GenCon Special: Day 2

Our second night hotel stay was in the much more luxurious Hyatt in downtown Indy, rather than the dank caverns of the outer city Super 8.  Our new room was nice, clean and non-itchy.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Spin-Bot is dead.

Anyway,  SUPER ROBO RALLY was great fun, maybe my second favorite part of the whole Con...

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.

Twonky bot.  Looks kinda like a Panda-bot.  Adorable.

GenCon Special: Travel and Day 1

GenCon.  A general gaming convention.  Lots of games.  "The Best 4 Days in Gaming" they say.  It's been over a month since we went.  The high has died down.  Here's what I remember from that 4 day blur of games and jolly good times:

Our original plan was that we were going to drive out to Indianapolis for this smorgasbord of fun on Thursday, get there Thursday night, do a small bit of fun stuff, then go on a boardgame/event rampage on Friday and Saturday with a cooldown period on Sunday before the drive home.

But we got antsy.

We booked a one night stay at a cheap hotel on the edge of Indy, then drove up Wednesday afternoon. The goal: get there early so our rampage could include ALL off Thursday. We wanted all the time we could get.

So we drove up Wednesday afternoon. All spontaneously-like.  I felt like such a rebel.

Booking a really cheap hotel turned out as you might expect.  We stayed at a super sketch Super 8.

Dramatic re-enactment of our hotel stay. And that's the guy that fixed the broken bathroom light, obviously.

Didn't even go into the bathroom.  And the bed was hard and the pillows were flat and the air was itchy.

So itchy.

But who cares.  We were at Gen Con!  Almost, at least.  We played a few games that night.  We played Fleet, a short little card game about getting fishing licenses, and Innovation, another card game where you build a civilization with a huge variety of abilities.  We also played CO2, a great game about building clean power plants and combating carbon emissions (more fun than it sounds, trust me).

We then retired for the evening.  Hard to sleep, though.  Too excited.  And I think the boogieman was under my bed.

Day 1:

After a sleepless night on a slab of concrete and pillows made of what I can only assume was pudding, we made our way to the Con!!!!

This is my badge.  My 4-day badge.  My ticket to the best 4 days in gaming. My badge of honor as a board game connoisseur.   My admission to a geeky, crowded heaven.

Yes, that is totally my real name.  I didn't edit this photo or anything.

We had the whole morning before we had any scheduled events.  So we wandered around for a bit.  Checked out the scene.

Saw some cool miniatures stuff.  I'm always impressed with these things, even though I don't play myself.

Then...the dealer hall.  A giant exhibition hall filled with board game dealers selling  their newest games,  clothing dealers selling costumes and nerdy t-shirts with pikachus and other beloved characters, and artist alley filled with beautiful fantasy art.

I bought this.  I can't resist a Totoro.  Totoro so adorable.

Art by Rebekah Crowmer.  So awesome.

Jake also bought Panamax, a brand new Gen Con release.  Meaning we got to basically play the game before the rest of the public!

We later went to a couple of demo rooms where we played Harbour, a very mediocre harbor themed worker placement card game (honestly, it was pretty lame), and Concordia, a fantastic Roman Empire themed game where you develop a trade network and please the gods or something like that.  Best game we tested at the Con, in my opinion.

Later in the evening we played a rip roaring game of MAMMOTH SETTLERS OF CATAN!  It's Settlers of Catan, but giant.  Giant board, giant wooden pieces, giant foam dice.
I hate Settlers of Catan.  I really do.  But this was worth it cuz it was GIANT!  Ahh, good times.

The game is giant, but I am still giant-er.  I feel like a kaiju.

I'm orange.  I'm losing.  Both very typical of me.

Cute guy, playing his giant board games.

We played some more games.  Like Imperial Settlers, another Gen Con release.  It has pink meeples.

Imperial Settlers.  Brand new game release.  One of first to play it.  Aren't we special?

There was some more wandering around, then we went to bed.  Solid day.  Had to get geared up for an epic Day 2!

Through The Ages: A Game for the Civilized

Through The Ages: A Story of Civilization is a civilization building boardgame, where the goal is to build up your own personal civilization from its humble beginnings to a giant cultural force, with an awesome economy and fancy technologies and artsy stuff and a military that can beat up the other guys.

Our group tried this one out recently (and we loved it).

Very busy box art. On the left is the distant past.  On the right is closer to the modern age.  In the middle is a spaceship clearly taking off from a train smokestack.  That must be the future!

Through the Ages basically plays very much like the Sid Meier's Civilization series of computer games.  If you aren't familiar with them, I highly recommend you check them out.  It's a nice way to sacrifice an entire weekend to sitting in front of your computer.

