I recently had the pleasure of attending a 7-day board game convention at which I had the opportunity to play 67 games!  It was an absolute blast, and I’m here to report on the good, the bad, and the absurd.

Day 1 – Brief But Spectacular

The first day was abbreviated due to an evening arrival, but I still managed to learn and play my personal Game-of-the-Con!  I started off with William Attia teaching his new light roll-and-write House of Cats, which was fun and clever.  I’m a fan of roll-and-write games (especially when they don’t end up in a dizzying sheet of numbers like MetroX or Dizzle).  There were a good deal of numbers in this game, but the mice and cats and cheese made it just thematic enough to grab my interest and hold it throughout.  The dice selection mechanism and the variable abilities for completing groups were clever and intriguing.  I’ve added it to my wishlist.  The second game was less good – Broken and Beautiful: A Game About Kintsugi, which was gorgeous and had a wonderful theme, but the gameplay felt like a less good Sushi Go with not as interesting decisions.

My favorite new game of the week was definitely Friedemann Friese’s Fishing, which is a deck-building trick-taking card game coming from Rio Grande in the hopefully not too distant future.  I don’t often like deck-building games, and I’m very hit-or-miss on trick-taking games (especially if they make you predict the number of tricks you’re going to win, which feels stale and tired), but Fishing was brilliant.  The game just worked so very well.  You earn points and add cards to your deck by winning tricks, but a poor hand (or clever dodging of tricks) will reward you with more powerful cards added to your deck from outside the game.  There is such a delicious balance here of earning points versus leveling up your deck, along with the classic decision of when the switch from engine-building to earning points, but here there seems to be more of an oscillating feature to that switch rather than a one-and-done switch.

I ended the night with Forest Shuffle, which I disliked enormously.  The game was beautiful, but the gameplay involved many dozens of cards covered in numbers and symbols for a plethora of scoring conditions that I found unpleasant to parse and calculate.  I’m sure this is the perfect game for many people, but I really don’t like looking at a hand, tableau, and display of many cards covered in numbers and scoring conditions.

Day 2 – Deep Print Time

I started off the day with two prototypes and two published games from Deep Print.  Publisher Peter Eggert (formerly of Eggertspiele) taught me an unpublished prototype by Michael Kiesling, followed by the card game 5 Towers, then a prototype by Leo Colovini, and ended with the published game Triqueta by Stefan Dorra.

My favorite was definitely Triqueta, which I am eager to pick up.  This seems to be Dorra’s homage to Michael Schacht’s classic card game Coloretto.  The central mechanism is very similar involving deciding whether to flip up an animal to add to one of the available pools or whether to drop out and take one of the pools of animals.  This is like a push-your-luck mechanism that heavily relies on reading your opponents and planning around their individual incentives.  I really enjoyed the feel of this game, the decision-making process, and the aesthetics as well.

While 5 Towers was a less interesting and more random card game with shades of Lost Cities via drafting, I thought the Kiesling prototype was a gorgeous game with a lot of potential that will hopefully come out later this year.

After playing a nice variety of Deep Print’s games, I had a chance to learn an upcoming cooperative game from Tom Lehmann (and Matt Leacock), which got a brief mention in a Rio Grande newsletter earlier this year and in this BGG News post – “The Problem with Purrballs.”  It was an intricate and fascinating challenge that ended with our total demise.  I can’t wait to try again.

Next up was the modular game system Nature coming from Dominic Crapuchettes and NorthStar Games, which I’ve playtested over the last couple years and had a chance to try a gorgeous pre-production copy at the convention.  This is a highly interactive strategy game that is basically the opposite of multiplayer solitaire.  You will be assigning cards to your species to give them abilities / adaptations so that they can try to compete successfully with other players’ species for food.  There is rarely enough food to go around, so this is a real knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth situation.  Only the strong, or fast, or clever, survive.

