On a recent weekend, I again invited a number of my friends to town for a weekend of playing trick-taking games. Around 33 people participated, and, if I’ve counted correctly, I played 68 different games, almost all of which were trick-takers.
Now I’ve done it already –two sentences in and I’ve reverted to my style of communicating through a recitation of statistics. Let’s push more in the emotional direction.
Here’s a photo of my grandfather. My great-grandmother, who I never met, held on to things that would become keepsakes in the same way that I communicate through numbers of things. He gave her a rock once. We still have it; there’s a note “this is a rock that Jimmy gave me.” I think it’s dated. Slips of paper recording this event and that. Elementary school report cards. I read many of his elementary school papers on the drive to Yellowstone last year. His puppy died and it made the local paper.
Yet, if I have the story correct, this is the only photo that was ever on display in her home.
But we’ll come back to him.
(Also, this is going to be a long one. Get comfortable.)
Here’s a shot of the lobby where we met this year. It was a doorbell factory. Then a parking garage. Now it’s a hotel. I suppose this is more accurately the atrium, as if the lobby is where you enter and the registration desk is, that’s somewhere else.
There were meeting rooms here and there. Some small, some more appropriate for the type of setup we would want. Some on the first floor, some on the second, and some on a sort of fourth floor conference center annex where there were a few restaurants and some outdoor patios that would be better served if we weren’t doing this in the third week of January.
We went with this room for playing, and the room below it as a sort of casual hanging out and library room. Benefits I hadn’t considered include how nice it was to play games in rolling chairs! I love being able to swivel just a bit as I fill with nervous energy excited to play a card when my turn comes around, as I reach around the table to deal a hand of cards, and roll across the room to grab someone’s badge upon their arrival.
Below is the actual lobby, with the front door across from the mural, and the stairs playing the roll of a visible landmark that I could use to guide people, as our space was at the top of those stairs (and also accessible by elevator.)
I told people that it “started” on Friday, but that I would have access to the space on Thursday if they wanted to come early. Jonathan did –and so did the pilot of his flight, as his 6:00 AM airport pickup turned into a 5:30 AM pickup. Some locals would join us in and out during the morning and afternoon, but we explored all of the 2P trick-taking games I had brought.
One of the highlights for me was Kazuma’s recent game Somnia, a 2-4 player trick-taking game in the Jass family. Must follow suit, and the first card thrown off-suit determines the trump suit for the hand. In this trump suit, a few cards switch their strength, as well as how many points the cards are worth. Players play a best of 7 match, with the winner of each being the player to take the cards worth the most points without going over a certain number.
I’ve played it twice now at two player and have quite enjoyed both plays. One of the barriers of entry to me for playing older traditional trick-taking games is when everyone would need a player aid to track the ranks of cards and their point values -let alone when those change if the suit becomes trump. Here, you’re blessed with Sai’s art and indicators in every corner of what happens to the ranks and points if the suit becomes trump.
By the way, that mat we’re playing on isn’t part of the game, but I had ordered one as a way to keep score in card games. It’s sold by the Japanese game store Korokoro-dou for that purpose. The material is a nice felt, and it comes with scoring markers in 5 common player colors.
We also had a chance to play Taiki’s Count Up 21. Originally, released during last year’s “Is this a trick-taking game event?”, he released a $5 version with the Japanese maple leaf art below at the last Tokyo Game Market.
The game comes with cards numbered 1-21, and, again, players will play a best of 7 match. In each hand the player who wins the most tricks wins. It’s one suit, of sorts, as his goal was to explore following within a rank range rather than by suit; you can only play a card within a certain range of the previous play. You aren’t obligated to play, and the trick doesn’t end until a person chooses to pass. Once one player is out of cards in their hand, the round it over.
It doesn’t sound like there’s much to it, and, well, ultimately maybe there isn’t, but for now, I found it very interesting. There are certainly choices to be made around when to pass strategically. Similar to “Let Me Off”, some tricks may be 1 card others may be 2, 3, or 4. You may lose 1 large trick, but can you mold the arc of the hand such that you’re able to to force several 1-card tricks to fall your way?
