Gamehole Con 2021 - Day 3

Starting to feel like a lot of boardgaming yet?  No kidding.

Friday...we're not to the weekend yet.  E and I started our day by heading over to Mickie's Dairy Bar by the Madison campus.  It's a usual stop for us now and Apong picked up on it from my FB feed and headed over not long after us.  Great food - cash only, so come prepared - but huge plates, well prepared, and at great prices.  Not to mention I've never  had an unfriendly waitstaff and this time was no exception.  She went out of her way to talk to us about food and work.

First game of the day was Tournament at Camelot.  It's a trick-taking game with a twist for your primary character, secondary character, and a number of places and artifacts associated with the round table.  We had a bit of a rocky start because the coordinator hadn't played in a while and couldn't remember the difference between what basically was a round and a hand.  It made a BIG difference for play as some things weren't visible until all tricks had been played.

E's particular card combo facilitated drawing more and more specialty cards.  You can see the obvious difference between their hand and mine.

One of the best  parts of the game is that it is fairly easy to manipulate the target as you figure out the rules.  The woman across from me was point free [a good thing, think of getting points as damage] until we got a little more savvy, and then players would use "ties" in the card number/suit to pull the lowest or highest card out of contention, meaning the trick would default to the second highest or second lowest depending on the situation.  Made for some pretty spirited table talk.

This is not us.  Random people playing Cthulhu Wars.   I don't think that 90-120 minute playtime on boardgamegeek is accurate.  They seemed to have been there MUCH longer than that.  I assume they're playing with an expansion as I think the base set only accommodates up to four.  Ah, it does exit in a 6 to 8 and clocks in at at least 120: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/145039/cthulhu-wars-six-eight-player-earth-map.

Some more rando Gameholeconers.  Not sure what they're playing but they were interested in my random photo taking.  There were a couple of tables with lengthy games going on including one the next day with a huge custom Mario Kart type board game.

E and I played games with Kane Klenko, the game designer, for a few sessions.  During this one we played Fuse, a few prototypes, and Cosmic Factory pictured here.  This was a fun game - easy to pick up if you want a family game that's fast: five one minute rounds.  You're using 2x2 cards to make a 3x3 grid and score for areas with orange, areas with green, areas with blue, and continuous asteroids [like a wall in Alhambra].  Your lowest two scores are your end score.

Those cards in the middle are for snatching if you think you have the most points in one of the three planet categories.  Pick up extra points if you're right.  Lose some if you're wrong. I'm obviously going for a green planet play and wall points here.  I'm not sure what E is up to as a strategy.  Or Kane for that matter...their layouts are much less monochromatic than mine.  There are cards that mix it all up by forcing the tile draft to be different, adding black holes [removes cards], and more.

We had a gap, so went to the library to play a round of Wingspan.  I stole Klund's strategy and focused on birds that took other birds.  Even so, with big piles of point cards, E and I had close scores.

We also played Battleline.  Sean, who taught me Power Grid forever ago, also taught me this game.  Love it.  Think three card poker hands [sequential, suits, total] and any "cohort" that wins a column counts toward a win on your part either via a number of wins or sequential wins.  There are some cards for mixing it up [like wilds] and you have to pay attention, because with only one of each card, it may become impossible to win with a column and that means that column is immediately and irrevocably won by your opponent.

While E was off playing other games, I went back to Liberty Station.  My burnt ends grilled cheese from the day before was a bit too much, so I settled for a bowl of burnt end chili.  Top notch. That and a beer were the perfect amount of lunch time food.

Gaymer group.  E didn't make it to an event but bought a pin from them.

It's Apong, and he's involved in nuclear annihilation.  He's playing on the Solvanti system. I had a gap where I could have played, but it felt disappointing going to a gaming convention and playing on a computer.

That said, they all looked like they were having fun whenever I saw folks using the pads.  Honestly, with everyone in the same place, it's just a LAN party.

Mike hosted Shadows Over Camelot.  Not to be confused with the Camelot game earlier.  I had watched a video on this one randomly in the past and was interested.  It's a semi-cooperative where you go on quests alone or together to gain renown for the round table.  But someone is the traitor.

Both Eryn and I felt it suffered a bit because we had younger [e.g. 8?] players and they'd go a little OCD at times trying to make sure all the knights were on the right colored seats, etc.  In the end, we kind of let the person we knew was the traitor slide so he could finish the game by placing the last catapult.  With another group, might be more fun, but I don't think I'd consider it a go to game for replayability if I owned it.

