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jazzfishBecause it's been ages and ages since I did a proper con report.
Travel: the thing about airport security at YVR is that it's either trivial or nightmarish; there is no inbetween. This time it was trivial.
Toronto Pearson is still the worst airport I won't go out of my way to avoid. Since most flights to the US from YVR go through either Toronto or LA, and I will go well out of my way to avoid LAX, I fly through YYZ a lot. The water is polluted and the mayor's a dork / And they dress real bad and they think they're New York This time I scanned my Nexus card and still had to go through the grilling from an actual human being, and then back through security of course. Stupid Toronto. (See also: earlier post.)
General: BGG.con is not the con of my heart, although Saturday did a great deal to redeem it in my eyes. The registration line is an hour long, and in general the con is crowded and loud and poorly-lit. In addition there's nowhere to walk outside the venue to eat, which is I think fast becoming one of my requirements. I mean, either that or better in-venue food options.
I knew a large and varied assortment of people coming in, which was mostly nice but meant I tried and generally failed to spend much time with many of them. Game inertia: the tendency to finish a game with good people and say "well, we're all here and looking for a game, we should play something" instead of going on a possibly fruitless search for other people one would like to see.
But it was good to meet the folks I met, and to see people like Ross and Adam and Joe, who I've not seen in years and years. I regret not successfully tracking down Jmac, too. Maybe next time, whenever that might be.
I probably met Jerry H in 2006, at Arlington Board Gamers. He moved to Madison a few years later but still occasionally turned up at game days or at the annual week-long beach trip. He's a good guy: friendly and very sharp.
A month or so before the con, I signed up for a game of 1817. Afterwards I got a message from Aliza the organizer, saying in essence "Jerry vouches for you, so we should see about getting some gaming in." From there I got invited into a group of a dozen or so good serious heavy-gamers, and spent the greater part of the weekend hanging around with two or more of them.
That was pretty excellent, all in all. They're decent folks as far as I can tell, and they learn quickly and play fast. I spent most of Saturday running around with one subset or another of them, and that made up for some of the headache that was registration and stress that was the 1817 game on Friday.
The 1817 game ran on Friday. I made a tactical error right out of the gate (putting one company in a position to be acquired, when I hadn't thought any other company would be able to acquire it. Oops), scrambled to save myself from that error by acquiring it myself, and left myself in an awkward and unfamiliar position. I had at least three different opportunities to pull myself together, and fumbled them all (differently!), and went bankrupt around dinnertime.
Part of the problem with that game was that it was a seven-person game, with not a great deal of focus. In that situation I usually start driving some of the bookkeeping, but I was seated rather far from the bookkeeping equipment. So I got progressively more irritable at the errors and lack of focus, and the poor lighting and a minor headache, and, yeah. Just as well I washed out when I did.
Other 18xx played: 18SW ("somewhere") in prototype: very fast-paced game with constant escalating train maintenance costs rather than rusting, and bonds rather than loans. Difficult to get my head around, especially since I had 1817's loan mechanism on the brain. Fun. Also 1846 with Aliza and Jerry. In that game I learned the peril of floating a company with too high a stock price: the company does great (lots of money from shares sold/issued), but I can't afford to share in its wealth because I can't afford to buy many shares. Here endeth the train-game neepery for the day.
The Best In Show award goes to Mombasa, which I played three times and in fact bought my own copy of, but can't figure out an easy way to describe. The central mechanic involves playing three cards at a time (possibly more, later), doing actions associated with the cards, then drawing one of your three discard piles into your hand and discarding your played cards onto your three discard piles. This sets up a pleasant tension between using good cards, and knowing that you won't get to use a given card more than twice or *maybe* three times. There's also a map, and some interesting board-play, and a minor worker-placement component for good measure. It is also a game about Africa that involves no black people, so there's that.
Other games of note: Kraftwagen, in which you're making and selling cars to various car-buyers; neat, and I think it would be neater on the second play. The Gallerist, a game with a very clever central mechanic that solves the strict-turn-order problem, but with about three layers too many of excess rules piled on top. The Game (not the one you just lost), a sort of cooperative 6 Nimmt.
And Codenames, the best party game I've played in ages. It's a team-based word-association game: there's a grid of twenty-five words, and the clue-giver for each team is trying to clue 8-9 of them to their teammates, without accidentally clueing the other team's words (oops) or the insta-loss "assassin" word. The trick is that clues are a single word and a single number: the word is a word that relates (by meaning) to one or more cards, and the number is how many it relates to. So, you could try to clue BELT and SLUG with "Assault, two". Then the guessers get a number of guesses equal to the clue number plus one (to try and pick up on any clues they missed earlier), but they have to stop guessing if they guess wrong. This doesn't even begin to describe how fantastic the tension is, or how bloody *hard* it is as cluegiver to a) find decent clues and then b) not yell at your teammates for their failure to make bloody obvious connections.
I don't regret going, in the slightest. But between the awkwardness of travel, the venue, the noise, and the time of year (in fall I'd rather be back east), it is Not My Thing.
But as I said, I'm glad I went.
Travel: the thing about airport security at YVR is that it's either trivial or nightmarish; there is no inbetween. This time it was trivial.
