarters, which I think was their actual goal of pulling me in.
I wandered around a little more and ran into E from the previous day explaining Alchemists. I was curious about the game and tried to listen for a while, but there was a lot going on and I didn't really pick up the rules.
A little while later, as the explanation was still in progress, B wandered up and we decided to let E explain and go check out the library in the meantime. E would catch up, as he was only explaining the game, not playing it.
The first of the games we picked up was Cheaty Mages!. Players are mages betting on the outcome of gladiator fights, but aren't above applying a little (or a lot of) magic to affect the results. However, it's not always clear what spells opponents are casting and judges are keeping an eye out for any extremely obvious cheating, so going overboard with spells may backfire, wiping out spells or disqualifying combatants. Of course, that might be your goal in the first place...
By the time we figured out the rules, E had come back and we played a game. It seemed short and simple. I may pick it up at some point.
E had to leave (getting sleep or catching a flight or something silly like that). The closing ceremony was coming up, so we hurried to play of the other game we picked up, Red7. Sometime earlier in the convention I had watched my coworker's friend group play the game and had picked up the rules, so we dove right in.
Red7 is a card game with 7 colors of cards, each of which comes in values 1-7. Cards are ordered so that higher numbers are better, with ties being broken by color (longer wavelengths are better). The best card is therefore the red 7, hence the game's name. Each player has a hand of 7 cards and is attempting to be the last one in the game; you never draw replacement cards and running out of cards is bad. You lose if you are unable to make a move that results in you being the winning player. You can play a card from your hand to your palette (i.e. in play area) and/or you can play a card from your hand to replace the previous goal. The initial goal is to have the highest card, other goals include things like having the most even cards, having the most cards of the same color, or having the most cards below 4. If you have no cards, you cannot improve your situation and will lose since by definition the previous player was winning; not running out of cards turns out to be an important part of the game.
This seemed like a very short and simple filler game. From the few games I saw, most of the outcome is due to the luck of your initial draw, but there's also a little bit of strategy in what you choose to play. I might pick this up because sometimes it's nice to have a fairly brainless game.
The closing ceremony consisted of announcements about upcoming events and changes (e.g. a family-oriented version of BGG.con in 6 months), but the most interesting part was the raffles. A lot of prizes were raffled off - most were a set of games, maybe 3-4 per set. There was some artwork that had been produced for the convention as well as some crokinole boards (with custom art) that had been out in the dexterity game hall for people to play. I was a little confused by the final raffle prize, which had a design I didn't recognize as either being out in the hall or notable in any fashion. It became clear when someone was called up to translate some text on it and it turned out to be a marriage proposal to the "random" winner. Nicely done!
Just because the closing ceremony had taken place didn't mean that gaming stopped. B had bought a couple of games, including one she wanted to try, Sheriff of Nottingham. Sheriff of Nottingham is a bluffing game where peasants are trying to sneak contraband (mixed in with ordinary goods) past a corrupt sheriff. The goal is to have the most money at the end of the game. Each player takes turns being the sheriff; the game is over when everyone has been the sheriff twice. Players can swap goods from their hand either with unknown cards from the deck or face-up cards in one of two discard piles. They then place a number of cards into a pouch, seal it, hand it to the sheriff, and declare the contents. The sheriff can either hand it back or open it, and is allowed to discuss or make a deal (even with other players) before doing so. If the sheriff hands it back, the player keeps all the contents. If the sheriff opens it and the declaration is not exactly what's in the pouch, the player pays a fine. If it does match exactly, the sheriff pays a fine. Deals can range from the straightforward ("Give me $X and I won't open this") to complex ("Give me an apple from your market stand and one random card from this bag and I won't open it" or "Give me $X and I'll open this other player's bag").
I don't like bluffing games. I'll typically pass on Mafia, Werewolf, Coup, and so on - lying is not something I find easy or enjoyable. I was mostly playing the game because B wanted to and because it seemed like a popular game. I was second player, and by the time I was sheriff, help came from an unexpected source. One of the other players, without prompting, presented me with a pouch and 5 money as an incentive to not open it. I suddenly realized that in addition to being played as a bluffing game, you could play it as an economic game, which I was much more comfortable with. I knew the player was lying about the contents - she had admitted as much with the bribe - but it would work out for both of us if I let her through. I accepted the bribe, and on her turn, presented her with a similar offer, which she accepted. I did similar things with other players. This was much easier and less stressful.
I did feel like I was generally able to read when people were bluffing, which surprised me a bit. On the other hand, some of them were pretty obvious, and I let some of them through even though I knew they were lying because I felt sorry for them. Probably not how the game should actually be played, but we were learning.
Of course, the potential payoff for an economic game isn't as great as for a bluffing game (though I'm not sure if it still loses out when people know each other better), and I ended up losing. B had been having a tough time with the guy who had been teaching us the game; he had managed to deceive her both times she was sheriff, but she still managed to edge him out at the end (helped along by my lassiez-faire approach to being sheriff).
B and I wandered upstairs to check out the game show event, but we had gotten the start time wrong and the second run hadn't started yet. We ducked into a nearby room that had more games going on, and sat down to play Mysterium, a mix between Dixit and Clue. Mysterium is a cooperative game where most players (psychics) are attempting to interpret art-filled cards (dreams) that the remaining player (a ghost) is sending them. The ghost is not allowed to talk and can only communicate through dream cards.
Each player has a person, a place, and a weapon assigned to them that they must correctly choose from a common pool using only the dream cards as guides; after all players have identified this mapping, they must identify which player/place/weapon combo was the ultimate murderer. That was a little confusing, because it's really cooperative even to the end; there's no penalty for being the murderer and so everyone works together. If the murderer is not identified before 7 rounds are over, everyone loses.
The game was very asymmetrical - it's very easy for the psychics, as they can discuss things, but there's a lot of pressure on the ghost to pick good cards. I'd estimate that 80-90% of the time we spent playing the game was waiting for the ghost. Still, it was fun coming up with (very wrong) theories and having the ghost frustratedly send us more and more dreams until we finally caught on.
If you like Dixit, I'd definitely give this a try.
Daily food intake: 2 leftover Chick-fil-a sandwiches