I was Sir Gawain.  My power was drawing two cards at Camelot.

That shirt across from me is the traitor.  At this point in the game, we had five white swords, but you really need 7-8 to try and force a victory.

Way more swords, but there are a LOT of catapults out there, and when there are 12, game over [so really when there are about 11 because the traitor can try and play one on purpose as their "bad event" each turn].

Setup.  I swear I played no less than four games with Picts in them over Gameholecon.  Picts are big.

E went off to play games and prototypes with Kane and Klund.  I, on the other hand, bred peppers and used those peppers to create chili in Scoville.  It was fun...but most of the mechanisms have better implementations in other games.

The trick is walking between the rows like in Children of the Corn to breed better peppers by combining the colors.  Brown peppers are generally gross, but you can sell them, and they are used in recipes.  White and Ghost and Black peppers are better, although you need those other colors for optimal scoring.  

The winner had very few recipes.  You could win by a few other methods.  I put in a good showing by having a lot of smaller points on recipes and on the market cards.  Here's the card for cross referencing pepper colors.  The x was the big one to avoid...everything else had some sort of use.  Downside to the game was constantly referecing the card if you hadn't played it a few times already.

Friday night...bedtime.  I went back, made some chicken at almost 11 p.m. because I'd missed dinner while gaming and E had a brat.  E and Klund got back LATE - they hung with Kane for a long time discussing the pros and cons of the prototypes and discussing possible changes.  Sounded like a better time than Scoville.

Playoffs

We had a series of card game design events on my team.  I broke up the traditional teams and had them design card games using a.) preferably a work or developer/quality theme, b.) a card making framework (I had examples in javascript and Ruby with modifications), c.) paper prototyping if they didn't want to use a framework.  They had an hour to design, minimal follow up to firm up their rules and give me a paper or printable prototype, and then we spent an hour at a subsequent meeting rotating the games between the teams for play testing.

The goal was a.) to design, b.) to see how hard it is to write good documentation and acceptance criteria, c.) do some testing and modifications to adjust based on the findings, and d.) do it in a way that was fun, because I find aspects of our tech jobs to be fun, we just lose sight of it.

Afterwards, everyone voted, and the four folks on the winning team had a playoff to determine who picked their prize first out of four different commercial card games (Coup, Batman Love Letter, Release!, and Guillotine).  My door was closed, but glass, so as people walked by they observed four people laughing and playing cards with this on the white board behind them.  The game that won was called Year End Review (initially a bit tongue in cheek and no one won, everyone walking away with a subpar review, but cleaned up for team play and upper management), but that wasn't obvious if you didn't know the backstory.  So you could watch people pause momentarily outside my door and ponder the players and the sign and look really confused.  Which means they were pondering whether I was making my reports play cards to determine their annual rating.  Admittedly, not necessarily the worst approach, and better than some, but not what we were doing.

Cards Against Gallifrey

How to get your own free set of Cards Against Gallifrey.  Still not entirely kid appropriate (e.g. Companion Porn), but closer than the core game.  I suspect it will drive my daughter absolutely bonkers if we play Cards Against Humanity without her and she can hear us constantly referring to Doctor Who themes.

http://nerdapproved.com/gaming/the-doctor-who-version-of-cards-against-humanity-is-hilarious-and-free-to-download/#!tp6JV

Valentine's Day

I received some very peculiar pictures in my email.  They came from mingslittlekat@google.com.  Wasn't sure what that was all about, but the content was certainly amusing.

It must be nice to get a Valentine's Day card from your cat saying how much you're missed.

Card Games

When we played card games on New Year's, I tried to pull out a few of the games my father in law and his friends had introduced me to on quarter day:

1.) Pass 4 one way. 3 the other way. 2 the other way. 1 the other way. A round of betting each time. Low and high hands split the pot. This one drove people crazy, but there was a method to the madness and you really had to think about what you were passing.

2.) Jacks or better to stay in. Trips to win. Old game, but I always forget it exists. Forces you to play hands that might not normally get played.

3.) High hand AND high spade to win. If someone doesn't have high hand and high spade, the pot rolls over and you play again until someone wins. This can result in some very large pots if you play a stud variant unless you put a rollover limit on it.

4.) High hand splits with high spade in the hole. Or, high hand splits with low spade in the hole.

5.) I can't remember the 10 of diamonds/Q of spades game exactly. But it had something to do with making everyone throw their cards back in on a 10D and the QoS being wild maybe? No, I bet the QoS took half the pot. The trick was to have the 10D face down so you knew your QoS was good.

