BGG Con 2015: Games, games and more games!

Wow, BGG Con came and went to so quickly! I arrived Dallas a day before the convention to attend Team Geek orientation, and immediately got into gaming that evening. I’m planning to write a follow-up post next on what it was like to be part of Team Geek, so this entry will be strictly about gaming and other activities.

BGG Con 2015 had sold out over 2,800 tickets and to make room for even more gaming, it had booked Room 25 on each floor so that folks had the option to game there instead of going down to the main ballroom in the convention floor. These rooms were pretty cool, each having about 6 tables each, complete with water stations and a bathroom inside. I met up with some friends on Tuesday night to play card games. The first one was a German set-collecting game from Essen that translated to 3 Is Too Much. The next one was Red 7, which is a hand-management player-elimination game. Both were fun, but now I realize I forgot to take photos of either one of them. I blame it on being tired from a travel day.

The next day was Day 1 of BGG Con. Us volunteers hit the ground running. After a mid-morning shift, I immediately hit the vendor hall to take a giant lap to see what games were there. I had been so busy the last few weeks that I didn’t have any time to research what games were buzzing, so I immediately wasn’t on the lookout to pick any up. I was going to wait to see if any new games I played interested me or if I heard from other friends about good ones. I did, however, pick up a few T-shirts from the Geek Store. Score! I do love my T-shirts; it’s a sickness really.

I then sat down to do a demo of Royals. I heard good things about this game at last year’s Con, but there was only like 2 copies floating around the entire convention. Royals is a solid area-control game. You draw cards in a deck and place your squares on the map and on the noble the area is assigned to. You can knock people out, but I believe your square stays on the noble for scoring purposes. I was bummed to find out it won’t be printed again until second quarter. Note to self: Must keep an eye out for that!

I then met some of my friends and we played a game of Chinatown. This game is a city-building, negotiating game. And by negotiating, I mean, anything goes! You randomly get city-block tiles and business tiles, and you’re trying to place matching businesses next to each other in order to get a better payout. So you can trade city tiles, business tiles and/or cash to get all your pieces out there, and, after 6 rounds, the person with the most money wins.

I ended Day 1 with Dungeon Lords. This was a game I had previously tried to play back home but was never able to secure enough players. There were three of us who started this game around 1:30 a.m., with me being the only player who hadn’t played it before. While 4 was best, the 3 of us still decided to play using a 4th dummy player that blocked random areas on the main board.

I really enjoyed the hand-management style of this game. After you choose your 3 actions from cards in your hand, 2 of those cards can’t be used in the next round. That forces you to do some advanced planning and strategically place your cards down on your player board. I also enjoyed the worker-placement aspect of the game. Being first to a location isn’t always the best option so you have to time your placement correctly. You are basically trying to gather resources, hire imps (which are these cute itty-bitty plastic figures), set traps, and hire and pay your monsters. The game takes place over two years, and at the end of each year you fight heroes trying to enter your dungeon. I ended up winning by 1 point. Woohoo!!

On Day 2, I bought my first board games Shakespeare and Trickerion after watching videos on it online at Rahdo Runs Through.  I usually watch Rahdo or Watch it Played to see how games run through; they both give excellent tutorials though each varies in style.

I’m an English major at heart so initially I was intrigued by Shakespeare, but I discovered that a similar mechanic from Dungeon Lords was in play in this game as well. When you pick actions and activate your characters, all but one have to rest the next round. So again, lots of planning on which actions to take. Plus, there’s a cool bidding element that I like. Bid the least amount of actions, and you get to go first. Bid the most, you go last but then you have the most actions and the most characters to rest for the next round. As for Trickerion, I haven’t opened it yet, but the game is just so gorgeous and I like that Victorian era/magician theme. I cracked open my game of Shakespeare to play with friends later that day and sadly, I did not end up winning.

I had also purchased The Grizzled after seeing some buzz on it via Twitter prior to the convention. One of the cool Team Geek swag I received was a beautiful playing mat for The Grizzled, so I totally wanted to pick up a copy of it. It’s a quick co-op game about completing missions during a war. In each round, the team leader decides how many cards each player gets in his or her hand for a mission, and each player plays a card. If 3 of the same disasters come up, or 4 hard-knock cards end up in front of a player, the mission fails and the game ends. If players withdraw, the total cards in their hands get added to the trial deck from the morale deck. If the morale deck drops to zero, the game ends. It’s quick and punishing, and I enjoyed playing it even though we lost!