I didn’t do a good job of photographing what I played or even taking notes. Those daily bggcon posts in the fall are likely the last “daily” recaps you’ll get from me, though I know it’s what I most like to read from conventions I’m not at. One thing that some of the meeting rooms at the hotel had were large white boards, and while I thought about grabbing one of those rooms so that we could sort of record all of the games we played, well, the meeting rooms in that part of the hotel had a stricter no-outside-food policy.
With invitation only attendance and a population in the low 30s, it’s more of a large game night and less of a “convention”, but I get to throw in a few touches that wouldn’t be available at scale. We’ve touched on a few of those, such as personal airport pickups and swivel/rolly chairs, but you also get fresh pastries each day.
This photo of the apple hand pies isn’t the best, but the pies were! I’m grateful to Chaske and Blair for working with me to provide these on Thursday afternoon. They were stunning as usual, and, well, I’ll leave it to Dale to tell you how many he ate.
That night I had a chance to play “dois” for the second time. (Something else I either didn’t take a picture of or took a poor picture of, but luckily Rand played it later in the weekend. You also get a bonus tweet because of how he threads his games at events, so yeah Länder toppen!)
dois is the second, and it won’t be the last, game designed by 新澤 大樹 (Taiki Shinzawa) that we talk about. Its main feature is that ranks and suits are on different cards. For the first trick of a hand you’ll play one card of each next to each other. In each future trick, you’ll play one card of either type, obscuring the previous card of that type and retaining the card of the other type. You also must follow suit.
That is, you play a 2 and a Cat to the first trick, while I play an 8 and a Cat. I win the trick, and next play a Glove to cover the cat. Now, you must follow suit to Gloves with a Glove card, if you can, but it will be a 2 of Gloves as the number is retained. Alternatively, I might play a 6, now a 6 of Cats, and then you could either player a Cat card on top of your current Cat card if you’re hoping to short yourself sooner in cats, or a number to change to the 5 of Cats, for instance.
You also will need to bid for how many tricks you’ll take. (The bidding in Taiki’s games has an ominous presence, as it can be quite difficult to execute a bid exactly within the margin for error that he allows you.)
But it’s growing on me. Maybe I’m getting better, or becoming accustomed to his style, but I’ve fallen into an equilibrium trough where the angst of hitting the bid exactly is just what I want.
This isn’t going to be a post about exclusively Japanese trick-taking games. We have one more to cover in a moment, and then it’ll be a bit until we return. Among things I might not remember to mention, I also played hearts and sextet (a 6-player bridge variant). Heck, I played two games that were Massachusetts trick-taking games designed for the weekend, and two more that were designed during the weekend!
But when I was ordering treats from one bakery, I mentioned why I was asking, and she suggested that a curry pan might be appropriate. These soft little buns below were filled with a Japanese curry, and were the morning pastry for Friday.
There are a few games that maybe I had finally finished the translations for and we would be able to play, including FINAL BURGER -LAST ORDER-. The cards are round, and each shows a hamburger bun on the back. The suits on the front of the cards are different burger toppings and ingredients: beef, pork, chicken, lettuce, tomato, pickles, etc. Each trick will be exactly 6 cards, and the winner will hope to make a tasty burger out of each, with a point structure based upon certain flavor combinations, and not overdoing it on the pickles.
It was fine, but as you’d likely guess, making the burgers was the best part. (Well, and eating hamburger flavored Pringles at the same time. Next to a friend who was wearing hamburger and fry earrings. Also, hamburger fingernail polish.)
We’ll talk more about why in a minute, but I read many rule sets in the months leading up to the weekend, and in several ways it put a few things on my radar to play. Sometimes, the rules sounded interesting. Other times, I couldn’t find the rules or enough details to know whether I wanted to try it, which, well, meant I wanted to try it!
Such was the case with The Great Migration.
The card play phase of the game is a fairly standard must-follow affair, with a random trump suit flip each hand from a selection of suit cards. Each player will also bid for how many tricks they’ll take, with a higher reward for winning less.