There are a pile of good variants for poker out at rec.gambling.poker if you're looking for something interesting.

Once Upon a Time - Children's Gaming (and Butt Fairies)

Kyle gave Eryn a game for Christmas called "Once Upon a Time: The Storytelling Card Game" (alt: Wikipedia, Amazon). It's difficult. You get a bunch of cards with people, places, things, events, and aspects on them and try to tailor the cards to an ending (not necessarily a happy ending) card. There are some general category cards for interrupting, and if someone says a word that somewhat matches a card in your hand while engaging in exposition, you can cut in.

Playing the game gives you some idea of the narrative skills that most people don't have, including yourself, even if you like to do a bit of writing now and then. Telling a story out loud is just a different bag of hammers. While I was at board game day yesterday, my friend Sean remarked that he'd once upon a time played Once Upon a Time and had won. Strictly speaking, that's possible, and it's the point of the game, but I've written a little narrative to familiarize everyone with the game and demonstrate why winning isn't as clear cut as in other games. If you're playing with more than two people, the game starts to show real-life modeling of the Group Intercommunication Formula, and you can apply n(n-1)/2 to get an appropriate transcript length:

Player 1: Once upon a time there was a cottage...

Player 2: Wait...no no...interrupt. Once upon a time there was a kitchen, a beautiful, fully stocked kitchen with lots of pans, silver utensils, a luxury stove, a Kitchenaid mixing machine or two in complementary colors, a larder full of bacon, sausage, pancake mixes, big loaves of delicious stone-ground, hearth-cooked bread and, unbeknownst to the ugly old woman who owned the kitchen, a stolen box of jewelry.

Player 1: A crown is a piece of jewelry. It was a crown. A cursed crown that had been stolen by a notorious thief in a cave in the deepest, darkest depths of far off...

Player 2: (plays Far Away card)...far off Junglania. A country known for caves, full of jewelry, nestled amongst thicks trees, all of it protected by an angry tribe of gorillas. The thief, whose name was Frumpkin, had gone to steal from one of the caves with the love of his life, the princess

Player 1: Interrupt with a general character card...his wife, the queen of Junglania.

Player 2: The thief was married to the queen of Junglania?

Player 1: Yep.

Player 2: Doesn't that make him of the King of Junglania instead of a thief? Doesn't he already own everything in the cave?

Player 1: You're distracting me (this happens a lot - very convenient for throwing the other person out of their groove). He can be a thief and the king. He's stealing from the people. He's only the titular (snickering) head of Junglania. So the Queen of Junglania and her husband, the thief, walked into the cave...

Player 2: Interrupt with a general place card. They walked up the stairs into the cave, stopping at a great oaken door.

Player 1: I have door. They knocked, waited for an answer, told a few knock knock jokes, then walked inside the cave. They looked around....and looked around....um....and looked some more...they were looking for something...

Player 2: Interrupt. You're stalling. I was going to call you on it, but I'll just play time passes isntead because it gets the card out of my hand. So some time passed while they looked around, and eventually they saw a great pile of jewels and treasure, including the cursed crown. Frumpkin of Junglania and his wife went to grab the crown, thinking it would look nice on their daughter, the princess. But it wasn't as easy as that, they just couldn't be that fortunate...

Player 1: Interrupt with lucky because the meaning is the same as fortunate. They just couldn't be that lucky. The treasure, and the cursed crown, were guarded by a pack of ferocious wolves, at least 100 of them with big snarling teeth...

Player 2: They were snarling? Or their teeth were snarling.

Player 1: They were.

Player 2: Their teeth?

Player 1: No the wolves, they were snarling.

Player 2: And there were 100 of them in this cave? It must be a pretty big cave. Do wolf packs grow as large as 100? We should wiki it. [Editor: 2-20, 8 is normal].

Player 1: It is. A big cave. [To editor: And maybe there were like a dozen packs, but there were still 100 wolves]. So the princes...the...pass. I pass. (swaps one troublesome card for another random card in the general stack).

Player 2: There were 100 wolves in the big cave, and they were led by an evil witch who kept them on a great big leash.

Player 1: Interrupt...I have an item interrupt. She kept them attached to a great big dog sled.

Player 2: In the cave? There's snow?

Player 1: No...she's just eccentric. And lost.

Player 2: Damn it.

Player 1: She'd lost her way back to her cottage.

Player 2: Interrupt with a place card. She'd lost her way back to her mountain retreat.

Player 1: That's a cottage.