Another game I played for the first time at the Con is Tzolk’in. This is an amazing game! Yes, I know I’m a few years behind. In this game, your two actions are either to place workers on the wheel or remove them to gain resources. But it’s soooo much more complicated than that. You have to time it correctly when to jump off the wheel, while trying to navigate moving up the god and technology tracks.  That wheel is pure genius!! And it hurts my brain so much, too! I’ve already started playing this game online at boardgamearena.com to brush up. I’m totally putting this game on my Christmas wishlist.

On Day 3, I wandered around the vendor hall again and did a Krosmaster: Arena demo. This game has the cutest miniatures (and I can totally see it being addicting as they release new miniatures every season) but it wasn’t a game for me. I’m definitely more of a eurogamer and this game was too fantasy and collectible-ey (yep, that’s a real word) for my liking. The components are definitely well made. Each character has special powers and abilities, and they move around the board trying to kill each other.

I then met up with friends and we played a game of Colt Express again. This game is lighthearted fun, with cute train cardboard miniature sets. True story: one of the leaders of Team Geek told my friend and me that she recognized us from last year’s convention because we were having such a riotous time playing this game and she decided to buy it for her family. She said her copy of Colt Express is well played in her household. Too cool!

Later on, I was able to secure a seat at Mombasa in the Hot Games section. I first did a demo of the game earlier in the day, and was pleased to get in on this game where we were all trying to figure it out. This game is great … it’s the game I’m most excited about playing with my board-gaming friends back home. It has the hand-management mechanic that I kept running into all weekend. When you play your cards and discard your actions, you can only take back one discard pile, and the rest are out of play. Meanwhile, you’re trying to move  up a diamond track, a book track, and stock tracks of four different companies. If that isn’t enough, you are also trying to control areas of the map so that stocks you own in a certain region are more valuable.

My friends and I decided to end Day 3 playing the dexterity game Coconuts and taking shots. This was so much fun (and who doesn’t love these monkeys?) that I purchased the Coconuts Duo game the last day of the Con. So yes, you can imagine how the night went …

I slept in on Day 4 as I didn’t have any volunteer shifts scheduled. It felt good to catch up on sleep after four days and take some R&R to nurse a slight hangover. I of course made it to closing ceremonies and stood up at the front with other Team Geek members. This ceremony is when the Con raffles off so many prize packages, an Essen trip and an awesome hand-painted Crokinole board. I unfortunately didn’t win anything, but it’s always so great to see people happy with their prizes. The rest of the Con was basically hanging out with friends, taking another lap in the vendors halls where I picked up a few more components for various games, and finishing up the last of my Team Geek shifts.

Lastly, there were a couple games I was being indecisive about buying and decided against it. Two that came to  mind were The Gallerist and 504. The Gallerist is another gorgeous heavy worker-placement game where you’re trying to have the best art gallery. It comes in this huge box, and after hovering a few games in the Hot Games section, I decided to not purchase this game because I felt like it wouldn’t get much play among my gamer friends and me. This is what I call the “Kanban effect.” I’ve mentioned before that Kanban is one of my top 9 games, but none of my close friends enjoy playing it because “it feels like work.” We are all heavy eurogamers, but apparently, the car meeples didn’t win them over and neither did the theme of working in a car-production factory. Womp, womp. So now, Kanban sits on my shelf, longing to be played. I made a conscious effort during the Con  not purchase any games that I think would have this Kanban effect.

504 was also another game that looked great in theory. Why is it called 504, you ask? It’s because the box contained 504 games. Seriously. In each game, you can pick three different modules from this giant thick spiral-bound notebook to play, and that’s how you get all the different combinations. There’s an actual checklist in the box to see if you’ve played all 504 games. While great in theory, and maybe I would love to try a couple scenarios if someone I knew had it, I do not want to be trying to learn a new game every single time this box is opened. Plus, at the $100 price tag (it’s not yet released in the U.S.), it’s pretty steep for a game that may or may not get much play back home. If you do happen to run through most of the 504 modules, then it’s totally worth your money.

And with that, BGG Con ended on Sunday, and now I’m back at home. I’m planning to write up another post about my experience with Team Geek separately, but overall, I’m so happy that I attended BGG Con again, and I’m so happy to be part of Team Geek. There’s no other experience like it in the world of board gaming. Now the countdown begins for next year!