Con of the North 2025

Con of the North 2025.  This is the third year Aeryn and I have been to this board gaming convention.  Given I missed most of Gameholecon in Madison, WI, this year due to my wife's heart attack, this was a welcome three days of gaming.  Lots of gaming.  Noon to ten, ten to ten, ten to six.  Roughly 30 hours with a single session gap after I realized, unlike almost every other game at the con, one game I signed up for required intimate knowledge of the game.  In case you think that's an oversight on my part, my table before and after both thought that was a mighty unusual move on the part of the host.  Generated a lot of discussion.

We did most of our eating before and after the day. Although I managed to sneak in some food from the concession stand [think hangry avoiding sustenance only], but more commonly found a beer at the bar to tide me over.  Fortunately on that second 10 p.m. day there was a Perkin's in close proximity for some late night pancakes.

We have a habit of hitting The Original Pancake House our first day.  The counter as usual, because the Eden Prairie OPH is a nightmare for getting a booth. I like their logo because from afar it looks like an Eagle Scout badge.  Given the number of pancakes I cooked in Scouts, it always amuses me.

My first game of the con was one I hosted, Roam, a Ryan Laukat, Red Raven, game.  I've hosted it before.  It's a light game that has a tetris vibe because the placement of your tiles is based on your orientation to the land cards.  When you claim a card, it becomes a character in your tableau that has a different tile placement configuration.  Add in some magic items that allow you to spin, claim a coin, bump another player's tile or move a tile, and there's a lot of thinking for such a simple premise.  Particularly when you realize your move might result in a fresh card full of coin options for the next player, or your claimed card makes you that much further from ever using your favorite cards [cycle time increases].

We were supposed to have a table of four, but only two showed up [it was snowy].  So I played a third spot.  My angle was the tough one because with a long table instead of a card table, one player has to sort of tilt their perspective to play their angle.  Usually the first game is learning and the second is strategy, but they both picked up the strategy immediately.  One player played when I hosted last year.  The other, Val, was sitting at a table next to me and my wife at a local music/brunch for Leslie Vincent at the Icehouse and talking about games with her husband when we started chatting and realized her first game of the con would be with me.  Minneapolis can be tiny.

Game two, day one.  El Grande. Despite being a bit of a classic, I'd never played it before.  There's a wooden piece [yes, that looks like a wooden marital aide] that represents the king.  Wherever the king is is locked down tight.  The players big on their turn order which leverages meeple placement against order.  Priority order gives a better choice of cards that trigger actions/scoring.  So you're trying to get your meeples into as many first/second/third positions in the highest scoring areas as possible.  That blue castle in the jail and you can dump meeples in there [count announced] and every three turns they spill out of the jail into a single province. If you pay attention, you know what's coming your way.  If you don't, it's difficult to adjust for the influx.

Creature Caravan, another Ryan Laukat game, which I own but hadn't played yet.  I liked this one a lot, although the simultaneous nature of play makes it INCREDIBLY difficult to figure out what the other players are up to as they try to create combos / sets.

Example.  I had no idea what was going on at that end of the table.  You get points for camping.  You get points for collecting treasure if there's treasure where you camp.  You get cards, you get bread, you get purses, and then you play your card combinations to place your dice to trigger market events, movement events, zombie fighting events, and more.  All of it leads to points.  I made a HUGE mistake and thought the blank space next to a sword meant I got one extra pip to fight.  Instead, it was all of the pips on the die and an extra.  By the time I figured it out, the rest of the table had all fought high point value zombies that closed out before I changed tactics.

Last game of the first day, Isle of Skye.  Think Carcassonne, but with a tile bidding mechanism and a solo tableau, more like Alhambra.  I did well at this game, but primarily because I was paying enough attention to be able to shut other players out of points.

Why yes.  That's me and Nicholas Cage, pondering the next board game we're going to play.

Day two.  I ended up playing my first game of the day with the same host that I had finished up playing with the night before at ten p.m.  Different game though.  This is Bonsai.  Someone at work asked me about "cozy" games.  This is a cozy game.  Collect flowers, wood, leaves, fruit, and build your bonsai using a combination of tools and master gardening techniques.  Bonus points for leaning left, right, under, most flowers, most fruit, on certain sides.  One tactic is to pass on points to score the higher scoring tiles.  I simply used the strategy of taking all the lowest point tiles.  It was a sound strategy.

Ponzi Scheme.  I borrowed this from Ming so I could host it.  I loved it the one time our group played and I wanted to see it go down with strangers.  Amusingly, Ming signed up to play at my table. Two people had to bail, but that still left us three, even without me, so I could help coordinate [I prefer that to playing - makes for a more seamless experience for the players if someone is watching and correcting missteps].  