Thematically though, each player has a number of settlers that they are moving from the east coast of the U.S. to the west. It’s a point-to-point map, and winning tricks, hitting your bid, having certain cards included in a trick, each grant you a certain number of action points which will be used to move your cubes further west. Once a cube reaches the west coast, the end game condition has been triggered, and each player will score a number of points based upon the longitude each of their cubes is at.
It was fine. Both portions of the game, the card play and the map board, worked, but it was also a bit too pedestrian. As always, I’m glad to have tried it.
This is another spot in the narrative where it would be helpful to explain why I was reading so many rules, but it’s still several photos down, so we’ll talk about that when we get there.
Instead, we’ll talk about trick-taking games where players draft their cards from a public pool. This came up at bggcon this last year as I was playing my friend Daniel’s upcoming trick-taking release Reapers (which was not signed at that time, but he announced it has been picked up just today!) There’s Was Sticht?, Volltreffer, and No Hand… are there others? Third Strongest Mole sort of has that, but it’s a stretch. (Would it be neat to have a big spreadsheet of such things?)
Well, in my rules reading I found another, Alan Moon’s Tricks, and it’s also the only trick-taking game I know where you get to take loans!
Here, each player starts with a certain amount of points/money, and their own deck of identical cards – three suits, ranked 0 to 5, and a wild 4. Everyone shuffles their deck and reveals the top card. In turn order, players acquire cards by either paying the bank to take their top card into their hand (and reveal the next card), or pay another player for their top card. The cost of each card is equivalent to its rank. (If you need more money, take a loan!)
After each player has acquired their 8 cards or so, one card is used to bid for both trump suit and number of tricks the player will win. Points are awarded, and a second round is played.
It was interesting enough. This is all about the company and learning new games together, and as with everything I played, it was a success on those grounds.
The hotel was…odd. It feels like it was prematurely built for some future demand, and was quite vacant during most of our time. My contacts said that we could use any of the public space in the hotel, and, at times, we would. We weren’t the only folks using some of the meeting spaces, but it did often feel like we were the only event with folks staying at the hotel.
Some of the other events were routine corporate meetings, but, well, here’s a bar mitzvah being setup in the hotel’s art gallery.
A few of us did retreat to the “library” of the hotel, with a fireplace, pool table, and comfortable seating, to play 42, a traditional domino based trick-taking game, taught to us by two attendees proud of their Texas roots.
(There would be a few times when the blue-chair room would become full, either in the sense of seating capacity or volume level, but typically, meal breaks would mean that enough folks were out eating that the room was just right.)
Anyway, 42 is a partnership, once-around, bidding game. Tricks are worth 1 point, and any dominos that sum to exactly 5 or 10 are each worth that many points. “Following suit” means following with either end.
I had fun! I struggle with auction-type bidding in trick-taking games, especially when the bidding allows me to “pass” and kick the can either down the road, or to my partner. I err on the side of passing, and rarely make a bid. Is that right? How often should I be expected to bid? How confident should I be in a hand before I bid?
Luckily my partner was well versed in the game and more than made up for any shortcomings of having me as a partner!
Games that use double-suited cards/dominos won’t ever be my favorite, but this was more enjoyable than the others that I’ve tried. (Plus, again, it was about the people.)
Um, here’s a picture of a hallway I walked down a lot. I hadn’t organized a water station, and the bathrooms were on a different floor than our meeting space. For my out of town folks, most of them had rooms on the 2nd floor where the space was, and it worked well, as their rooms were just next to the space and they could access their own private facilities. For the locals? Well, the “fitness center” was at the end of this hallway. It was extensive, and included a bathroom and an ice machine with a water dispenser.
So it’s the hallway we walked down when we needed a drink or to use the “fitness center”.
It was also a reset. A respite. It was a meditative straight-labyrinth to reflect on what was happening. How did my life get to here. What would my grandfather make of this. Somebody who knew me from birth to mid-college, if you jumped forward to now, how would they feel? (It wasn’t something I intentionally thought about when I turned the corner to head down this hallway, it unavoidably hit me each time. How blessed I am. Thank you to everyone that came.)
