Even cooler was that our hotel was directly connected to the convention center by a set of tunnels called the skywalk. Easy access to the Con all day every day without ever having to set foot in the sunlight. Quite vampire friendly.
Sadly, the hotel didn't have a waterfall. I like waterfalls. I stayed at a hotel in Nashville once that had a waterfall. I liked it.
Friday morning, we played a game of Terra Mystica in the morning, a fairly heavy euro game where players start as different fantasy races trying to build up a network of buildings into cities on a crowded map. Great game with 4 players and getting better every time I play it.
We also played a couple of games of Eight Minute Empire: Legends, a card drafting and area control game where you use your cards both for endgame points and as action cards to add troops to the board or move troops on the board in an attempt to have the majority of troops in various areas, the main way of scoring points. It's short and simple and fun. And the art is beautiful, from the game's designer and artist Ryan Laukat (more on him later).
After a few games, we prepped to head over to the convention center. We decided that Friday would be our pseudo-cosplay day. We are not cosplayers. We did not put almost any time at all into our costumes. Normally, we wouldn't even consider this. But we were at a gaming convention, so why the heck not.
Group theme: Miyazaki film characters!
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| Cute bunch. |
I'm a totoro. Cuz totoro so adorable.
I didn't go all out for my costume. I wanted something comfortable and casual that still conveyed the essence of totoro.
I had the awesome hat custom made by Yako on Etsy. She was quite friendly and did great work very quickly. She fit it to my head size and made in blue at my request, cuz I love the blue totoro the best. I may never have an occasion to wear the hat again, but I love it.
Our first event of the day was Artemis, a spaceship bridge simulation. Basically, each member of your team has a different role as a starship crew member, like driving, navigating, communicating with other ships, monitoring power consumption in the ship or operating weapons. There is also a captain who makes all the hard decisions and coordinates the whole ordeal. No other crewmates can see info from the others, so everyone has to communicate with each other for things to run smoothly.
For our first short cruise, I manned the weapons. Basically, the captain told me what weapon to load and when to fire. I wasn't too excited for it. Though if he had left me to my own devices, I probably would have just shot nukes at people at point blank range.
That's how I play first person shooters: charge into the fray, take a couple of guys down with me, respawn. I think I'm playing these games wrong.
Our second adventure had me navigating and researching enemy spaceships. Nobody told me about the researching part. People were all "what do you know about this ship?" and I'm all like "nothing." And then people got angry before the captain came over and told me I had to scan stuff...lame.
My third shot was at driving the ship. I crashed it into a space station.
Lastly, we had only a few minute left for our timeslot, so the guys in charge cranked out an impossibly hard scenario, with floods of enemy ships trying to kill us. I played the engineer, trying to direct ship power where it was needed, repair broken ship sections, and keep all the systems cooled. With us getting hit constantly, it was a micromanaging nightmare.
We need more power to weapons so we can actually shoot them? Oh, okay then, I guess we can do that, but imma take all the juice away from the thrusters so we can't move anymore. Also, everything is overheating. Also, all of my repair dudes are dead, nothing is getting fixed anymore.
This...was actually a lot of fun.
Overall, this wasn't my favorite event. I probably wouldn't do it again, but it was worth the experience.
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| Aboard the spaceship with the Miyazaki Crew! And another guy! |
We bounced from our space adventure to our next even: SUPER ROBO RALLY!! This deserves full capitalization, because it was impossibly fun.
Basically each player has a giant robot made of LEGOs. That enough is awesome. My robot was Wall-E.
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| Wall-E is such a sad looking LEGO-bot. |
The goal of the game is to get to the "flag" spaces on the board in a certain order. Before a turn, everyone inputs a series of moves that they choose from a randomly generated set of possibilities. These get inputted by all players via a cell phone that communicates with the main computer off to the side.
Then the fun starts. The moves begin to resolve, in some order determined by a priority randomly assigned to your move bank. But maybe you don't get to go where you want, because another player moved in your way first.
And after all moves have resolve, the conveyer belts trigger and you move some more. Watch:
Just wonderful when you end up on a belt by accident and then go completely the wrong way.
Also, if you walk off the board or fall in a hole, you die. Don't die. Though at one point, I was so far away from where I wanted to be I jumped off the edge of the board on purpose so I would respawn in a more reasonable place closer to the center of the board.
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| Spin-Bot is dead. |
Anyway, SUPER ROBO RALLY was great fun, maybe my second favorite part of the whole Con...
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| Rawrrrrr!!! Sock monster! |
Since this was vacation, we wanted to treat ourselves to one great meal. So we had advance reservations for St. Elmo's Steakhouse in downtown Indy. They have world famous shrimp cocktails, they say. And boy, were they delicious. We also go our steaks with sides for very reasonable prices. Great meal overall and fantastic shrimp cocktails. Nice.
Back at our hotel that night, we played City of Iron, a weird mashup of an economic game, area majority, deck-building, I don't know, read the description somewhere else. It's fun though. And the art is fantastic. Why? Because it's Ryan Laukat again. And we still aren't through with this guy...
We made our last trip over the convention for the day for a kind of "games in development playtesting" event. And we requested to the new Eight Minute Empires expansion from, guess who...Ryan Laukat. He was a super nice guy, it turns out. He signed a City of Iron box and player board. His signature is pretty.
Went back to the hotel. Called it a night. Solid day.
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| Twonky bot. Looks kinda like a Panda-bot. Adorable. |