Toronto Pearson is still the worst airport I won't go out of my way to avoid. Since most flights to the US from YVR go through either Toronto or LA, and I will go well out of my way to avoid LAX, I fly through YYZ a lot. The water is polluted and the mayor's a dork / And they dress real bad and they think they're New York This time I scanned my Nexus card and still had to go through the grilling from an actual human being, and then back through security of course. Stupid Toronto. (See also: earlier post.)
General: BGG.con is not the con of my heart, although Saturday did a great deal to redeem it in my eyes. The registration line is an hour long, and in general the con is crowded and loud and poorly-lit. In addition there's nowhere to walk outside the venue to eat, which is I think fast becoming one of my requirements. I mean, either that or better in-venue food options.
I knew a large and varied assortment of people coming in, which was mostly nice but meant I tried and generally failed to spend much time with many of them. Game inertia: the tendency to finish a game with good people and say "well, we're all here and looking for a game, we should play something" instead of going on a possibly fruitless search for other people one would like to see.
But it was good to meet the folks I met, and to see people like Ross and Adam and Joe, who I've not seen in years and years. I regret not successfully tracking down Jmac, too. Maybe next time, whenever that might be.
I probably met Jerry H in 2006, at Arlington Board Gamers. He moved to Madison a few years later but still occasionally turned up at game days or at the annual week-long beach trip. He's a good guy: friendly and very sharp.
A month or so before the con, I signed up for a game of 1817. Afterwards I got a message from Aliza the organizer, saying in essence "Jerry vouches for you, so we should see about getting some gaming in." From there I got invited into a group of a dozen or so good serious heavy-gamers, and spent the greater part of the weekend hanging around with two or more of them.
That was pretty excellent, all in all. They're decent folks as far as I can tell, and they learn quickly and play fast. I spent most of Saturday running around with one subset or another of them, and that made up for some of the headache that was registration and stress that was the 1817 game on Friday.
The 1817 game ran on Friday. I made a tactical error right out of the gate (putting one company in a position to be acquired, when I hadn't thought any other company would be able to acquire it. Oops), scrambled to save myself from that error by acquiring it myself, and left myself in an awkward and unfamiliar position. I had at least three different opportunities to pull myself together, and fumbled them all (differently!), and went bankrupt around dinnertime.
Part of the problem with that game was that it was a seven-person game, with not a great deal of focus. In that situation I usually start driving some of the bookkeeping, but I was seated rather far from the bookkeeping equipment. So I got progressively more irritable at the errors and lack of focus, and the poor lighting and a minor headache, and, yeah. Just as well I washed out when I did.
Other 18xx played: 18SW ("somewhere") in prototype: very fast-paced game with constant escalating train maintenance costs rather than rusting, and bonds rather than loans. Difficult to get my head around, especially since I had 1817's loan mechanism on the brain. Fun. Also 1846 with Aliza and Jerry. In that game I learned the peril of floating a company with too high a stock price: the company does great (lots of money from shares sold/issued), but I can't afford to share in its wealth because I can't afford to buy many shares. Here endeth the train-game neepery for the day.
The Best In Show award goes to Mombasa, which I played three times and in fact bought my own copy of, but can't figure out an easy way to describe. The central mechanic involves playing three cards at a time (possibly more, later), doing actions associated with the cards, then drawing one of your three discard piles into your hand and discarding your played cards onto your three discard piles. This sets up a pleasant tension between using good cards, and knowing that you won't get to use a given card more than twice or *maybe* three times. There's also a map, and some interesting board-play, and a minor worker-placement component for good measure. It is also a game about Africa that involves no black people, so there's that.
Other games of note: Kraftwagen, in which you're making and selling cars to various car-buyers; neat, and I think it would be neater on the second play. The Gallerist, a game with a very clever central mechanic that solves the strict-turn-order problem, but with about three layers too many of excess rules piled on top. The Game (not the one you just lost), a sort of cooperative 6 Nimmt.
And Codenames, the best party game I've played in ages. It's a team-based word-association game: there's a grid of twenty-five words, and the clue-giver for each team is trying to clue 8-9 of them to their teammates, without accidentally clueing the other team's words (oops) or the insta-loss "assassin" word. The trick is that clues are a single word and a single number: the word is a word that relates (by meaning) to one or more cards, and the number is how many it relates to. So, you could try to clue BELT and SLUG with "Assault, two". Then the guessers get a number of guesses equal to the clue number plus one (to try and pick up on any clues they missed earlier), but they have to stop guessing if they guess wrong. This doesn't even begin to describe how fantastic the tension is, or how bloody *hard* it is as cluegiver to a) find decent clues and then b) not yell at your teammates for their failure to make bloody obvious connections.
I don't regret going, in the slightest. But between the awkwardness of travel, the venue, the noise, and the time of year (in fall I'd rather be back east), it is Not My Thing.
But as I said, I'm glad I went.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-01 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-02 05:28 am (UTC)Near as I can tell, the con that actually is the Con Of My Heart is Wiscon, except for its weird harassment issues: there are excellent panels and excellent conversations, and downtown Madison is the perfect place to hold a convention. And the lighting at Wiscon doesn't give me a headache, either.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-02 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-29 05:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-30 02:52 am (UTC)I actually grabbed my own copy of Codenames sometime in October, but this is the first chance I'd had to play it with Serious Gamers. I was quite happy to see that it holds up!
no subject
Date: 2015-11-30 11:45 pm (UTC)