BGG Con 2019: New hotel, same game convention

Every year, my BGG recap gets later and later. Sorry folks! It’s so hard to rebound after Thanksgiving as I end up hitting the ground running for the holiday season. Anywho, I had a great time at BGG Con this year, especially since it moved into a new location in downtown Dallas — at the Hyatt Regency. 

The new hotel is larger, with convention activities spread out across multiple floors. The vendor hall and BGG library are downstairs in the basement, the main ballroom is way larger than last year’s, and on the Atrium level and third floor are rooms that people can rent out for group gaming. There are also tables sprinkled across those floors for people to drop in and game. I personally love that this downtown location makes it much, much easier to take a rideshare in search of non-hotel food. Texas BBQ, anyone? 

I volunteered again, which is always a great experience. And I was fortunate to meet new folks and game with old friends. This post will be a quick recap of each game I played at the convention. 

Tuesday games

Woof Meow Biscuits and For Sale. Woof Meow Biscuits is a card game in which cats and dogs are trying to steal biscuits by playing numbered cards to get to exactly 14. These biscuits are so snazzy! For Sale is always a great filler for a group of 6 people. 

Wednesday games

I played Heul doch! Mau Mau, a cute card game about crying onions. On your turn, you must play a card down that matches the color or number of a card that’s face up, but, of course, if you play it onto your opponent’s pile, they will get the points for it. But collecting a number of certain onions will count against your pile as well. My colleague Ruth on The Five By recently covered this game.

Shibuya is a small puzzle game about a Japanese crosswalk. Players are placing tiles on a grid to move their pedestrians across to their destinations. On each turn, a pedestrian can only move along one specific attribute — either all circles or squares, or all whites or black spaces. 

Signorie is a strategic dice-drafting game from What’s Your Game in which players are trying to gain influence in Italy. I really like how you’re limited to actions based on the number of pips on the dice you select — or else it gets really expensive and you never seem to have enough money for the game anyway. I didn’t like though how the women were basically just there to get married off, and how the crests that folks were trying to gain were randomly placed in. I ended up not completing two sets of crests. Alas. 

I finally got a chance to play Airship City. It’s a strategic worker placement from a Japanese game company, so it’s not widely available in the U.S., which is a bummer! This game is so neat! You move your airships to tile locations on a board to gain resources, and build and/or sell ships, but there are some locations that allow you to move those tiles around. I love the spatial puzzle of this! Thanks Matt Wolfe for teaching us this game! 

I then taught a 6P game of Sidereal Confluence, one of my favorite games to run during a convention. 

I ended Wednesday night with a chill game of QE, well as chill as it can be when you don’t know what exactly folks are bidding. QE is a set collection game where you secretly bid for tiles. The thing is that the person who bids the most during the entire game will immediately get knocked out. Such tense fun! 

Thursday games

I wandered into Unpub Protoalley to play Matt Wolfe’s Squaring Circleville, which is coming next year. I love the historical background of this game, of a town in Ohio that was built in a circle but had to make way for modernity by squaring its streets and entire town.

I really enjoyed the rondel mechanism in this game, which allowed you to do one action, and then a second action, based on the tile that’s sitting on that piece of the rondel pie. That tile then gets placed into your player board, which then strengthens your action powers. I’m so excited for when this game comes out!

Chris and I picked up Spring on a String after seeing players on a nearby table in the main ballroom looking like they were … sewing. Wut?! In Spring on a String, players are threading a shoelace through flowers on this felt board and scoring VPs based on the number of flower petals they’re passing through. The game gets surprisingly brain burnery though based on the number of flower cards per game. These flower cards place restrictions/extra rules based on which flowers you can pass through. It’s a charming little game you can play and chat around the table with — as long as there aren’t too many flower cards in play, in my opinion. 

We also picked up Brikks, a fun roll and write Tetris game. The active player rolls dice to determine which piece is in play, and you fill it out on your player sheet. You can also spend energy, which are hard to come by, to change the piece to another one instead, based on the piece chart. You score VPs and energy based on how you fill out your board. The higher rows are worth more, and closing out multiple rows at once nets more benefits. 