This is brilliant little game in my opinion.  Everyone knows someone or someones, maybe everyone at the table, is going to go broke.  It's in the title.  You're taking cards, collecting money, but taking on debt at various levels that end up on a wheel.  As the turns progress, the wheel turns a sixth of a rotation, sometimes twice, and your debts come due.  Then the cards STAY on the wheel, not earning you more money, but going back to the number on the wheel corresponding to their debt load and often stacking up / compounding.

Additionally, there's a set system of four sets, and the number of the tiles in your set is where you have to take a debt card from [low, medium, high] and the sets are the only thing that matter for winning [a few points for remaining cash], the more the better.  But to get more than three in a set, you have to offer someone money for their matching tile. There's a nice little leather wallet. You slide your money in, as Ming is doing here and make an offer.  The other player can take the offer and give you their tile.  Or they can match your offer and take your tile.  Given how tight trying not to crash your Ponzi scheme can be, those offers can be really tempting and a way to overextended someone.

It's a great game for being able to talk and have fun while playing because you can see the looming, impending, doom of a huge payout in advance for other players.  You just can't see the money they're hiding.

Here to Slay.  My LEAST favorite game of the con.  Despite enjoying Bunny Kingdom, I have a love/hate relationship with bunny themed games, if you leave out the word love.  It did not help that the table host didn't seem to know the rules.  I looked up a PDF quick so that someone at the table knew the details, but I think that only made me a target because it because obvious I was threat because I'd read the rules.  There were a number of times I was a target when I was obviously the least powerful bunny tableau at the table.  Additionally, we were at a big table, so you couldn't see what almost anyone else was playing.  There's a challenge mechanism and you HAVE to know what they're playing to decide whether to challenge.  I asked them to tell me what they'd played a few times.  I tried to be a good model by announcing the details of my cards as I played them.  But no one else would really announce anything before  moving on to attacks, and I think I again became a target because my cards were the only ones being announced.  

Lot of luck involved in my opinion.

Amun Re.  I really enjoyed this one after I figured out the strategies.  You're claiming territories on the Nile and every three turns it restarts except for the pyramids  So you're trying to leverage a mixture of pyramids, mines, farmers, event cards for various stages, and winning favor so you get bonuses, additional placements.  All of it driven by money cards and purchases that follow the usual gaming set mechanics [as in the second item is more expensive, the third more than that, etc]. Pretty game as well.

I tend to find one four hour game to play during each con.  That's a lot of potential unhappiness if you get a bad game or bad group.  Fortunately neither was true and everyone was even cheerful at 6-10 p.m. Gaia Project is a lot like Terra Mystica, and there are a bunch of ways to eek out points.  Tech, planets, types of planets, specialty tiles, number of sectors, federations of buildings, et al.  You need range, which requires tech or a special token.  You require money.  Ore.  Mental power.  Terraformers.  All of it gives potential ways to score a few winning points.

I was the bird race.  It was a good choice because it leaned heavily into cash so toward the end I was able to just buy every gap I had in tech or buildings or range, and even spent half of the allowable balance of money to grab 12 victory points as a cash exchange.  Those were the 12 points that scored me second place [the host crushed us, but we still had fun].

Verdant.  I've played games like this before. It definitely fits the cozy vibe.  You're alternating rooms and plants, and certain plants need certain amounts of light, and the sides of room cards have differing amounts of light.  Throw in some tools and a token set system [kitties, vases, furniture]  to decorate your house and encourage your plants to grow, and you're trying to make the best scoring 3x5 grid possible.  I won Verdant, focusing on making sure almost all my plant[s were potted.

I've talked about this one on the blog before.  Leviathan Wilds.  It's a 2024 coop game where you're not trying to defeat the leviathans/kaiju, you're trying to clean the nasty crystals off them so they're healthy.  But it's not safe, and they roar and ooze and don't realize you're trying to help.  So you climb and jump and glide removing regular and toxic crystals and trying to work together by exchanging health and special actions for character/role pairs [think healer/support, sprinter, heavy muscle].  The leviathans get harder [this one is number two] and have special rules, and certain characters and roles can be more or less complex.

Originally, I got there early enough to set it up for the two people registered and then another appeared.  And another.  I knew which characters/roles to give players for a two player game as I'd preplayed it a bunch with multiple roles, but figuring out two more players was a bit tricky for a second [we went with the easier combos, but I don't think they used their specials as much for those easier characters, which was my experience as well].  Regardless, they all had a great time and pretty much cut it to the last moment as a player crossed health and toxins taking out the last blue die and the rest finished up within the last turn allowed after a player had to retire [they don't die].