OK, this is where I put it. I made a big spreadsheet. For whatever reason I’m compelled to do things, I made scratch off cards to help folks decide what to play.
Last year, I had a bingo card based system for providing such guidance, and this year my mind went to having cards that were some sort of self contained game. A dungeon crawl of sorts, but that you progressed through, scratching off, when you accomplished certain things (e.g. play games with at least 4 new friends.) As I mulled it over, it evolved into a flowchart of sorts. Each box would present you an option: do you want to play a game that is must follow suit or may follow suit? You could scratch off in the direction you wanted and would be faced with another option. After a few questions, some of the choices would start yielding games to play.
But I don’t have the memory or knowledge to create the underlying chart, and hence there is now a big spreadsheet. Moreover, that’s why I was reading so many rule sets! I needed to be able to fill out the data in the spreadsheet.
One of the categories I got to add was “may have more than 1 unresolved trick”. What a category! I had only known of 1 game that would fit such a category, but am not letting myself add a column until at least 2 games necessitate it. Now this category has 6!
That’s how I knew I wanted to try Stichling. The game is played over 3 rounds, and in each round the players get 3 cards each that will grant points based on the modulus of how many tricks they win. That is, you arrange the cards in a certain order, and win you win one trick, you flip over the first card. If you win a second, you flip over the second card, and the first goes face down. The same process happens with the third trick, but for the fourth, you’ll flip the third card face down, and the first will be face up again.
The game can have up to 4 simultaneous tricks, and for much of the game, you can not not follow suit. That is, if you don’t have a purple card, you can’t play a green card to a purple trick if there is another trick available to play it to, or you have room to start a new one. Players use a wooden disc in their color to mark tricks they’re winning, but otherwise don’t track who played which card. Tricks resolve when 4 cards have been played, and as there’s no bookkeeping of who played which card, it may be that one player contributed more than one or even all of the cards to a single trick.
This was pretty fun! The card play seemed fairly rote the first trick or two, but it became apparent that there was more going on.
As I said above, there were many things I failed to take pictures of. This includes Saturday’s honey pistachio croissants and our “scoring parchments” in use. Luckily, Rand had me covered in a way.
I had 2 of the felt scoring mats to be used, but sometimes you want or need paper to keep score on. My father some time in the last year had found an unused box of my grandfather’s personal stationary in his attic and given it to me. I put it in my closet, and while I think I put it there to use as scoring paper for T6, when I found it again there around Christmas, I was definitely going to use it for that. (This is what really was setting me off on the “what would my grandfather think?” track. I don’t know what he thought might become of any left over pieces once he passed, but what would he make of this?)
(But also, honey pistachio croissants? As Shari later analogized, it’s sort of like if baklava was a croissant. Delicious!)
While we’re on @OpionatedEasters break, Dale had 3 to 4 exotic potato chip flavors for us each day, and here’s a selection of those.
I had a chance to play Pisa, a 1999 Adlung-Spiele release from Burkhardt, and it was one of the highlights for me in the category of old-trick-taking-games-that-probably-should-be-better-known.
Here, the players will bid on two trump suits, whether they will be rewarded for taking the most or fewest tricks, and whether the strongest cards will be those with a low rank or a high rank.
In order, the trump suit bidding occurs first. Four cards are set out, each showing the bottom of the Leaning Tower, and each with a different trump suit (and really, each has two, but we don’t need to get that into it.) In turn order, each player plays 1-3 cards face-down next to one of the cards. Once everyone has played their cards, the values are revealed, and the card with the highest bid becomes the base of the tower for that hand.
This process is repeated for most/least tricks and high/low rank.
Afterwards, the players are rewarded some points based upon the smallest sum of ranks played (least influence on the bids), and players pick up all but 3 of the cards played as bids, returning them to their hands. Then, a normal round of trick-taking occurs and is scored.
What’s especially charming here, in addition to the general bidding process, is a scoring structure that is only based upon your relative ranking. That is, the player who takes the most tricks in a 4-player game will always earn 8 points, second most tricks 6, third most 4, and least 2. What doesn’t matter is how many. In our first hand, one player took all but 1 trick and they game felt clearly not fun, but then we realized, that Val had only earned 2 more points than the player that won 1 trick, and based upon the points that had been awarded for low bids during the first phase, the overall scoreboard was still a tight competition!
