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!

Panda's Box

So a real-life board game store moved into my neighborhood(-ish) recently, and I'm very excited.  Not so much for buying boardgames there though.  I can do online browsing and buying from home, where pants aren't required.  More like it's a nice place to meet up with people to play games occasionally.  Or to browse their game selection just for funsies (but with pants on). 
They also have, 4 different times now, had out-of-print games at non-ridiculous prices.  We picked up Strasbourg and The Ladies of Troyes off the clearance table for their less-than-MSRP-online-retailer-like prices despite their out-of-printness.  We also found Hansa Teutonica and the St. Petersburg Expansion for MSRP prices, which are still a good deal considering their out-of- printness.

They sell game acessories too. 
So there I was, browsing the store other day, wearing pants, and I stumbled upon this gem!

PANDA'S BOX!

It's a panda deck box!  It's supposed to hold your (insert collectible card game of choice here) cards, but with cute panda theme.

I don't play (insert collectible card game of choice here), but I bought it anyway.  It was only $3.50 and it was adorable.
I still put it to good use.  I don't have cards for it to hold, but I still have card sleeves that I use to protect cards for my board game that, you know, have cards.  So that's where they are stored now.

A card-protector protector.

Hello Panda!

In a couple of weeks we are heading to Indy for GenCon!  It's the biggest gaming convention in the U.S. and it's going to be awesome.  4 days of boardgames and cosplayers and boardgames and LARPers and boardgames and theme partys and GIANT BOARDGAMES!  It'll be great.  I may even post about it.  But only if you are nice to me.

PEEK-A-BOO!!!!

Go: A Game of Stones

Just FYI, my blog hit 500 page views this week.  That's a nice round number, half a millennium.

So in honor of this first milestone, I wish to tell you about my favorite game ever:

Go.  That's the name of the game.  I don't want you to go anywhere.  I want you to stay here and keep reading.
 
It is an abstract strategy game at it's finest.  Few rules, endless variability, and looks great on a coffee table.

I've been playing Go for almost 8 years now, long before I got really into designer boardgames as a hobby.  It is the only game I have rated a solid 10/10 on my boardgamegeek profile.  Every other great game can only get at best a 9.5, because that is a rule I set for myself.  Go is my favorite and that will never change.  It is so great, I made sure it was the inaugural game on my game table.

But enough about me.  You come here to hear about the games.  Or maybe you come here for me.  That would be quite flattering.

Go requires only a few components: A board and some stones.

The board consists of a 19x19 grid of lines.  That's it.

Here's mine:

My precious.

My board is made of bamboo, 3/4" thick.  It's a pretty good looking board for pretty cheap.  And it's a favorite of pandas.
Boards come in a variety of woods and thicknesses.  Thicker boards and nicer woods cost more.  The one I have is a table board, but you can get ones with feet on them that are meant for placing on the floor.  The fanciest boards are floor boards made from 700 year old Kaya trees grown in a particular region of Japan and are like 8 inches thick or something.  They can run several hundred thousand dollars. *Sigh*...I can dream.

You also needs stones.  Here are my Go stones (not to be confused with my gall stones).

A bowl of stones.

These are the black stones.  There are also white ones.  They come in fancy wooden bowls.  Everything about this game screams fine craftsmanship.
These stones are made out of Yunzi.  Few know what they are actually made of; it's a secret Chinese recipe.  Yunzi stones are relatively inexpensive but still look and feel very nice.  And the black ones are known for the strange green glow when held up to the light.
Probably the most well known/ fancy stones are shell and slate (the white ones are from shells, and the black from slate).  The shells are from polished shells of a particular Japanese clam, and they have just lovely lovely patterns on them.  They are also expensive. *Sigh*...I can dream.

The game starts with 2 players, each with a set of stones, and an empty board.

My blank canvas.

Starting with black, the players take turns placing stones of the intersections of lines of the board.  The goal of the game is to secure territory by enclosing areas with your stones.  This is complicated by the fact that there are capturing rules that "kill" stones if they get surrounded by an opponent's stones in certain ways.  Those rules are hard to explain quickly.  I'll refer you to the Wikipedia page for that.

But when you capture an opponent's stone, you get to clink it into the lid of your stone bowl for safe keeping.

My captures

 These are my skinny fingers placing a stone on the board.  That weird grip is the proper way to hold a stone.  To place the stone, your index finger slides out and your middle finger presses the stone onto the board with a satisfying 'clack,' or 'thwak' if you really get into it.  I save my 'thwak' for moves that say "sorry, but you probably just lost."

Throughout the game, you make all sorts of pretty shapes.  Some of them are common enough to have names.  Like this one:

Bamboo joints!!

This shape is called bamboo joints!!  Yay panda!! 
Ahem...excuse me.

Once both players decide there is nothing useful left to do and pass, the game ends.  You then count the spaces that you have enclosed by your stones plus the number of stones you have captured to get a final score.  Since black went first in the game, a slight advantage, white is award an extra few points to compensate called komi.  There are several different sets of scoring rules, but I usually play by Japanese scoring rules which award a 6.5 point komi to white.  The 0.5 point ensures that there are no ties.  Good games can be won by only that half a point. 
This is how a game with my brother turned out.  I played white, he played black.  It was not a good game for me.

