Gameholecon - March of the Ants

I played March of the Ants at Gameholecon - one of the few I played without anyone else in our party.  I told Eryn and Klund, "I really liked it and had a great time, but I only ever need to play it once."  It has mechanics very much like any other worker placement game.  You have larva, you "harvest" them into your space, and then you play them as ants.  Ants have to be fed.  More ants.  More food. And there are options for collecting food, getting bonuses, expanding territory, etc.  I did like the additional ant evolution options to evolve your ant colony's heads, abdomen, and thorax multiple times - definitely gave it a bit of color.

Here we are, a few turns into exploration with the ants owning some breeding grounds, food production areas, and card generation areas (cards are good for evolution and bumping your attacks among other things).  That green giant is a centipede.  They eat your ants, so you need to maintain a strong enough population to kill them, but when you do you get a nice resource bonus.



Grabbing an exploration tile.


You can see my colony with evolved heads here.  Those were good for attacking and defending.  The two big ants are from an expansion (I think) and we barely got to play them because the game is very limited in turns.  The guy leading the game had a separate turn track he'd made himself in order to play slightly longer games.  It was a surprise how fast the end snuck up on us.  Those worker ants, master ants, whatever they are, give extra bonus options and reinforce your hex presence.


Finally, I simply thought this was funny.  He labeled which bag held which color cubes.  I am 100% certain that was not necessary.

My review.  Great worker placement game.  Didn't need the expansion.  Not too different from other worker placement games, but a great theme.  The evolution is a positive feature.  The constrained length is a positive feature.  The pressure on food versus population versus evolution seems balanced.  But I'd probably play Champions of Midgard (rated 96 overall) for a similar experience instead of buying the ants game unless I had a budding etymologist in my family.

Gameholecon - Eating and Other Things

The first few trips to Gameholecon we ate almost exclusively at the food trucks and on site.  The last two years we've gotten out to eat some better meals and treat it more like a mini vacation.

This is from Mickey's Dairy Bar.  We went there last year too - cash only.  It's incredibly popular.  My pancakes were WAY more than I could eat.

They have this monkey with bananas and this year we were there after Eryn went to Hausu at the Trylon with Peter and Lara, so it had special significance.  Bananas, Bananas, Bananas!


We had sushi the second night.  This is Muramoto Hilldale,which is the upscale mall. The dumpling place next door smelled better, but Eryn was really happy and I'm always happy with the sashimi plate.


The last night we went out for ramen at Morris Ramen right downtown.  We went there last year too.  Hard to find, small place, but delicious.  I had the corn and sausage ramen which is a little midwestern (aka not very spicy) but has a great flavor profile.  Eryn went spicy.  There was s small woman sitting next to us who had hair dyed like my niece and was the same height, but on closer inspection was probably a 40 year old.


And on the way home we went past the Norske Nook in Osseo, WI.  I wanted pork and gravy, but it wasn't lunch time.  And then someone stole my berry pancake.  And so the waitress thought I could have the pork and gravy.  But no.  So I got my blackberry pancake, just after a long wait.  And she gave me my banana pie and Eryn's sugar cookie comped, which was nice but unnecessary.  I was AMAZED that she remembered us from our trip to House on the Rock in the spring.  Hell of a memory on that waitress.  She said she wasn't sure until Eryn ordered her burger.


These next two have nothing at all to do with food.  This is from the True Dungeon.  Not this year - this year's theme was a blue snake woman and a giant demon.  This was in the dungeon last year and Eryn has fond memories of a woman on her phone who was oblivious until the tree grabbed her from behind.  Our team this year was much more inexperienced and we actually failed a puzzle challenge and one of the guys dropped unconscious and I had to revive him with a potion as we had no cleric.

My favorite part was on the puzzle we failed where we handed gems into a crypt in the right order to turn some skulls.  One of the guys didn't realize there were people in the tomb and kept tossing his gems into the holes.  I'm surprised no one got seriously beaned.


And this is the original Greyhawk map they used for inspiration (the Gygaxes are from WI) for the modules.  Chris (from high school) was excited to see this photo when I sent it his direction.  Eryn's excited about making her own map and has my old D&D map out at the moment to see how I handled it back when I was world building (my rules were: only part of one continent so there was lots of space to expand, different land types, countries basically had a theme (Sherfora, horses, Cthulhu-y, Romanesque, Persian, various novels, ruled by Dionysus, Atlantisa) an; d then populated with geographical features appropriately (Sherfora, forest in the middle of a plain that was more English-like; the Cthulhu area had lots of mountains and the borders were determined by how far someone had managed to make it without disappearing; Atlantis, big volcano; Dionysus area lots of dunes and grapes....etc).  It did make it about a million times easier to put a basic framework around any adventure and local color/character building.

Gameholecon - Martian Dice

Whoa....I don't think I realized I had quite so many photos of Gameholecon, and that's after pruning the duplicates, the bad photos, and the uninteresting ones.

Here we are playing Martian Dice. The folks who run the game library - the Milwaukee Company of Gamers - put on a tournament and gave us free dice.  The concept is simple.  You're the Martians.  If tanks show up, you need as many death rays to offset the humans.  After that, you get a point for everything you abduct: humans, chickens, cows.  If you get at least one die from each set, then you score an extra two points.  But you have to either play a death ray or another set you don't have each time.  First person to 25 wins.

Eryn setting aside some dice.  Those are all my tanks in the foreground.  That was a real roll.
 

I made it into the semifinals.  One of the Milwaukee gamers was dressed as a yeoman from Star Trek. 


Ming not happy with his dice.  Or else getting lectured by that wagging finger across the table.


Ming happy with his roll.

Gameholecon - Our Fourth

E, Me, Ming, and Klund went to Gameholecon Thursday through Saturday (came back Sunday morning, but at least Eryn and I didn't play games).  It's our (Eryn and me) fourth visit to Madison to play games for days.

It was snow free in Minnesota, but by the time we got to the Dells, there was snow on the ground.  And Madison had a big snow storm.  Enough that they were worried about cleanup for sports games on Friday.



On Thursday after we got there, we checked into our AirBNB (and almost tumbled down the slippery snow-covered steps) and then got to gaming.   Eryn and I played some short games first.  Apoteheca was a hidden information game where you used your abilities to move the tiles so you could get several in a row.  That's Kevin lurking in the background.  And that's Eryn's Displacer Beast skulking at the end of the table.  It's funny how cute they made a displacer beast.  Eryn was amused to find out he had a little red x for a butthole.


More Apotheca.  We played a few rounds.


Eyrn and her displacer beast enjoying getting gaming.


The first day was on Halloween, so there were all sorts of attendees dressed up / in costume.  This guy was very proud of his fairy costume.


Surprise photo of me playing 5 Minute Dungeon.  Our initial group liked this one best out of the four games we played.  It was fast.  That poor guy next to me had hearing aids, however.  So people were talking and doing things all at the same time and it was tough to keep up.  They did like it much better than Fuse which had the same issues (lots of noise and motion, so difficult to pay attention).


Our hostess dressed up as Sally in A Nightmare Before Christmas.  We're busy cleaning up after throwing all our cards on the table in 5 Minute Dungeon here.


And a game of Forbidden Desert.  In my opinion, this was the pickiest game for n00bs.  The water carrier and the mover (me) should have sat on the oasis/well and just moved other teammates and water around.  Anything else (which is what we did) was foolish. I"m not fond of games that aren't forgiving at all without a good organic incentive to use the game mechanics.  But it was a fun round of team building.