It’s the way I score crokinole -tournament scoring in which the winner of one round is awarded 2 points, whether they win by 150 or by 5. It’s the AlphaGo lesson: it doesn’t matter how much you win by, just that you win. It’s how we scored 42. I might have to add a column for this now that I remember how much I love this type of flattened scoring. (It’s also feels very Burkhardt-y. Günter’s games usually include interesting ways to counteract the randomness of the card deal, and this one is no different.)
I think there’s a commonality to Taiki’s games that I’ll be ready to discuss at some point, but I’m not quite there yet. One of his more atypical releases is American Bookshop Card Game from this last fall.
Four suits, 0-11, with two 0’s, and no trump suit. Players will earn -1 point per card they take, unless they have strictly more than each other player in that suit, in which case they earn +1 point for that suit.
However, a trick may also end prematurely, as it resolves when either each person has played a card or the sum of the ranks in play exceeds a certain number based upon player count.
In my Nathan S. Caveat, I played this most of the weekend with the wrong rules. (That also goes for Kusatta Banana and Stanford.) It turns out that if a player causes the trick to bust, that player takes the cards, rather than the player that would win the trick in a normal resolution. So…reserving judgement for now.
While we’re discussing Taiki, I finally had a chance to play Time Palatrix on the 4-trick side! Rand, Jim, and I played a 3p game, and in this n=1 sample size, it really shined. The 4-trick side, with only 3p, made it feel like there was a “just right” amount of shenanigan possibilities -though we still had one or two plays where our card plays followed the typical trajectory!
Speaking of shenanigans, we’re almost out of the trick-taking portion of the weekend, and onto the late-night and Monday morning miscellany. First, though, I wanted to touch on some games Joe brought. He designed two games for the weekend, and one both Friday and Saturday nights! (What is my life!)
Some felt nicely traditional, closer to a hearts type model where they accomplish a solid and enjoyable game without resorting to gimmicks or mischief. One allowed you to make a sort of “sub-hand”, where you set your normal hand aside for a moment and could only play from a subset you had selected until it was empty. The sub-hand was public, but you were also able to strengthen the values of the cards.
The other one…is straight knavery. Currently under the title, Colour: Wheel, it’s a sort of puzzle trick-taking game. Without going into too many details, as things are still subject to change, the cards are played into a circle, and no tricks are defined. Each card played is marked by who played it. After all hands have been complete, each player examines the circle to determine the best lead card for themselves, and then, well, tricks are resolved normally!
That is, choose a card to start with (it does not need to be one of your own), and proceeding clockwise, find the first card played by each of the other players, skipping any second or third card from a player who has already played to this “trick”. Determine the winner, then proceeding from the last card played to that trick, find the first card played by the winner, and repeat. This process continues around the trick until you would need to start a new trick after the card you started with.
Scores will be things like 3-2, 2-2, etc. You win 3 tricks, you lose 2. Somebody else wins 2 and loses 2. That’s how it goes –you may have a different number of tricks! It won’t be for everybody, and that’s OK, but it’s in a sweet spot for me. It has had several developments since my games at T6, and I’m looking forward to where it ends up.
So late at night, as with any other gaming get together, things devolve towards the party-ish end.
One that I “finally” got to play was Deku, from the publishers of Gossip and the City, and 四畳半ペーパー賽系. It precedes their other games, but I only recently decided that I trusted their track record enough to order it and was placing an order where it would fit in.
The game is, well, it is what it looks like. It’s a diorama/still-life game. In two teams, players have a card to select an item to represent, as you would in a game like Pictionary, Telestrations, Concept, or Just One. (Unlike those, here some of the words are unguessable due to cultural reasons, and we loosen how the words are chosen.)
The game is both cooperative and competitive, as you work collaboratively with your teammates to use the figurine, the blocks, and the foam pieces to represent an item on your card, but after the setup is rotated (on the included lazy susan), it becomes a competitive game with points going to the first person to correctly guess the other team’s answer.