Battle Masters. 1992. This one is old school.  I gave Kyle my copy and I think he has one more.  This is three sets end to end so six people could play at once.  Super simple game.  Flip a shared deck of cards and the image on the card determines which characters move.  Mounted characters will see more cards.  There's a mighty ogre who gets three moves and three attacks, but randomized, so it might not move at all.  And there's a mighty cannon that can take out any other unit in one hit if the tiles fall right. Or itself, if the tiles fall wrong.  Which is what I did, but only after I shot the mighty ogre.

I hear they're re-released it, or are planning to, but smaller scale.  The big scale makes it really enjoyable.

My crossbowmen backing up my knights.  Or hiding behind them.  Take your pick.  This game gives me flashbacks to my college years on University Avenue drinking with Kyle and Justinian [and by 1992 I'd met my wife and was living with her, so she has good memories of Battle Masters as well.  Or maybe just memories of being young].

Last game of the Con, Lagoon: Land of Druids.  This was hosted by the same person I played my last game with last year, a tech manager from St. Louis who ran Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig [Verdant reminded me of a lighter version of that game].  This was a kickstarter, and he hadn't played it in a while, and never with a live group.  There were just the three of us and, at first, we didn't understand why you could take certain actions [like moving land tiles or even removing them].  But as we played, it became very obvious moving land tiles meant they couldn't be removed if it would isolate them, and removing them meant the balance of power shifted toward a particular mana type which drove the end score.  At that point it became a lot more interesting and you could see all of us jockeying for our particular strategy.  Solid game to end on and a fun group.

All in all, a definite success.  Aeryn had a good time and some good stories and hosted a number of games as well, including Wingspan and Flamme Rouge.  I've recently backed two other cycling-related games. It might be fun next year to host all bicycling-themed games.

Con of the North 2024

Warning, a long post.  I spent a long weekend - Friday/Saturday/Sunday - at Con of the North in Plymouth, MN.  My kid and I went for the first time last year and hosted a few games and had a great time, so we were back this year to do it again.

I'll cover the games I played, but two are missing photos so I'll cover those first. 

Evolution: started late and the lack of instruction was really frustrating to a few people at the table so that made it go slower after a late start and only an hour to play.  I felt bad for a few folks who wanted the game coordinator to weigh in while he was trying to direct three tables, but they couldn't quite make the leap to using common sense in a few cases.  That's not a dis. I know it's difficult to just accept a consensus rule sometimes and move forward. Different brains work different ways. A good example was worrying about the "fat" trait to store food.  Someone wanted to know if it applied to all creatures they had per the logo.  A few of us said "no, it makes more sense that that applies to the single species, it's just always active."  But she really wanted an expert opinion rather than moving on. The game made sense to me.  You're evolving critters, the more of them in a population, the better you are at feeding them, the more points you make.  The bigger they are, the less likely they are to get eaten by someone else's predator [we didn't really have an predators in our round].  Food is limited and you can influence the pool to try and starve creatures and make them vulnerable to predation [and getting fewer victory points]. It's a FAST game with half a dozen people.  You burn through the deck of trait cards quick.  I could see it as a bar game.

Dixit: I've played Dixit before.  It's one of those games where if you're playing with friends and family you have an edge, because you know how they think and can map their clue to the card on the table they were hinting at without allowing everyone to guess.  e.g. if there's a duck with a hat and a monocle, you might say Monopoly or Put it on My Bill and hope that the cards other people are committing to the set have receipts and wheelbarrows so there are at least a few wrong guesses.  My favorite parts at this particular round were the other guy at the table acting out walking up infinite steps and, me having to explain my clue, "sonnet", to a teenager.  I said "it's like a poem", but it was important to know  in the context of the comedy/tragedy mask card if you wanted to make the leap to Shakespeare.  That wasn't my favorite part.  My favorite part was a few turns later when she was stuck and I asked, "Are you stuck because I already used Sonnet?"  She stared me down and after a pause said, "You're old."  No debate there.  I laughed and noted yes, and too many of those years had been spent studying Shakespeare.

On to the games with photos.  We did have a very nice breakfast at The Original Pancake House on Friday before we started.  The other two days I actually had a hard time finding time to eat something between start and end.  Gaming is very unhealthy, because you're either eating Girl Scout Cookies on the run between rooms, or going out afterwards for a late late dinner.  There was a place to eat some fast food like fare there as well as the hotel bar, but you still needed a bit of time to eat and that can be extremely hard to come by if your games are pushing their full allotment.