I was convinced in the evening to learn yet another Uwe Rosenberg game – Atiwa.  It certainly was not nearly as unpleasant as Feast for Odin, Caverna, Glass Road, At the Gates of Loyang, Merkator, or Ora et Labora.  But that means it was a 5 out of 10 on the BGG scale for me.  I’m glad so many people enjoy Rosenberg’s games so much, but I seem to be defective in this regard.  I just cannot seem to be enjoy the intricate, resource management, worker placement (with a plethora of places to go from the start of the game) puzzles that he crafts.  I much prefer when the number of worker placement spots grows over the course of the game (like in Caylus or Lost Ruins of Arnak), and I much prefer when there are a significantly smaller number of resources to manage (like in Caylus or Lost Ruins of Arnak).  My brain just recoils at games like Feast for Odin, and I guess it recoils slightly less at games like Atiwa.

Next up were two trick-taking games, a clever Friedemann Friese party game prototype, and a miserable Hanabi clone.  I enjoyed Chris Wray’s Xylotar and the incredibly cute Rebel Princess (which is basically Hearts with special abilities and lovely artwork), but I found Expressions to be essentially an inferior Hanabi.

Day 3 – Hasbro > CGE?

I started the morning off by getting unexpectedly pulled in as the fourth player in a game of the new Ravnica: Clue Edition of Magic: The Gathering.  I thought it looked ridiculous and it would be a silly thing to get to tell people about.  I had heard vaguely about it, but I had mistakenly assumed that it was just a thematic change, not new rules or gameplay.  Wow, I was wrong.  The game is actually brilliant.  Way to go Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast!  The game is still fundamentally Magic: The Gathering with sealed decks, but the Clue Edition introduces just enough new to have a really different feel.  You can now win in two ways: either by eliminating your opponents as usual or by solving the Clue-style mystery (i.e., who is the murderer, what was the weapon, and where did it happen).  You can get information to aid in this deduction game by doing at least 1 damage to an opponent on your turn, which significantly changes the incentives in the traditional Magic gameplay.  You only get one guess at the answer, but if you’re wrong then you can still play and try to win in combat before your opponents solve the mystery.  This could have been such an absurd flop of a mash-up, but instead real thought and ingenuity has clearly gone into the design and it shows.  Bravo!  I ordered the $40 box set immediately.

After losing horribly at Ravnica: Clue Edition, I jumped into a brain-burning game of Maple Valley by Roberta Taylor.  This proved to be a nicely crunchy follow-up to Creature Comforts, which had been a bit light for my tastes.  By contrast, Maple Valley felt rather heavy to me with the range of card rows to pick from, the movement puzzle on the board, and the Concordia-style hand builder / hand management to consider.  Afterwards, I needed a light game and Captain Flip was just the ticket.  This proved to be an incredibly fast and amusing game that I ended up playing several times throughout the week.  I was sure that I would buy it after this first play, but less sure after the third play a few days later.

The afternoon started off with a playtest of my tile-laying prototype design before diving in to learn the big upcoming Czech Games Edition release – SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  SETI had a beautiful board with striking table presence and an intricate design.  I have enjoyed many CGE titles, and the theme of SETI is definitely up my alley.  I wanted to love SETI, but I don’t think that I do (at least based on the current prototype rules).

This is an engine building game that has an action menu like Lost Ruins of Arnak and numerous cards that slightly augment those actions like Terraforming Mars.  There are a lot of crunchy rules and decisions here that fans will enjoy, but I felt like there was a definite “rich get richer” issue with points and success breeding more points and success.  I don’t like overly strong catchup mechanisms, but the rules here (especially the selection of end game scoring bonuses) rewarded players ahead so starkly.  I also felt that the 12 available technology upgrades were interesting, but that the game strongly incentivized specialization along a couple paths that greatly limited your decisions and options in the second half of the game.  This was a prototype that may change in the coming months, and I’ll be eager to see how it all turns out later this year.

I ended the night by learning Marshmallow Test, FTW, and Pick a Pen: Gardens, followed by long-time favorite Stephensons Rocket.  Marshmallow Test was a fine trick-taking game, FTW was a mind-bending climbing game, and Pick a Pen was an uninspired roll-and-write.  Stephensons is a truly brilliant classic that was an absolute joy to revisit!

Click here for Part 2 covering Days 4-7 when we’ll get into Oath, Inis, Blocky Mountains, Seaside, Dorf Romantik: The Duel, Stationfall, Rebirth, and much more!