I picked up a copy of Pret A Porter, a game I had never played before but was super excited to own and play. It’s a worker placement game about fashion shows! Squee! And I love this version designed by Kwanchai Moriya. It’s gorgeous. This game is intense! You have two quick rounds to gather cloth, designs, models and/or buildings until your first fashion show. And each show is unique in what it’s looking for, either trendiness, PR, etc. You win ribbons by winning these categories, which will net you VPs and income later. But the bigger your fashion company is, the bigger upkeep you have to pay for models and buildings. So good!

The next game I played was Draftosaurus. It’s a light drafting game with tiny little dinosaur meeples! So adorbs! Players grab a handful of dinosaurs, pick one to place in their animal park, and then hand over the rest to the player on their left. Rounds continue until there are no more dinosaurs to pass along. And your VPs are based on fulfilling requirements in your animal park. 

We then played Randy Flynn‘s prototype, Rolling Up Roses, a roll and write where you’re collecting various flowers to make bouquets. I like how you’re choosing from a personal supply of rolled dice, as well as the rolled dice in the middle, to maximize the amount of flowers you get. Order cards are also phased in, so hanging onto those expensive roses might come in handy later! 

Friday games

I started Friday by teaching Lisboa, one of my absolute favorite games ever, to Marlene and Randy. It’s a heavy game to start the morning with, but I think everyone had a great time. I know I did!

Chris and I then took a trip up the Reunion Tower to see a bird’s eye view of downtown Dallas. The tickets were $17, and it was a fun experience. We picked a time right before the sun started setting so we were able to see some daylight and the nighttime skyline. But man, it was freezing up there because of the wind!

The Inside Voices meetup was next, and I absolutely loved being able to hang out with such awesome folks in a small conference room. We even had a bunch of snacks and prizes! I ended winning Horticulture Master and Netterplays Felt Trays in a raffle. James Nathan said it best on his blog when he said it felt like a home-style game night. 

I played a fun 5P party game called Pictures. You’re secretly assigned to a photo on this 4×4 grid and you’re trying to get the rest of the players to correctly guess which photo is yours. The trick is that you’re given a random set of materials for the round. You either receive a deck of emojis on cards, string, an assorted set of 9 cubes, sticks and stones, or wooden blocks. Once the round is over, players move their supplies to the next player and the next round continues. It’s so unique! But also randomly fun.

We then played Silver and Gold, a fun flip and fill where you write on the cards themselves and score victory points. There’s also a race to get the gold based on the squares you cross off. 

I then got to play Aquatica with the wonderful Beth Sobel. Best described as Concordia light, Aquatica is this gorgeous underwater engine building game. It did come with plastic manta ray bits, which had symbols on them that were a wee bit hard to see. But otherwise, the game had great components, such as a cardboard tableau where you actually slide cards into, and it plays quickly at about 30-45 minutes. 

ClipCut Parks is a neat roll-and-cut game! Dice are rolled to determine how much you’re clipping from your main parks sheet toss segment plots of land, in order to satisfy card requirements that have terrain and shape restrictions. If you can’t place your segment or a large strip of paper falls off your main sheet, you must CRUMPLE. It’s equally disheartening and satisfying! And the game includes scissors!

Cinecitta 1936 is a game based on the real-life Italian movie studio of the 1930s. Each player is working to hire directors, producers and actors for their movie, as well as produce the highest-quality movie. The hiring of employees has a similar mechanism to Ponzi Scheme, where you secretly offer another player a worker and an amount of money. If they want that card, they’d have to pay you the same amount back, or if they don’t want the card, they can just take the money and add that worker to their movie. 

We purchased Imhotep: The Duel, which is the 2P version of the solid midweight game Imhotep. It has the same tense mechanism as its original where you don’t want to set up the other person to sail away with the boat. But this time, goods are randomly loaded in 6 boats, which are docked at the end of a 3×3 grid. Each player takes their turn placing a cube onto one of the 9 Harbor Spaces, and if there are two workers of the same color in any column or row, they can choose to unload a boat instead of placing a cube, and gain the goods for their player tableau. 