This is a disaster for white.

He won by an embarrassingly large margin.  Maybe you can see it, but black owns a lot more spaces than white.  It's disgusting.

Anyway, I like Go a lot.  It has simple rules, but is actually a very complicated, deep game.  If you want to learn a lot, I would suggest checking out Sensei's Library.  It has everything from beginner's tips to advanced strategies and position analysis.  It's great. 

You can also find several Go servers that let you play with people online.  KGS is nice for live games, and is especially accepting of beginning players.  Dragon Go Server (DGS) is my favorite, and is a faster modern equivalent of playing by mail.  That is, you have a time limit of like 30 days or something and the players don't have to be online at the same time, it's all done turn by turn at your leisure.  I like this style actually.  And I also like dragons.

So I would of course recommend that you try Go.  All the cool people are playing it.

 

I'm allowed to reuse this panda picture from a previous post because it is way too adorable to use only once.

The Art of Cube and Meeple Stacking

Sometimes I have a short attention span.

It's quite odd really.  I can sit down and play a brain-burner of a game for 4 hours with no problem usually.  But those 5 minutes where we are reminding ourselves of the game rules before we start just get to me.

Luckily, the best board games come packed with bits of fun that are even better when employed beyond their intended use.  Like cats who sit in empty shipping boxes.  Or kids with bubblewrap.  Or adults with bubblewrap.
What I mean is that all the little meeples and cubes and other bits that come with a game make great stacking toys while you're killing time waiting for the game to get started or for your turn to come around again.  It is truly a fine art, using your time efficiently in constructing Meeple Masterpieces.

We played Troyes the other night.  It's a cool little game, but I didn't take pictures of it.  I was too busy talking to myself.  And the meeples.  The meeples each have their own voices.  I wish you could hear them.
And they told me to take pictures of their stacking feats!  So I did. Enjoy.

Meeple cheerleaders.

Platform shoes are back in style, and in designer orange!

Meeple fortress!

King of the castle!

Just stack things.  It's fun.

I realize I haven't given you a full game post in a while.  Some of you might actually care.  And you deserve better, especially if you are one of the maybe 5 people who actually read this blog regularly.
I was going to do one this weekend, I really was.  But then I played board games and cleaned my house and ate a lot of tacos instead. 

The next post will be for a full game.  I promise, I think.

Pandas Love Boardgames: The Adventures of Panda Friend

Bichlien was kind enough to bring me back a new friend from her visit to the San Diego zoo.  Somehow she got the idea that I really like pandas...It was a wonderful birthday present!

Yes, I just had a birthday.  Send gifts if you wish.  I don't mind.

Say hello to my Panda Friend!

Panda on my game table.  Pandas love boardgames.

Yes, this is my panda friend.  I haven't given it a name yet.  Right now, "Panda"  will do.

And he LOVES boardgames!  Because pandas love boardgames.  It's a fact.  Trust me.  I'm an expert on both.

Panda playing Bruges.  Don't let the cuteness fool you.  He's cutthroat.

Look at the little paws holding the cards! 

Panda playing Go.  He's really likes the color scheme.  And the bamboo board.

He's really found a good home I think.  He fits in well.

Yes, he fits nicely.

He's even making friends...

Panda  and meeple, pre-fusion into the Panda Meeple.

Panda and panda-phone-nightstand. Twinsies.

And raiding my fridge...

Where do you keep the bamboo?

And getting into mischief...

He sleeps in the same position I do...

Awww, he can spell his name!

But mostly, he's just been chillin' and bein' a bro.

Cheers!

Tzolk'in The Mayan Calendar: The Spinning Wheels of Doom

Tzolk'in the Mayan Calendar is a game about Mayans, and their workers who eat corn, and offering skulls to the gods so that they give you points, and spinning wheels.

Not "spinning wheel" like Sleeping Beauty being clumsy around a thread making machine.  "Spinning wheel" as in plastic gears that spin on the gameboard, moving all your dudes around and around with each turn to different spaces on the board.  More on that later...

I'm not sure how to pronounce the game title, exactly.  But the way I pronounce it (which is, then, the correct way) is "Zol-kin."  Kind of like "Zoltar," the magic fortune-telling machine from the Tom Hanks classic "Big."  (You know you've seen it.  Giant piano scene?  Yeah, you love that.)
I made the "T" silent.  I bet it is.  It should be.  More "T"s should be silent.

...Here's the box:

Halloween costume idea.

Yeah, he's holding a skull.  A crystal skull.  It's very important to the game.

"To game or not to game?  That is the question."

You know what? While we're at it, let's throw in the expansion to this game: Tribes and Prophecies.  You see, this is one of my favorite games.  And it's like buying a Barbie where you can't just have the doll but also have to accessorize and buy the dream home and the pink convertible and a Ken when she gets lonely and....wait what was I talking about?
Oh, yeah, I like the game and so I bought the expansion to add even more mechanics to the game and hopefully make it better.