I hosted three games this year.  One per morning.  All by Ryan Laukat of Red Raven games.  No particular reason.  He and I aren't friends or anything.  I just like his games and I had played a few solo [as multiple players] end of last year, so I was prepped to direct them.

First up, Roam.  It's one of my favorites and less like his other games in that it's fast, and actually a game you can play in a bar.  The basic idea is that you're waking up citizens who succumbed to a sleeping sickness.  When they awake, they bring a Tetris-like pattern with them on their card that you then use to apply markers to get more cards/people/patterns.  How you play your pattern depends on which side of the table you sit on.  There are some artifacts that let you move/capture/play optional spots for free. But that's most of it.  First person to 10 characters/cards  wins.

That's Jen sitting there looking at the camera.  I had no idea she'd be playing. We worked together at Thomson Reuters [TR]/Westlaw.  Fun fact, it was at a TR board game evening that she personally introduced me to my first Red Raven Game, Above and Below.  That led to me kickstarting Roam and eventually my collection of Laukat's games [I think I have half a dozen?].  We got in two rounds, same as last year, which is perfect because everyone learns some strategies in the first game they apply to their second game.  Not necessarily successfully, but I think everyone feels like they have tactics/experience.

After Roam, I headed off to have someone teach me a new game, the G.I. Joe Deckbuilding Game.  I've played that one with Klund before in St. Peter and it should be a favorite of mine.  I love the theme.  But in practice, I'm never quite as excited about it after a round [albeit, only two sessions so far].  It definitely helped that we had a fun table of good gamers that worked well together and propped each other up.  We ran into trouble once or twice, but in general kept things moving along nicely even when we didn't get good synchronicity [example, my character let people get rid of cards in their decks, but it only really ever was played on my own deck/discard.  I spent more time ensuring other players got rerolls per my cards].  We won, and it took a long time, but I don't think it was necessarily tight.

It helps the imagination when I get to play the eye candy. Scarlett in movies was Rachel Nichols and Samara Weaving.  I can pretend I'm the hottest player at the table.

Five Tribes, also a game I've played before.  It uses a mancala mechanism where you pick up the meeples and then drop them one at a time on squares until you pick up all the meeples of the same color in the last square and the specific color triggers an action, as well as the square itself. I love this game, but I always forget exactly how much decision lock it creates for new players.  You can spend five minutes just waiting for someone to decide if they want to spend a coin or three coins on the turn order, let alone what to do when faced with all those meeples on a fresh board, or how the genies interact.  We had two games running side by side.  I was thankful for the player at our table who had the genie who let him place camels, because in the end that seriously sped up the game and allowed us to finish rather than stop or run late.  He won. I placed second even with a few bad moves, but I understood the assassin mechanism from the get go, and stole the vizer bonus at the end.

I don't think this is from Day 1.  That's my kid leading a round of Blood on the Clocktower.  That's the game they played with youtubers at a castle outside London, among other places.  Most folks who play this game can't get enough of it.  It's social deduction but with basically an almost infinite variety of characters [not really, but everyone is generally a unique character versus "townsfolks" as in some social deduction games].  So there are rounds of eliminating characters, side discussions, and generally a ton of social interaction and joking.  Aeryn said this one involved a lot of jokes about forklifts.  I suspect you had to be there to appreciate it. Social deduction and push-your-luck are probably two of my least favorite mechanisms, so I'm generally not at these.  

Day 2.  I hosted Islebound in the morning.  We didn't quite finish, but we got to a spot that was a good stopping point.  I hadn't played with four people before, so I wasn't sure we'd fit in the two hours.  The strategy slowed everyone down initially and by the time they were speeding up, we were already getting along in our time limit.  The strategy part is that you're a trader/pirate and you're sailing from town to town, conquering, influencing, and trading, as well as building to support your own little trader empire.  Coins can be tight and the influence to sway towns to give you "spoils" are finite on a shared board, so there's some strategy for when to grab spots that open up.  Otherwise, trade, trade, trade and try to rack up the money and goods you need to drive victory points and build.  I think even without finishing, everyone seemed to have a great time.  The win condition is 7 houses, and several players had 5 houses, so we weren't that far off.

I did miss them trading in their books to buy some of the buildings.  The books only allow you to buy from those areas, you don't actually spend them.  When I realized they'd snuck it past me, we just rolled with it.  Per above and talking about Evolution, sometimes if the rule was broken, you go with a new house rule for a round.  I don't think it broke anyone's eventual scoring placement as three of the players applied it equally.