In the realm of my gaming tastes that are “games that are just too preposterous to work”, as with Colour: Wheel above, this one clears the bar and can append “, but do!” to the end of that previous line. What a riotously funny time. Thanks to those who played this nonsense with me and made the experience better for their participation.
I didn’t stay at the hotel, as I don’t live too far away, and some many of the late night shenanigans happened without me, such as Rand and Kimberly participating in each other’s games of Wavelength while 3 time zones apart at different cons.
Two games to go. I know you’re not going to have read the whole thing, but these are going to have been two of the best.
It’s now Monday morning, and we no longer had access to our event space, so we spent time at this…odd table outside the breakfast/coffee bar, until we adjourned for lunch and trips to the airport. This table is twice as long as this photo makes it appear. At times the words appeared to be painted on, or projected on, but at night it was clear: the light was coming from within.
Heck, this oddly inspirational glow table even had words running down the ends. We really weren’t sure what to make of this table, but it was one of the most appropriate tables to play on in the common areas.
Rand had played the day before with some folks, but now I had a chance to play SCOUT!, a climbing/shedding game released at the last Tokyo Game Market.
In game play, once it becomes more well known, it will inevitably draw many comparisons to Krass Kariert, as it shares the same genre, and hand situation, where you can’t rearrange and can play any consecutive cards.
It doesn’t share some other aspects, that, while they appear minor, I think push this game into a territory where I love it, and it overcomes the short comings I felt in Krass Kariert.
The cards have a domino distribution, and each have two values. Once a card is in your hand, it only has one value, but the domino aspect comes up in two situations. Firstly, when you pick up your hand, you have a one-time option to flip the entire hand over and play with that side instead.
Second, and this is one of the seemingly minor differences that I think makes for a better experience, if you pass instead of playing, you take a card from either end of the current high set in play and insert it either end up at any position in your hand. They get 1 point, you get a more optimized hand, the next player gets an easier rung to climb as you’ve weakened the set in play. It’s a great dynamic.
Before you go running off to look for copies, it is currently sold out, but the next printing should be available in March 2020.
(Really, though, look at that table –you can read the words through the playmat!)
The last game we played was a 3p only word/deduction/venn diagram game Rand had brought called Encyclopaedist. The game consists of those 3 large sections of rope, and 3 pads of post-it type stripes, with colored stripes on the end that correspond to the rope colors.
Your goal, is, roughly, to accurately place the most of your strips into the intersections of the ropes. To start, each player picks a category, and there, well, aren’t really rules for that part. “Things on a thanksgiving dinner table” or “items made of metal” work. As does “one syllable words”.
On your turn, you place the wooden Encyclopaedist piece in one of the section and each player attempts to write a word that they think accurately belongs in that piece. The players reveal their words or phrases at the same time, and then determine which section -if any- the words fits in. If it is accurate to remain where the Encyclopaedist is, the player earns a point (reflected by the stripe at the end of the note); otherwise, the note is moved to the proper section, and the stripe is folder under.
Remember throughout this post when I forgot to take pictures of almost everything I played and ate? You may be asking why I have so many pictures of this table. Like the side of the table. Well, Dale and I were playing as a team and our category was “words from this table” and I needed pictures so that I could determine which guesses fit without suspiciously getting up and pacing!
It was a brilliant choice by Dale and a satisfying reveal with Rand figured it out, now finding himself in need of excuses to get up and pace to review the possible words without cluing Jonathan in as to why he kept getting up from his seat. (It was also hard to find inspirational verbs that also overlapped with things made of metal!)
What. A. Game. This was a treat.
That’s pretty much a wrap! As always, I’m grateful for everyone who made the trip and spent time with me this weekend. From people that committed to coming without even having played a trick-taking game and had to take a friend out for pie and a primer so that they knew what they were getting themselves into, to old friends who just happened to be in town for the weekend and asked if I was free to get together to play a game. For all the other stories and time we shared getting to know each other as we walked or drove to meals, waited for food, went to and from the airport, or derailed a game’s progress learning the history of Texas.