Here's the box for the expansion, too.  Because you LOVE pictures of boxes.

Moe, Larry, and Curly.

Check out the game board, pre-game.  There's a lot going on already.  And you get a sneak peak at the spinny wheels.

The basic idea of the game is that on a turn you either place workers on the game board or pull them off (only one or the other, no a combination of both).  Placing workers gets them on the board spaces, and pulling them off allows you to take the action corresponding to the space they are on.  But...
Each turn the wheels spin, pushing your workers to a new space.  Typically, the longer you let your guys ride on their Mayan Merry-Go-Round the better the actions become.  So you want to find a balance between doing stuff and having patience to let your guys chill so they can do better stuff later.

One of the spinny wheels, connected to the bigger central spinny wheel.

Ok, this is going to be the greatest thing to have ever been on this blog.  It's a video.  Of a board game.  I usually don't do this, because most board games don't having spinny wheels strapped onto the board.

Ready?  Here you go:

You. Are. Welcome.

Here's a bunch of workers on a wheel.  It's pretty.

It's like a rainbow, but not in order.  And missing colors.

The players each start out with a couple of randomly drawn starting tiles, which give them stuff to start the game with.

Starting with some corn, a rock, some more corn, some logs, and some street cred with the green god.

Corn is the currency of the game.  It lets you place workers and perform certain actions.  Also, 4 times throughout the game, there is a feeding day where you must give up 2 corn for every worker in your possession.  Because they've been working and they are hungry.  If you don't feed them, the gods get angry and take away some of your points.

Nice stack of tasty corn.

Building materials like stone, wood, and gold let you build buildings, which give you more stuff.

The bottom buildings are simple buildings, and do things like help feed your workers or give you technologies.  The top buildings are monuments, which are SUPER expensive and hard to build, but give you extra points at the end of the game for doing specific stuff.

Speaking of technolgies, you have them, I guess.  And you can upgrade them throughout the game.  They do things like get you extra corn every time you get corn. Or points when you build buildings.  Just some examples.  There are lots of things.

Technology tracks.

Then there's the mighty god tracks.  There are 3 gods, and as you gain favor with them they give you stuff or points at the end of each quarter of the game.  They are one of the main ways of scoring points in the game.

Sun god gets the tallest temple.  The Mayans are clearly playing favorites.

The other main way of scoring points involves the CRYSTAL SKULLS!!!!

Cute.

Not to be confused with this crystal skull, which used to contain vodka.

Vodka skull.  Not relevant to the game.  Very relevant to my mixed drinks.

 Just having crystal skulls in your possession is worth points at the end of the game, but a more efficient use of them is placing them on spaces of the blue spinny wheel.  As an offering to the gods, or something,  not only does it get you points but also gains you favor with the gods.  Up up up we go on the god track!

Tomb of sacrificed skulls.  Still cute.

The god track, then, plays a pretty central role in the game.  There are actions on the board that move you up the track directly, or you can take actions to get skulls to later place on the blue wheel which will move you up the god track, or you can build certain buildings which will reward you with moving up on the god track.  You get the idea.  It's important.
But there are so many different things to do, it's not like everyone is doing exactly the same thing.   The god track just seems to be a central point where many different strategies converge.

Oh, we're playing the expansion!  I forgot.  New things...
The expansion is called "Tribes and Prophecies"  because it adds 2 game mechanics:  Different tribes for players and...wait for it...something called prophecies.

A different tribe is given to each player at the start of the game.  Each tribes grants a player a special ability during the game that other players do not have access to.  They are pretty special.

Each tribe has their own unpronounceable name.

The prophecies are tiles that are laid out at the start of the game, letting players know that at certain periods during the game, taking certain actions will cost more than normal.  But accomplishing these actions will get you points.

For example, above, during a certain quarter of the game, getting wood from the green wheel requires the player PAY one wood first.  That's just mean.  But for every forest tile (the tiles with the wood picture on them that cover up the corn tiles, because beneath the lush forests are corn fields...) a player has at the end of the quarter, you get so many points.  And not having any makes you lose points.
But no fear!  The first quarter of the game has no catastrophes like above, so you can get ahead, and collect things that you know will be hard to get later.  So, for the bad no-good prophecy above, you could collect forest tiles before this prophecy comes to pass when there is no penalty to get the tiles.  That way you are prepared for later when the bad no-good prophecy hits.
 
The prophets tell you stuff for a reason.  Listen, and plan ahead, dummy.

Here's the board at the end of the game.  It looks empty, because if you time stuff right,  you pull all your workers on the last turn to take some last minute actions.  Leaving a worker on the board that can't do anything means you didn't plan well.  It makes you feel bad.

When I first bought this game, it was my favorite ever.  I won every game.  That doesn't happen anymore.  Jake wins every game.  He knows what he is doing.  I just like to spin the wheel.  Still love the game though.

Noooooo!!!! That's so sad!!!!