Nokosu Dice is such a thinky trick-taking game that involves dice drafting. At the start of the round, players draft dice, which can be used like a card — color and pips included. But the last dice remaining determines which color/number is trump. And as you use you cards and dice during game play to win tricks, the last dice you have left in your pool marks your bid on the number of tricks you aim to win that round. You get a point per trick won, but lots of points for making exactly making your bid. So many tough choices!

Queenz: To Bee or Not To Bee is a light pattern-building game about bees and flowers. The beekeeper moves around the board collecting orchids, which you later use to fill a polyomino fields in play. As you fill in more fields, you score more points for connecting orchid flowers. You can also use these hive structures to fill in a spot for a field, which then score points for bees surrounding them at the end of the game.

One of the best things about going to a convention like #BGGCon2019 is being able to try games you normally wouldn’t have access to. I got a chance to play Electropolis and just found it darling! It’s a tile-laying city-building game that has a clever turn order mechanism built in. You have to take a certain number of connecting tiles on your turn, and the earlier you go in turn order, the fewer tiles you’ll be able to take.

There are parameters each round about where on your board you can build those new tiles, and you score points based on how you place those industry tiles on your board. It feels similar to Quadropolis but more strategic and gamey!

Saturday

Chris and I did some exploring on Saturday afternoon to visit the Dallas Eye Sculpture. We found it.

And we ate some BBQ at Pecan Lodge. The BBQ was excellent, but the sides were meh. I need to have my sides yummy, otherwise, what’s the point. We walked around downtown Dallas and Deep Elum, which was a nice change of pace after being cooped up inside for the past few days.

Bus was one of my must-play for the cons! Brian Frahm taught it to me, and it did not disappoint. Players are trying to deliver passengers to various locations by building connections, and the passengers will go to whichever destination they need to go. It’s brutal, cut-throat and a typical Splotter game, even though it’s been republished by Capstone Games this year. 

I next played giant Container. I love, love this game. It’s a closed economic system in which you’re producing goods, setting a price for them to sell, loading them onto your boat, putting your boats up for auction and all to get those goods onto the island. The problem is that you can never buy from yourself, and a huge part of this game is pricing goods so that people will purchase it. Our game went completely bonkers, and we were so broke by the end of it. 

We ended Saturday night playing a quick game of Werebeasts, which is a werewolf-type social deduction game but with bidding, and For Sale. 

Lastly, we played an adorable game of Fast Sloths. In the game, you’re trying to be the first sloth to collect all your leaves on the board, but being slow and sloth-like, you only move by jumping onto the backs of other animals. On your turn, you collect cards of various animals so that you can activate them for their animal powers — they’re all different — so you can travel around the board. The game lasts for about 45 minutes, but then it kinda slowed down a bit in the end. Nonetheless, we had loads of fun making random animal noises. Like for whenever we summoned the eagle, we all yelled, caw caw!! 

The last game of Saturday is On The Underground: London/Berlin. In our 3P game, players are in charge building out their 3 different rail lines, hoping the tourist will take your lines to the closest destination and give you VPs. The pawn doesn’t like walking to stops or changing lines, so it’ll embark on the route that’s easiest for it. This version is a reprint of an older game, which I heard only has slight differences in game play and on the map. I do love the box art style though.

Got a chance to play Pictures with these cool folks on Sunday. Explaining this game is so funny because you’re immediately met with incredulous looks, but after a round in, you start seeing everyone finding their groove. 

The last game I played for the entire con was Bruxelles 1897. This is the card game of the beloved board game, and it manages to feel just as tense in a small box format! To take an action, you play one of your architect cards, which has a cost value on it. Players are taking action to collect art, sell art, collect supplies or build buildings. Players can also take free actions, but then those architect cards go to prison, which means they won’t be available in your hand to take actions with later.

And just like that, five days of gaming was done! Next year’s BGG Con is the same weekend as Pax Unplugged in Philadelphia, which is causing many gamers to pick one over the other. It seems that more folks are picking Pax Unplugged. Sigh. Thanks kind folks who made it all the way down here! And let me know which game you’d most want to play!