Player 2: No it's not. It's more like a castle, or a chalet, like Hitler lived in with Eva Braun.

Player 1: I'm playing my Hitler card.

Player 2: No you're not. There's no Hitler card.

Player 1: I could play a character interrupt card. Then I could say Hitler, or even Sexy Manboy Chauffer Kyle if I wanted to [Editor: the sentiment to play Sexy Manboy Chauffer Kyle has been voiced during a live game. If you're unfamiliar with the reference, it's from Shrek 2, voiced by the fairy godmother (Jennifer Saunders).]

Player 2: Do you have a character interrupt card?

Player 1: No...just sayin.

Player 2: Whose turn is it?

Player 1: You're stalling, so it's mine. She'd lost her way to her mountain retreat where she frequently sojourned using her flying sled. She was trying to find her way back to her home, or at least to a friend's cottage, but to no avail. The cursed crown, with its ability to nullify flying, had trapped her in the cavern with her 100 snarling wolves.

Player 2: What was sn...

Player 1: Stop it. But Frumpkin had an idea. He and his wife would take the cursed crown, and then the witch would be able to fly home to her mountain retreat. So they took the crown, for which the witch thanked them and flew away. But they were worried that some day, someone might be drawn to the cave because of the treasure, and get stuck in a spelunking accident like in The Descent. To prevent such a terrible waste of British hotness, they vowed to seal up the cave and burn it (player moves to play ending card)...

Player 2: wait! (plays fire card). To burn it and return to their village...

Player 1: I don't have any cards...can you stop me from playing my ending card?

Player 2: Um...you said "burn".

Player 1: But it was on my ending card.

Player 2: I think you need to play the card, and then wrap it up, so I can't interrupt you. But I'm pretty sure you should have mentioned fire at a point I could interrupt if it's on your ending card, and I have the fire card in my hand.

Player 1: Ok...I'm drawing another card then, because I don't think I can have just an ending card. And then I'm going to interrupt you with an event card. They didn't burn it...hey...that was a fire item card, not a fire event card.

Player 2: I think it counts. They had to start a fire to burn the cave and the stuff. So somewhere there was fire as an item. You can't have a fire event without a physical fire.

Player 1: If I interrupt you, taking away fire from me, which you took as an item, not an event, although I had it as an event, and now I'm interrupting with a general event card, is that valid?

Player 2: I think we'll have to consider it both an event and a thing to be fair. And I get to lose my fire card, because I played it and it had to be on the table for you to take the event back, but I have to keep village because that came next.

Player 1: Ok...so we're back to burn. They didn't burn the cave, they cleaned the cave so there wasn't any treasure left.

Player 2: Poor future British hotties...

Player 1: But all the dust they'd kicked up created an explosion (plays ending card) which started a fire...

Player 2: bogus

Player 1: And the flames rose higher and the evil place was destroyed.

Player 2: That was all Terminiator and crap. You had an ending, I came back in time to change it, so you came back in time to undo or redo my changes so that the future you originally planned and lived in came to pass anyway. I needed a Sarah Connor card. And I'm still not sure how the cursed crown got to the kitchen.

Player 1: They carried it there after the fire. The old lady in the kitchen was really their daughter, the princess, but like 60 years later.

Player 2: Why's that?

Player 1: Because the crown kept stopping all manner of flying monsters right in her house, and they'd invariably eat her suitors. So she became a spinstress who caught evil flying monsters, and cooked them up for discerning royalty, haute cuisine like. She's very famous and has six published cookbooks, despite being an old maid in a kitchen. It's why the kitchen is so nice.

Player 2: Ah...we need some exposition cards for after the ending.

Player 1: What was your ending?

Player 2: "So they escaped their captors and fled home." I was trying to make the witch and wolves the captors, and earlier the gorillas, but you cut me off before I could get to that point, and now I have a stupid fairy card in my hand from having to draw after your interrupt. I'm not sure where I was going to pull out a group of captoring fairies

Player 1: Your butt.

Player 2: Butt fairies. Gross. No one would want to be captured by them. Would it have been legal to say, "suddenly fairies errupted out of their butts?"

Player 1: I think you need at least a bit of context, like when you said I needed to refer to a fire before I got to my ending card.

Player 2: It's a secondary magical characteristic of the cursed, anti-flying crown. Irritible bowel fairy syndrome.

Player 1: You think the kitchen princess would have been happy having fairies fly out of her butt for 60 years?

Player 2: Good eatin. Probably one of the six cookbooks.

Player 1: Ahhh.....