I played one of my favorite games of the Con, and a new one for me, with the TCAT Board Gaming Group.  Amusingly, I thought I was going to be playing Street Masters, which I own, but have only played a few times with other people.  Instead, I ended up playing Street Fighter, the Miniatures Game.  Once I figured out how to string combos together appropriately and the mechanics, this was a wonderful game.  And not just because I won in the end by mashing both players together into a statue and each other, sumo style.

It's a card-driven game and you're attacking, powering up, and defending.  The defense is either standard OR you can try to guess the nature of the attack [with corresponding bonus or penalty] OR you can play a response cards.  Most cards have several uses, so part of the game is using/managing them in the best way possible.

There were three of us and the other two at the table were guys I'd bumped into at Gameholecon in Madison before.  We had a great time.

The guy to my right won a game, so he was happy even with his loss.  It was a very tight game.  I think I only had a few points of health left at the end despite the win.

Concordia Venus.  I joked that this is  basically Catan for snobs, but I don't think that's entirely a misrepresentation.  Expand your towns/trading spots, collect wheat and iron and bricks and cloth, but use a series of cards to determine what you can do in any turn and collect more cards to expand your options.  We played "couples" style with six players so that's my partner over there in the maroon.

Despite being 3.5 hours long [really], I had a wonderful time. A GREAT table of players who were a lot of fun.  The table talk is limited/nil per the game, so there's a lot of fun debating what's table talk and what's just friendly advice to the table for n00bs, like me. The guy to my right was frustrated trying to keep track of the scoring, but I took the approach that if I had a sufficient amount of stuff, it'd all work out.  So while my partner was busy scoring us new cards [which were point multipliers], I focused on supporting him and getting us out of the game first despite not mentally being able to track the exact nature of who had what points.  Worked well.  I took us into end game while the other players were resource and money tapped so their last turns were effectively negated while we picked up 7 points plus our move.  We won by about 12 [I think], so it was a sound strategy.

Day 3.  I hosted The Ancient World [second edition].  A decade old now.  So some of the mechanics feel a little dated, but the game is intuitive and there's a lot to do.  Again, we didn't quite finish with four people, but we finished five of the six rounds and we announced it early enough that everyone could maintain their strategy [and all the 'options' are in place by round 4, such as the larger titans].  I am VERY glad I got an empty table to set up on before everyone got there.  That probably cut at least 20-30 minutes off the time.  Was fun to watch other people play given I've only played it against myself before.

Basic idea is you're trying to collect colored banners on monster/titan and building cards. Those titans threaten you every turn and you can protect yourself, others, or go after the titans "in the wild".  Everything kind of leads toward bonuses for food, ambrosia [lots of uses including pacifying the titans so you can deal with them later], and knowledge and those serve the worker placement to buy armies, buildings, more resources.  Again, first few rounds were slow, and then even with more happening sped up as everyone figured out the options.

Despite cutting it a round short, we finished with a few minutes before we had to give our table to the next game, so I told everyone to just push the components into the box and I'd clean up later.  It was amusing opening the box this morning to deal with the pile.

Ah, this looks like G.I. Joe, but it's Pathfinder the Card Game.  It was fun to bump into an old Thomson Reuters coworker leading this one.  Another gamer from TR game nights.  He was there with his wife who was also at those game nights [and also works for TR].  I bumped into Brett [manager from TR] and Pete [wife worked at TR] and Jesse [from Virgin Pulse] and Alex [from Virgin Pulse] there as well, so it was a bit of a software networking event in some ways.

I own this one in cardboard as well as digital, although it's been a while.

We played the starter scenario.  Basically, you've got a timer made out of cards, a deck that represents your health made out of cards, and you're searching locations, which are piles made out of cards.  Depending on the action or your character, you might end up losing cards [discard or out of the game] or recycling them into your hand of deck, trying to manage your deck while you close out locations so the baddie has fewer places to escape to.  We actually cut it fairly tight.  There were only three turns [that's people turns, not group turns] left when we caught him, and I had gone to the other pile to sort of "pin" it [officially, guard it] so he couldn't escape over there if he got away during the fight.

VivaJava: the Coffee Game.  I had NO idea this is as old as it is [a decade plus]. I have the dice version of this game, but it's still literally in shrink wrap ten years after I got it.  Don't ask me why.  It's like an unread book.  It happens. It'll be a future surprise for retired Scott or for Sank and Scott at the brewery.  We played this NON-dice version with 8 people.  It's a push-your-luck, which per above, I'm not fond of, and there is a significant aspect of luck imo, but I had fun.  You're collecting beans of various colors, researching to increase your bean count or influence what's in your bag, and then working with a changing team to craft a blend using basically a poker mechanism [full house, five of a kind, etc] based on the beans you each pull at random.  I only had yellow beans for a long time, so I wasn't very random.  She did tell me everyone had to contribute to the blend, which was a bummer because I thought I could just craft a five bean blend alone for my temporary group.

