Spent my setup hour on my final day here walking around the fair in picking up the last little things that I think might fit in my luggage. I did a fairly decent job of packing last night, and I think I have about 7 lbs left.

This might actually be the hardest part of the fair for me, because now every acquisition adds a sense of finality to my luggage.

A bit of sad news this morning. As I was walking around, I learnt that the fair had at least two thefts yesterday. There was a planned dinner and drinks event at artipia, and this had to be cancelled as they said they were dealing with a Robbery issue.

I have also heard that hub games may have had their cash box stolen. It sounds like the people that are doing this are using the same technique as last year, there appears to be a group of people that come, at least one of them occupies the workers at the Booth, and then the other takes the box.

To everyone who has a booth, please be very careful with the money box!

And now let’s get back to the games. I did walk around while the halls were relatively empty and I was able to get a picture of the Fair Play list.

I hadn’t even heard of Belratti, so I went to check it out.

Belratti is a co-operative game that mostly uses picture cards. The group together must work to choose the right cards in the art gallery while ignoring the fake art which is being put there by belratti.

Each round, two theme cards are flipped up in this case a shoe and an elephant. One-player is the art gallery owner and he will make all the gases, the other players choose picture cards from their hand which they intend to be with one of the two teams. The villain drawers for cards off the deck and adds them face down to the cards played by the players.

All these cards are shuffled, and then flipped over. The player who is the art gallery owner this turn now must choose which picture cards go with which theme.

Each exact match scores one point. Each fake picture which is chosen goes on top of the belratti card. The game will end wje and 6 cards are on top of Belratti.

There is a scoring rubric in the rules which tells you how good your group did depending on how many points you scored before the end of the game.

Next up, a trip to my brother’s Mattel Booth. One of the games they’re selling this year is a werewolf Escape room game. However, as I’m sure you know, it is very difficult to demo a one time play game period because if you show them the game, they don’t need to buy it anymore.

But out Germany has come up with a great way to demo the game. One of the German employees invented his own three puzzle Escape room game. It uses the same theme and many of the same components, and wonderfully, the puzzles are actually of nearly the same complexity.

So people wanting to demo the puzzle room game are able to try out a similar puzzle to see if they like the style, but they do not spoil any of the experience of the game that they can then pay for. This is genius.

Another genius Booth tactic would be having a coffee machine in prominent display at the front of your staying. And then offering coffee with demos at the open of the show. This totally secured me into the Booth, and I actually get a nice look at a game called seize the bean. A game about coffee making from a nice company out of Berlin. The game is not yet available, but is currently on Kickstarter. I would have no nothing about this game at all, but the free coffee has made me look at the game, and now I’m interested.

Another interesting gimmick that I saw today was putting a bar in your stand. The joint game Brewer and tasty minstrel games Booth has draft beer and soda.

I had a nice talk with the people from Game Brewer, and they have a number of highly anticipated games here at the show, I think most notably Gugong.

While they are separate from tasty minstrel, they each distribute each other’s games in their respective areas. Tasty minstrel will be bringing Gugong to the United States.

This is good for me, because this game is probably the one unlucky game each year that I really really really want to bring home, but I have run out of luggage space or weight by the time that I have the chance to get it.

And at least I will not lose the chance to get a copy of the game because it should be in the US soon. I did have a short talk with Michael from tasty minstrel games, and he said they should be here soon, though there is currently a slight hold up at the port karma so they are not entirely sure when the games will be available in the States.

Before leaving the stand I also got a nice look at
they’re new draw and write karma big dig.

I am pretty excited about this one as well. It is supposed to come out first or second quarter next year.

Well, I think it’s time to put my phone down and continue wondering around for my last day here. My apologies for any typos, this entire blog post was dictated into my phone via the magic of Google, and while I tried to proofread on the fly, it’s very difficult when you’re surrounded by 40000 other gamers who really want to go wherever you’re standing.

Until your next appointment,

the gaming Doctor

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