For those who are familiar with the Civ computer games, there is also a licensed boardgame version, not surprisingly called Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game.  It really does look very much like the computer version shoved into a cardboard box, though the game itself is not nearly as fun.  Kinda like from a distance Spam looks a lot like a chunk of ham, but it only tastes vaguely like it's parent cured meat.

Basically, this:

Looks kinda tasty, but requires heavy frying.  Not as 'glorious' as advertised.

That little detour could have been summarized briefly, as such:  I like Through The Ages much better than the licensed Civilization board game.  That is my opinion, and I will agree to disagree with those who think otherwise.  Because some people really enjoy Spam.

See also, Spam Totoros.  Just because.

But back to the game at hand.  This is what Through the Ages looks like at setup time for the most part.

Pre-game setup.

The Giant Meeple Man is not part of the game (sadly).  The board wouldn't lay flat and we needed an enforcer to make it stay down.

Colossal Meeple.  He is awesome.  Say no more.

Intermission:  I bought Jake this Colossal Meeple because I found it and it needed to be bought and I had no practical use for it.  Clearly it does have uses, though.  (I found it at MeepleSource, the same place I bought all the meeples for my marvelous meeple lamp). This red giant meeple's name is Stanley.  Jake didn't name him.  I did.  Just now.  Jake will find out when he reads this that its name is now Stanley.  And once something gets named, you can't change it.  My brother has a teddy bear who's name is Cheeseball, because I decided it was.  People have tried to change it, but it's too late.  The best the poor bear can ever hope for is to be called "the bear formerly known as Cheeseball." 

True Story.

Each player starts out with their own newly formed civilization.

"Yes... yes. This is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it... This Land."

You start out with some pretty simple things.  Some simple farms, some bronze mines, a warrior, a bit of philosophy to stimulate the mind, and the possibility for religion (although it hasn't really been started quite yet.)  Your player board has the yellow guys, which can be hired up to your buildings and the little blue guys, which will represent food and ore which are used for getting more population and building things.
Watch out though.  As your population grows, you have to feed them more and more.  And if hoard too much ore without spending it, it...rots or something.  It's called "corruption."  I don't get it but it happens and it is a pain.

Each turn, you have a limited number of actions you can take, based on your current government or other upgrades you've made along the way.
White thingies correspond to civil actions, which include building things or buying new cards.  Red thingies correspond to military actions, which include buying and upgrading military units.  The more thingies you can accumulate, the better, because it lets you do more stuff on a turn.

Every good government has to keep a balance between its white and red thingies.

Each player gets their own complete list of "Things you can do during a turn."  There are a lot of things.  There is a simple/beginning version of the game which has less actions available and takes much less time.  I actually highly recommend it for your first play, just to get the hang of things.  This seems like a lot to learn, but I promise you'll get the hang of it.  I have faith in you.

So much to do.  So few thingies.

Sorry you can't read everything in the picture above.  The glare from the alien mothership is obscuring some of it, and their signal jammers messed up the focus on my camera.  I swear. I accept no responsibility for any blurry photos from here on out.

You win the game by amassing culture, which is this game's version of points.

To get culture, you need to develop your civilization in various ways.  And to advance your civilization, you need to build stuff. You can build things with ore and research. Build what, you ask?

Build things like...

Upgraded mines and farms.

Upgraded farm.  Also known as "Take a biology class and learn about plants."

 Upgraded military units.

Swordsmen were the best I got.  At the end of the game, there were tanks available.  But I stuck with swordsmen.

Upgraded sciences and religions.  And entertainment buildings.

"Bread and Circuses" was the ancient equivalent of "Dinner and a movie"

Wonders.  These are very powerful, special buildings that are purple.

My civilization likes to mix up its architectural styles.

And you can follow some great leaders.

Smart people are cool.  Albert is a bro.

To top it all off, people can be mean and declare war on you.  Having a decent military in this game lets you bully people around, if you choose to be a meanie.  And while an awesome military won't win you the game, having a terrible military is just asking for everyone to steal your lunch money.

There are plenty of details and nuances to this game which aren't worth going into detail here.  Mostly because, again, there are so many things you can do to develop your civilization.

The game progresses through 3 different ages of time, with the upgrades and leaders getting progressively more awesome with each age.  After a few hours, the game table really shows you just how much stuff happens over those ages.

The blurriest picture ever.  Enlarged to emphasize the blurriness. 

My score cube is the yellow cube.  The yellow cube has the most culture on the culture track.  That means I am the winner.  Because I am very cultured.  A classy, classy fellow.

We played this game several weeks ago, and I forgot that I had actually won this one.  But there is photographic evidence!  Pics, therefore it happened.

I have played several civilization building-type games, and Through the Ages is by far my favorite.  The only problem I can come up with is that it runs a bit long.  I usually can't handle games that last several hours.  I also usually can't handle black beans.
But every once in a while a little extra fiber is a good thing.