One thing I particularly didn't like was there's a "rainbow" blend.  Generally the blends score points and degrade/age until they fall off the scoring continuum.  That doesn't happen to a rainbow blend.  So an inadvertent rainbow blend in the beginning [which happened] means those three players are going to score points every round for the rest of the game by default.  That seems someone broken.  I get that it's cool to get all five beans, but it should have a mechanism to age like everything else in some way [even if it's only a limited shelf life, it would still score additional points].

Finally, Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig.  I played a couple games with Mr. Giraffe, and Aeryn and Alex had a game of Alhambra dice with him.  He was a pleasure to play games with, although in this case we didn't have much interaction because you're pretty much only playing with the people to your left and right.  The goal is to use the tiles, Carcassonne style, to build a castle.  Certain tiles work better together and complement each other.  If you collect a set of three of a room type, you get a bonus room/special you can apply.  Some rooms are above ground [most], some are below, some are outside.  Your score is the LOWEST scoring castle to either side of you.  Ah, each round you're looking at a set of tiles and taking two that you can then use for the castles on each side.  Those tiles pass, so the options get smaller and smaller.

There is an ENORMOUS amount of table talk between rounds as you discuss with your partners on each side what your strategy is, what you're passing, what you're receiving, and your best options.  We played almost the full two hour slot, and I'd say 90% of that was conversation.  I joked to the host Luke that more than anything I've ever played, this reminded me of working with a team to create a software specification.  He leads a team of devs himself, so he was very amused [and agreed].  If you're looking for a team game and you're colocated, this would be near the top of my list.

Two of the folks at our table talked about working/volunteering at the Horror Convention that happens in the Twin Cities in the fall.  I asked if it was related to Fringe, and they said nope, but understandable that one might think so and the individuals involved have overlap.  I mentioned that I had received a flyer to go to Feast at Black Forest and it had a Fringe badge option.  One of the players was excited and said I should go, despite my dislike of sauerkraut, and the actress and director were wonderful.  I replied that the director was the wife/s.o. of a singer my wife and I had been to see in the Twin Cities a few times recently and really liked, and they both exclaimed, "Leslie!" and replied that she has volunteered at the Horror Convention. I mentioned it to Leslie on a Facebook post and she said she'd even served on the board.  So software networking, board game networking, theater and local arts networking....the Twin Cities are very small if you find yourself in certain circles [as another example, Pete's wife, who I mentioned earlier, who worked with me at TR, worked with another product owner at TR that I know.  One of them found the other a job and they worked together before "Surge" went to be a teacher recently.  However, Surge also plays music locally and we reconnected when I pedaled up to see Sarah Morris play in Edina and he was unknowingly part of the bill.  It was related to him and to Sarah that I learned about Leslie and her music/gigs.  Pete is going to have my kid lead Blood on the Clock Tower sessions at CONvergence this summer. Whew.]

Anyway, the castle two up is my "right" castle and this is my "left" castle.  64 and 65 points, so my score was 64.  I think 67 was the win.

Overall, an absolutely great weekend and I don't think I'd have factored in lunch time in retrospect at the expense of anything.  Thank you to everyone who played with me and hosted games and to my kid for going with me [and hosting games that my friends / ex-coworkers played in].

Con of the North: Day 3 of 3

Sunday, our last day of gaming at Con of the North.  I have seldom, if ever, signed up to play a war game at a con.  So I don't know what compelled me to sign up for a four hour, twelve person, stint of Memoir 44.  Perhaps it was the n00bs welcome language in the listing.  Perhaps it was a desire to figure out what the Memoir 44 thing was all about as it's always at cons I'm at and I've never played it despite having once been an obsessive war gamer.  You can imagine my trepidation when I walked into the room and was confront with this....  Where the guy in the hat is sitting, that's where I ended up sitting.  I contemplated whether I had completely misread the listing - double checked it - but it assured me I was in the correct place for a casual learning game.

I played the Axis on Utah beach during D-Day.  It was not too difficult to learn, although we did get dumped in the deep end so it was difficult to find our own reinforcements and in a few places we didn't quite understand what our options were.  For instance.  It took me a while to realize I should use my big guns against the guy to my right rather than the guy right in front of me.  When I spilled over fire and a few tank and troop units to my ally [not the allies] over there, his whole game slightly turned and so did mine.  The allies had to pull their destroyer in to deal with me pummeling my right flank which gave me the opportunity to take out their destroyer.  My opponent still did better than me - he had access to a lot of free points by capturing the beaches and some close landmarks.  But for raw casualties, I was cleaning up and starting to turn the tide on both sides, grinding him to a halt on the left and pulling up a wave of nasty reinforcements on the left despite him pushing ahead past the beach.
 

