BGG Con Spring 2018: Visiting Dallas in May

I got the chance to go to BGG Spring in Dallas for the first time at the end of May. My lovely friends from Phoenix, Ohio and Atlanta wanted to meet up somewhere in between all of them, and we all stayed at an airbnb near DFW Airport. I had an amazing time with these guys, and it was just what I needed to de-stress from a chaotic few months. We usually met up yearly for Friendship Con, which I’ve written about here and here.

BGG Spring is a way chiller, family-friendly version of BGG Con. It’s a much, much smaller con comparatively, but it wasn’t lacking in any way. The BGG library was just as ginormous; the people just as awesome and friendly. To me, though, I felt like the focus of the con was on gaming itself, instead of the hot new games or learning the latest Essen release. They did have the Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres nominees for people to play. And the only line I waited in during the entire convention was on registration day.

We all arrived in Dallas on Thursday afternoon, and, after checking into the house, we immediately jumped into gaming. I taught them Glux, an abstract area-control game. You place circular tiles that have pips, and the next piece you draw from your bag can only be placed in open locations that many spaces away, according to the pips.

The board fills up pretty quickly. The consensus: what seemed like a light abstract immediately started getting cut-throat. They enjoyed it.

We next played Goa. This is a new-to-me game but a classic from 2004 (ancient by board-game standards!), in which you’re competing companies dealing in spices, sending them to the new world, and investing money in the 16th century. There’s a bidding phase, in which you select which tile goes up for auction, and then an action phase, which is three actions per player. It makes for a very tight game to either improve your technologies or activate buildings tiles, and maximize your victory points. I would love to play this again, even if I couldn’t for the life of me remember that red is not cinnamon. (It’s apparently nutmeg, friends.)

BGG Spring Day 1

On Friday, we arrived at BGG Spring at the Hyatt Regency. I checked out Castell from the library to teach. In this game, you’re gathering your team of castellers, folks who participate in a human tower, to perform shows all across Spain and collect VPs. This game is always so challenging for me when I’m building out my tower according to my stacking rules. In each round, different areas on the board will score, so you can either work toward the current round or focus on future shows. I like how all the scoring info is shown at the start of the game and how there’s many paths to victory — very point salad!

Next up, we played Yamatai. The board is gorgeous and colorful, and players are racing to put their ships on the map to build palaces and collect VPs. It has an interesting turn-order mechanic; you pick a tile with its rewards, and the number on the tile determines your order in the next round. A tile that gives you a lot of resources will make you go later in turn order in the next round. There’s also rules on where you can start placing your ships each round. But to me, the entire game felt like I was just simply setting up the next guy to maximize his actions. I just couldn’t get any traction.

I then played Biosphere with Julie, Joe and Deb. This game had a super rocky start with a difficult-to-understand rulebook. It did, however, have a million dice, but not for rolling! We started this game around the same time my friends at the next table started playing Terraforming Mars, and they finished before we did! Biosphere is supposed to be a 90-minute game, in which you’re controlling groups of population across the board and certain numbered populations, displayed by pips on the dice, will go extinct in each round, but not before you populate and move across terrain. You also spend evolution points to advance your traits, and the first person to complete five objectives wins the game. We managed to get to four objectives before calling the game.

I also got a chance to hang out with cool Twitter folks while I was there.

My friends and I then went back to the house for dinner and played a game of Ponzi Scheme. Some readers know that this game stresses me out so much. My friends had been so intrigued by said stress that they wanted to play a game with me to understand the experience. Ponzi Scheme is thematically accurate: getting money now to make deals for industry tiles, and then paying back investors when the time has come. What stresses me out about this game is the secret negotiation for those tiles and trying to make offers people can’t refuse to acquire tiles, which is worth VPs at the end of the game. The guys ended up having a lot of fun playing this; I ended up in second place. Yay for not going bankrupt!

We closed out the night with some Ka-Boom, which, apparently, is not as fun with only three people.

BGG Spring Day 2

On Saturday, I met up with Julie and Joe again to teach them one of my absolute favorites: Lisboa. I’m always nervous about teaching such a crunchy game I love because I so badly want people to love it it, too, which then makes me anxious about teaching it the best way possible for the game to shine.

Luckily, they loved the game and said they both can’t wait to play it again. Success!

Joe then taught Viceroy to me, Julie and Rodney of Watch It Played. I knew nothing about this game except for the box art, but it’s turned out to be a neat puzzly, medium-weight game about bidding on cards, collecting resources and building your card pyramid. The blind bidding is fun in the game, and there are opportunities for getting a little backstabby, too. Thanks for hanging out with us, Rodney! Hope we can game again at another convention.

Afterwards, Nick, who didn’t attend BGG Spring but wanted to hang out while I was in town, picked me up from the hotel to visit Cidercade and play pinball. That place is pretty cool with all its games, and lots of yummy ciders on tap!

BGG Spring Day 3

The next day, Sunday, was our epic day of gaming, starting with Twilight Imperium 4 at 9 a.m. Nick joined us for the game at our airbnb, making our game a 5P, with all of us experienced players and Nick playing for his first time.

I managed to draw the Nekro Virus again, who I managed to win as in my previous game in April. The game went swimmingly for 6 hours, until Round 8, when four of us were in contention for winning the game in that round.

At 6 VPs, I needed 4 VPs to hit 10, which I could’ve done if only I had landed an infantry in one of my last battles. Instead, I could only get to 9 during the Status Phase, of which I would’ve been the speaker and scored first. Toward the end of the round, Nick took a Politics action, that my buddy @mdornbrook took the secondary action. He then randomly drew one of Nick’s cards out of his hand to later play as the VERY LAST ACTION of the game and immediately win. It was quite possibly the most bonkers ending I’ve ever played of that game. Epic madness!

We then played my favorite, Battlestar Galactica, while we still had 5P. I started out as human and become activated at sleeper with 6 distance. My cylon buddy and I couldn’t recover from having jumped so far and ended up losing to the humans. Frak!!

After Nick left, we played some Lovecraft Letter. I love the Lovecraftian world, and the twists in this version of Love Letter made it more fun than regular Love Letter, which I’m totally meh about it.

BGG Spring Day 4