As best I recall, my plays for the weekend were:
Die Crew (1 Session, 4 Hands)
American Bookshop Card Game 3
Colour: Wheel 3
Colour: Primary 2
DEKU 2
Doppelt und Dreifach 2
Time Palatrix 2
箸でCUBEs (Hashi de CUBEs) 2
42 1
Anou 1
Bargain Hunter 1
Caravan 1
Chronicle 1
Control Nut! 1
Colour: Secondary 1
Colour: Saturation 1
Count Up 21 1
Dois 1
Encyclopaedist 1
みんなのお茶請け (Everyone’s Served) 1
FINAL BURGER -LAST ORDER- 1
Goat ‘n’ Goat 1
Goldmine 1
The Great Migration 1
Hattrick 1
Hearts 1
Joraku 1
Länder toppen! 1
Let Me Off 1
Margin for Error 1
Monster Trick 1
Mü & More 1
Mückenstich 1
No Return: Es gibt kein Zurück! 1
Nokosu Dice 1
On The Cards 1
ペーターと2匹の牧羊犬 (Peter’s Two Sheep Dogs) 1
Pikoko 1
Pisa 1
Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to the Ghost Town 1
Scharfe Schoten 1
Schnapp 1
Schwarz oder Weiß 1
SCOUT! 1
Sextet 1
Skull King: Das Würfelspiel 1
Small Sugar Mill 1
Somnia 1
Tricks 1
Tricky Bid 1
Undisclosed Train Game 1
Voodoo Prince 1
Willi 1
くさったバナナ (Kusatta Banana) 1
なつめも (Natsumemo) 1
フォグサイト (FOGSITE) 1
四畳半ペーパー賽系 (Yojōhan Pēpā Saikei) 1
Overall, even with attendance in the low 30s, it’s getting almost out of hand for me, as it’s headed towards that wedding reception feeling where you simply can’t spend enough time with everyone that came. I’m currently leaning towards doing it again next year, but things may change between now and then, and I’ll probably be tighter with invitations. (As is almost always the case, I share the story of the weekend for my own diary-ish reasons, but also to spread whimsy and encourage others to hold their own such events.)
Thank you again for everyone that came out and spent time with me. I’m touched by your friendship and support.
I really hope you’ll have one of these a time that I’m visiting Cincinnati! (in-laws live in Amelia)
Let’s discuss during your visit in the Spring!
Stats alert: I logged plays with 26 different people over the weekend & 31 new to me games. Thanks for a fantastic weekend of my favorite game mechanic! (p.s. The card holders made from different varieties of wood were beautiful…and I don’t group my cards to give away info!)
My father made those, and Jason made the others.
I don’t sort my cards to a fault- yesterday in a game of The Mind, I played my own cards out of order! 🙈
I had a great time at T6, as always
1) I can confirm that the number of handpies consumed was an integer somewhere between 2 and 4.
2) I atoned for this by missing out on the cinnamon rolls;
3) I will probably never play Encyclopedist ever again. nothing will ever be able to eclipse this game
4) thanks to all the new friends that I met! I have lived here for my entire life, and yet I found two new places/experiences here this weekend because T6-goers asked to go! I am pretty pumped to have a good source for karaage now.
5) I played mostly TT games at this convention, though some may have been Train Testing, Time Travel, Tile Taking, etc
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Thanks again, man. Appreciate you. Looking, back, I think the only thing we played was Deku. Dang it. Dale and I only played one game as well. I think that happens to the game wranglers; they wrangle the games and don’t end up coinciding. Next time I may try less wrangling, and more “go with the flow”-ing. Amazing time, regardless.
You’re welcome, and thank you! If we can’t wait until next time, let’s fill out that Andor spreadsheet together sometime.
Yes!
Try Texas Showdown. Awesome trick-taking game sadly not published in USA, but easily orderable for a reasonable price on Amazon. Shines with 5-6 players.
It was played a bunch of times by several groups at T6.
Yes, Texas Showdown was played by several groups, just not one I made it into (though I do own). One attendee even brought 3 or 4 spare copies as he knew that folks would be interested in one after they played. :)
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