But it wasn't enough.  After about 2.5 hours we [the Axis, more specifically Germany] lost 73 to 74.  Yah, by a point, in what sort of amounted to real time.  You took turns, but not axis/allies/axis/allies for a whole side.  Each "pair" across from each other was barreling along at their own speed and as the guy across from me and I got more familiar with it we were really plowing along.  I suspect I actually helped the Allies win by giving him an efficient path to a lot of points that he could then spill over to friends who weren't doing as well on their beaches [I know that happened for both of us].

The game itself reminded me a lot of the Battlemasters game Kyle and I [and Dan'l] played back in the day.  Just slightly more complex and you had to take some things like terrain into account.  I had a blast.  And to top it off, at the end they gifted two boardgames randomly.  The guy across from me didn't win, but his son next to him did and dad told him which game to pick because he already had the other one.  So I got the other one.  But that means I got a game that he valued enough he had previously purchased it himself as a wargamer.  I picked up Warfighter: The Modern Special Forces Card Game.  It's 4tth edition so someone must really enjoy it beyond my opponent.  And it really does look like a lot of fun.  The box weighs a ton.  I'll queue it up for after a game of The Shores of Tripoli with my wife.

A few rounds of ad hoc Timeline: Events.  I stopped into Aeryn's room to say "hi" and got pulled in.  I'm glad I have this photo, because I totally forget to record my plays on Boardgamegeek. What I learned from Timeline is that I'm old enough I don't have to guess at the more modern events.  Sigh.  The guy in the yellow shirt was wonderful.  He uses board games to teach students history and when I mentioned I had Shores of Tripoli but was really after Votes for Women, he told me all about having Votes for Women and Marrying Mr. Darcy as games he used for teaching.  That's got to be a lot of fun.

Speaking of Marrying Mr. Darcy... I own this game but it's been a looooong time since I played it.  Aeryn and I both got in on the action.  With a table of eight, it's a little less fun imo.  The basic idea is there's a deck of events and you go through them randomly, all of them.  Each person gets an event and it keeps looping clockwise, so with eight people you can't really strategize because the randomness is going to mess you up.  I played Elizabeth and got the numbers I needed for my two best matches, but one of them disappeared in a surprise proposal and the other was someone else's second proposal when they failed to garner their proposal of choice.  I went old maid.  I still did really well as I had a lot of wit [yah, I did a good job of witting up the wittiest character in Pride and Prejudice] and other characteristics I'd managed to increase, but not a win.  And for both Aeryn and I there were a few extended loops where neither of us was doing much of anything.  Boardgamegeek says it's best with four [4] and I'd agree.  That would be much better.

I finished out the day with one of the oldest post Milton Bradley big box games in my own collection, Puerto Rico.  This one had been played so much the 'coins' had literally had their values rubbed off.  I had fun, but it took the full two hours, which is a LONG game of Puerto Rico.  A lot of decision paralysis going on.  I sped it up significantly by focusing on the collect and ship roles to literally run the victory point pool out early.  While I had a good time, it reminded me of why I don't play it anymore.  If you know the buildings well, there are some fairly straight forward tactics/choices based on what you have access to when.  You can "learn" the best strategy for PR, particularly if you know the buildings.  If you approach it more randomly....a bad building choice makes it very difficult to recover.  For me...I had a difficult time finding any cash throughout the game, although the harvest/trade strategy still garnered me a better end position than I probably should have had with no big point buildings.

Overall, a great con and I enjoyed hosting some games even if I wasn't playing them.  Definitely one I'd do again, particularly as it's still during the winter and doesn't interfere with cycling and the outdoors.

Con of the North: Day 2 of 3

Saturday I hosted a few games at Con of the North.  This is Roam by Ryan Laukat.  He does Above and Below, Sleeping Gods, Near and Far, and a bunch of others.  All of them good.  But this is one of my favorites because it's easy to teach, uses the same nice art, and is more of a bar game at heart.  You're playing Tetris with your roster of characters who each have a unique pattern.  By using those patterns you fill up the cards which "wakes up" another character who had succumbed to a sleeping sickness plaguing the land.  They bring a new pattern. Mix in some artifacts that do particular things, a bidding mechanism for ties trying to control a card, and a coin mechanism/s, and you're pretty much ready to go.  One of the best parts is the way your patterns work depends entirely on where you sit and, unless you have an artifact that's good for a 90 degree turn [and only 90] your pattern is not the same as another player's pattern.  I warned the guy sitting near me that he had to be spatially acute to play from that angle.  With four players, it takes roughly an hour.

