Gila Monster 2019: Meeting up with gamer friends — and a shark

Two weekends ago, I attended a small gathering of Arizona gamer friends for Gila Monster. This is the second year in a row we’ve done this, which originally sprung up as a way to play new Gen Con releases in an intimate setting. This year, we shelled out extra money to rent space at the Tempe Mission Palms and extended it over almost three days, starting with Friday night at Snakes and Lattes.

I didn’t start gaming though until early Saturday morning. I arrived at 8 a.m. and immediately jumped into Hadara. What a neat civ building, card-drafting game! We played with 5P, and I particularly how the first player can choose which pile to start drafting in, and then everyone else drafts where your crest is showing on the main board.

On your turn, you pick two cards from the pile. You discard one into the discard pile, and for the remaining one, you can either purchase it or remove from the game for money. When you purchase a card, they give you resources on your various tracks on your player board, either income, military, culture or food (which you’ll need at the end of the era to keep your cards in your tableau.)

In between each phase, you then purchase colonies and erect statues, if you have enough military and/or culture, for VPs. Game play continues through three epochs, with cards getting more expensive and more powerful each round. The game is really straightforward and the iconography is easy to understand, but still tough decisions about which way to build your civilization. I can see this game being really popular with larger groups of people who have about an hour of game play.

I then played a game of Kingdomino: Duel. This puzzly roll-and-write manages to capture the essence of the original game, now instead with dice! The first player rolls four dice, and they pick one. The second player then picks two dice, and the last die goes back to the first player. You fill in these symbols on your score pad, mapping out your country like in Kingdomino for matching terrain and multipliers. It also becomes a race to gain dice manipulation powers based on which dice you pick up.

I then played Barenpark with the Bad News Bears expansion. Oh my, look at this monorail! I’ve always been kinda lukewarm on the original Barenpark game, but I really enjoyed it with this expansion. It made the game more strategic with extra boards and more options for winning, and the monorails are a nice touch as they provide more meaning to the lowest base tiles. They can also be exchanged in tandem with other tiles for the giant bear tiles.

I then got a chance to play Black Angel. This game is absolutely gorgeous (with artwork by Ian O’Toole, who designs most of Vital Lacerda’s games), and Black Angel is from Sebastien Dujardin of Troyes’ fame. I think Troyes is a great game that we don’t nearly get on table enough, so I was really excited to see to see what Black Angel had in store.

In Black Angel, AIs seeking planet Spes after humanity destroyed Earth. Each player has a tableau in which you can gain technologies that trigger when you play a card from your hand. The many dice on the board enable you to take various actions across the main board. Players also draft mission cards, which then you send you bots onto a second board representing space. This entire board is made up of space strips, which then through the course of a game during a reset (when a player runs out of available dice to spend or doesn’t have resources to use someone else’s dice) flips over and moves to the front of the board, advancing the spacecraft Black Angel. Imagine a scrolling video game screen.

This core mechanism controls the timing of the game. Once Black Angel reaches Spes, the game ends. It’s a dice rolling, worker-placement game much like Troyes, and while I enjoyed playing it, it didn’t seem as punishing as Troyes, which is what I enjoy about that game.

I them played a quick game of Planet, which is a quick drafting game where you’re trying to score objective cards based on land terrain placement.

These magnetic tiles are placed on your soccer-ball-esque contraption, which makes for an adorable and tactile game. You literally have the whole world in your hands!

I then taught folks Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein. Such a great game, and it seemed like everyone had a good time. Our 4P game took about 3 hours, and that included a couple rounds shaved off because of a few cards.

After dinner, I got a chance to play Blackout: Hong Kong. This is a game from Alexander Pfister, of Mombasa, a game I really like for its hand-management mechanism of your playing cards. Blackout has the same mechanism featured here. In this game, a giant blackout has hit Hong Kong, and you’re trying to locate resources and expand your network of specialists in order to claim a position of power.

At the start of the round, dice are rolled to determine which resources are available for that round, and then you pre-program your cards to collect those resources. Meanwhile, you’re trying to complete objectives on cards you’ve picked up in order to place them into your deck. When you get down to your last remaining cards, you pick the longest discard pile from your tableau to use them again in your deck. The board looks really sleek, and all the iconography is easily understandable. I’d love to play this again.

On Sunday, I started super bright and early again with a chaotic game of Sidereal Confluence at 9 a.m. (Can you tell I’m so not a morning person?) I needed a lot of caffeine for this because there is a lot of yelling of course!

We are ready to start yelling at each other! #SiderealConfluence #GilaMonster2019 @corkyh2o @OmNomGmr @frahminator @JJUnderwood @bivaterl pic.twitter.com/bLMGYAJBek

— Meeple Lady💃🏽🌵🇵🇭 (@MeepleLady) August 18, 2019

I didn’t run this game officially, so it was nice being able to concentrate on my faction and use its ability to my advance. As the whale squids Eni Et Ascendancy, I used my bargaining skills to hand out some really cool resource techs! I probably helped one guy too much as he came in first, and I came in second. Not too shabby! I love this game so much, or maybe I just love yelling across the table for cubes and somehow negotiating 3-way deals.

Next up was Ragusa. When my friend was teaching this game, he kept saying, “You only have 12 actions.” I responded, “This kind of reminds me of that Calimala game.” He’s like, “it’s the same designer!” And then I was kinda proud of myself for recognizing similarities in his games as I had never heard of Ragusa until that afternoon.

In Ragusa, you place one structure on a corner of hex on the board exactly twelve times — and that’s the end of the game. The trick is that when someone else places on that hex, then you may get to activate that action again. You’re also placing strategically to collect resources, which allow you to build in the country or the city, as well as how many structures you can build on the same hex. You can also build walls or process resources for other goods, which then you can sell onto a ship for VPs. It’s such a neat game where every single placement really counts!

I then got to play a game that I had been basically pestering people all weekend to teach me: Jaws. (Insert ominous theme song here.) This game is ridiculously fun! It’s a 4P game, where one player is the shark vs all the rest. The game takes place over two phases. In Act 1, the shark is doing hidden movement along Amity Island snacking on some swimmers, while Brody, Hopper and Quint are working to prevent that. When they locate the shark or when the shark has eaten a certain number of swimmers (like a bunch!), the game enters Act 2. The shark then gets some special power cards, while the rest get equipment cards, based on how well Act 1 went for either side.

Then it’s to the death! The board flips over and it’s an image of the Orca with tiles on it. The shark attacks the characters, and then Brody, Hopper and Quint get their turns. As the shark attacks, the boat tiles become damaged or lost, and players can end up in the water, which is no good! A series of dice rolls and action cards make for a very frantic and bloody finish, and, like I said, Jaws is thematically ridiculous and fun!

I then got a chance to play Copenhagen, a tile-laying puzzle game where you’re building the facade of your cute little Danish house. On your turn, you either pick up colored cards or turn in a group of cards for various polyominos of the matching colors of the cards you just turned in. You score victory points for filled in columns and rows, as well as some other extra objectives. A super cute light game!

I then ended Gila Monster by teaching a 5P game of Hadara. It was a perfect bookend to a chill weekend of gaming with friends and trying out games that I normally wouldn’t have had a chance to otherwise. We had our convention at the Tempe Mission Palms this year, the same location fo Consimworld, and it’s seriously the best spot because there are lots of food options within walking distance.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s event as well as seeing a lot of these guys down in Tucson for RinCon in October. And if any of these games were intriguing to you, let me know down in the comments!