This year I had the great luck to be near Indianapolis during the best four days in gaming and I attended my 5th GenCon. Lot’s of exciting things happened while I was there. The short version is I met much of the development team from White Wolf and picked up Vampire 5th edition and got swept away in the energy at Goodman Games and discovered Dungeon Crawl Classics.
This Sunday I got to visit the Origins Game Fair in Columbus Ohio. This is a four day convention about card, board, and role play games. There are competitions and tournaments for games like Magic the Gathering, Settlers of Catan, and others. The schedule is packed full of things from early in the morning until very very late at night. I did not attend any of the paid game sessions, nor did I get to attend the evening sessions since I only had Sunday. There are a bunch of things to do and see outside the exhibit hall, but I …
The abstract tree growing and harvesting game from Blue Orange is not something that I would have normally picked up. It’s a game about growning trees. Every once in a while I find a game that is outside my normal fare (pirates, Cthulhu, space conquest, fantasy combat) that I find fun and fresh. Photosythensis is in this club.
This year was the 50th anniversary of GenCon and it was a large and amazing trip. We went out for all four days and managed to try some new things. I played my first convention RPG session, the Starfinder test game. It was not bad but it did feel a bit off. We played a much more mechanical combat mission. With the mat and miniatures it felt more like a board-game than a true RPG experience. It was hard for me to build rapport with stranger so that I could play my character’s personality beyond the archetype. Another new experience …
Boss Monster is a card game where the players take the roll of a villian from an 8 bit side scroller video game. You build a dungeon with monsters and traps. You lure adventurers into your lair and hopefully they expire before reading your chamber. The first to collect 20 souls wins If you get hit with 5 wounds from adventures who proved too hearty to sucumb to your designs you lose. This is an easy game to learn/play. You setup by taking a monster, five room cards and two spell cards. You then display adeventurers (one per player) and …
This was my first trip to the Origin’s Game Fair in Columbus Ohio. This convention is smaller than GenCon with fewer exhibitors and much wider asile space in the exhibit hall. There were many great demo spaces for trying out games. I went for just Saturday during the day. I didn’t attend any scheduled events; to be fair, I didn’t do a lot of research on what seminars were available, but the whole convention felt more like a place to play games rather than buy games or attend paid seminars. Origins definitely had less of a commercial vibe. I found …
We tried the Grizzled with the expansion and it was a better experience. The new mission deck mechanic is good for taking pressure off the mission leader and makes each mission unique. Keeping speeches and a more forgiving lucky charm reset does a lot to help make the game feel more winnable. We lost. It was the very last mission and we might have won but we couldn’t finish the mission and the threat deck ran out. I can see us winning next time.
Lately I have noticed that many new boardgames are including a solo option for play. This is good news for those of us who do not have a large gaming community or for those times when you just want to sit and play and everyone else is busy. The solo games that I’ve been playing are: Robinson Crusoe, Battle for Greyport, and of course Mythos Tales. Solo game are great for entertaining yourself and getting a board game experience without having to wait for other people. I’m surprised at how theme and style can shape the experience between games. Mechanically …
This review is spoiler-free and all examples and discussions related to game material are entirely made-up. Mythos Tales is an investigation mystery game for one or more people. The player reads an opening story and then decides where to go and who to talk to next. As you read more stories and meet more people, learn about places, find items, and witness happenings you will investigate further until you have enough information to answer the questions at the end of the story or you run out of time. You then use your notes and memory to answer questions for points …
The Grizzled is a co-operative card game set in the trenches of World War I. This is not a combat game. The focus of this war game is to help each other survive the terrors of war and come out of the conflict alive. There are basically three “suits” and three values of cards and during play your group may only play at most two of any suit or value. The suits are weather related: Snow, Rain, Night. The values are: Shells, Gas, and Whistles. Each card has at least one set of suit and value; others have multiple of …