The first game they all sort of figured out WHY you'd want the various artifacts and how to force a bid in their favor.  The second game...much more cuthroat with the artifacts.  The guy on the right side of the photo used his to early flip his characters giving him a bit of a coin generation edge because character flipping flips the artifacts as well.  He actually did well both games and, in the first one really shafted the person to the south who was ready to win when he basically slid her off her landscape and put her in limbo for a few turns that let someone else grab an edge.

I played Final Strike which some folks are trying to get Kickstarted.  With four of us we played teams.  It's based on the idea that the last person to hit an RPG critter before it dies is the one who gets the experience.  Reminded me of my D and D days with Bob and folks in Monti and Chicago.  So you're timing your hits to make sure you get the glory for being the last strike....or, um....final strike I guess.  The strategy is expanded because some baddies can only be hit by certain weapons or people unless it's peripheral [cleave] damage.  You can upgrade your weapons using other cards that allow you to pick an adjacent card from the tableau.  Might be left right/up down.  Might be diagonal.  Might be all directions.  Depends on the smithing you do.  Other cards trigger on play or reshuffle or let you discard and cycle faster.   It was a lot of fun with teams, but not a game I'm going to back.  It's similar to others I've played.  Although I could definitely see hauling it along to Arbeiter or something.

I bought a game.  Shores of Tripoli.  I would have preferred Votes for Women by the same company, but both were on my list as historical-based games and it was on sale at the Con.  My understanding is it's more of a learning event than a playing event in some respects.  Even reading the rules I learned all sorts of things I didn't know about that historical event/s.  Amusingly, I was reading the rules at the local bar between games and, when I left, the guy next to me who'd been giving me side eye for an hour asked if it was a book or a puzzle.  I said it was a board game about the events and he got truly excited and knew something about the time period and what happened.  I probably created a board gaming convert at the counter at Red Robin.

The other game I hosted was Obsession.  I set aside four hours because I wasn't sure how long four players would take including set up and teaching, including a bit of tactics I wanted to make sure they all had.  I'm glad I did, because it took the guys playing Space Hulk before us an extra 10-15 minutes to clear out.

That's Aeryn to the right helping me coordinate as there was time before their next game started.  They seemed to have a great time.  That guy to the north really got an engine going, cycling prestige for more prestige and gentry.  The guy to his right had an exceptional cycle going as well.  The guy to his left, not so much, but he did much better than he expected and made more goal points than the rest of them together.  The fourth player just couldn't quite catch a break/groove although she did just fine.  She just couldn't create an angle for herself.

Servants went quick.  I was expecting someone to steal someone else's at some point, but it never came to that.

I used my new coins for the first time.  They're from Viticulture.  Obsession comes with 100 pound and 500 pound coins [worth 7000 and 35000 USD given inflation].  These give me 1, 2, and 5 so they're a nice match, and even have the pound sign on them.

My last game of the day was Trans Europa.  It's a bit of a proto Ticket to Ride.  You get dealt a hand of cities and you try to attach them, trying to use other players' rails to do your heavy lifting  I won, although I will say my last hand of cities was pretty optimal and I knew I wouldn't have to play as much as the others and they'd hook up one end for me.

Aeryn and folks got a round of Blood on the Clocktower going ad hoc.  They had something like 16 people there to play, maybe more.  It was pretty raucous when I finally found them downstairs.

They're over there in the corner, although some of them are milling around. I have no idea how that near table managed to play/concentrate with a group of 16 engaged in a social deduction game.  Good on them for their ability to stay focused.

While Aeryn was finishing up, I hit the hotel bar for a drink and some fries.  A UPS Tech guy who traveled sat next to me and struck up a conversation with the waitress.  They were a fun pair.  I'd been explaining the convention to her [apparently no one else had] and him and talked local Minnesota beer.  He wanted to try one and I noted Furious was on tap but he wouldn't like it.  He had a pint and exclaimed, "This is what they drink in Minnesota?" I said I'd warned him - I find Furious isn't always for out of towners.  One of my favorite interactions was when he told the waitress she reminded him of his daughter, and she said she was older.  He nailed her age precisely and she sighed and said, "Yeah...old enough to start turning gray.  Like my mom says.  It's never your head first."  Good humor to close out a good day of gaming.