RinCon 2023: Back better than ever in Tucson!

What a difference nearly a year makes! After holding last fall’s convention in tandem with Tucson Comic- Con, RinCon held its annual board-game convention on its own again — and in a new location at the Casino Del Sol Resort and Casino in June. 

Having the option to stay at the hotel (which I did) where the convention is happening makes the entire weekend more relaxing and convenient. I didn’t have to schlep all my games around, and, if I needed a quick break, I’d just hop on up to my hotel room, which is easily accessible from the convention gaming area, which had plenty of room and tables. There resort also had a second hotel tower that was a little bit of a walk from the convention floor, but still not too bad of a walk. The facilities and gaming space were much nicer than previous places where RinCon was held, and there were plenty of food options at the resort, and grocery stores were about a 15-minute drive outside of the grounds. 

I arrived at the con Friday afternoon after making the two-hour drive from Phoenix. First up on the agenda: teaching Votes for Women in the Women’s Space. I love teaching games in this space! It’s quieter and more intimate than the rest of the open gaming area, and the Women’s Space is so welcoming and a place to ask all the questions about whatever game is being taught. 

Votes for Women is a 2-4 player game in which the suffragists are working to pass the vote to allow women to vote in the U.S., while the Opposition player works against that. It’s a card-driven area-control game. I love the subject matter of this game, and as each side has their own player deck that’s phased in, the game removes the fraught decisions that otherwise come with other card-driven war games, lowering the barrier to entry for more types of gamers. A win-win!

After dinner, I signed up to play Power Grid with the Brazil map. I am always down for a game of Power Grid and had never played this map before. Only two of us signed up for the game, so we played with the Robot, which is something I had also never used before! It’s neat building the robot to plan its bot actions, but it seemed like a heavy lit remembering all the things it did. The Brazil map restock rates heavily leaned toward oil and trash, which changed the feel of the game vs the original game. I invested heavily in oil power plants, and that was the path to victory. 

The last game I played on Friday night was Golem. The game is based on the 16th-century legend of the Golem of Prague, an anthropomorphic creature that Rabbi Loew animated from a clay statue to protect his people. I enjoyed this game but there is SO MUCH going on! There’s a main board, individual player boards, and a marble contraption where drop marbles at the start of each turn to randomly indicate how strong each action will be for the round.

The main board starts with two golems for each player that move along tracks and perform actions, but if your golems pass your student, which is a separate track, there’s a cost to pay at the end of the round. 

At the start of your turn, you pick a marble in the slot with the action you want to do, and picking a specific color marble will also matter for end-of-round bonuses and activations on your player board. You take that action, which then can combo into a bunch of other actions depending on what you do and how you’ve upgraded your personal player board. It’s important to keep a balance between your resources — wisdom, coins, artifacts, etc. — but you also cannot do everything you want to do. I would love to play this game again! 

On Saturday morning, I did a quick lap around the vendor area. I may or may not have purchased a bunch of earrings. I do love dangly earrings. Next up was teaching a game of Scout. I love this trick-taking game where you can’t rearrange your hand and often bring it with me because it’s so compact and easy to teach. 

After Scout, I was scheduled to teach a game of Twilight Inscription back at the Women’s Space. Twilight Inscription is my top new game that I played for the first time in 2022. It’s quite an epic game and I enjoyed teaching it to two other people that afternoon. Even though the game can hold 8 people, I capped the table to hold 4 people, and 3 ladies showed up to learn.

I then learned how to play Woodcraft. In Woodcraft, you’re gathering wood and crafting goods for customers in your workshop in the woods. This game has a delightful action-selection wheel — as actions get taken, the slide of the wheel gets moved ahead to the next section, giving bonuses to actions that haven’t been taken.

If an action keeps getting picked, it will become ineligible until some of the other actions have been taken and the wheel’s inner circle rotates for more bonuses. It’s such a cool mechanism! Meanwhile, you’re planting trees and processing wood to fulfill contracts, while upgrading your workshop to be more efficient. 

The last game I played on Saturday night was Sabika. Full disclosure: I had never heard of this game before but I’m so very happy I got to play it. This game has three rondels! You can’t see my face right now but it is definitely beaming. <Insert heart eye emoji here>.  

Players are constructing towers, gardens and palaces as well as establishing trade routes by sending ships out through Europe. Meanwhile, you’re also carving poems and reactivating them for bonuses. Each rondel has different actions and different workers on them, and on your turn, you move 1 to 2 spaces to activate the action location. If you land where someone else is, you have to pay. This game was a lot of fun. 

During this game, the clock hit 11 p.m. You know what that means? It’s Eegee’s time. RinCon always treats the convention attendees with this Tucson favorite! Yums! 

On Sunday, I took another lap around the gaming area. I saw Trailblazer: The Arizona Trail being demoed. It’s the follow-up to Trailblazer: The John Muir Trail, designed by Dan Rice of the Phoenix area. I did not get a chance to play it but the copper color scheme, representative of the Southwest, and the miniatures are just gorgeous! It’s set to come to Kickstarter in February.  

A nearby table was playing Dead Reckoning. Look at this neat pirate ship! 

The last game of the convention for me was Lacrimosa. I had seriously hunted down a copy of this game to learn at this con and I was so happy that David Short had a copy and was willing to teach this game. The theme was what drew me in — Mozart is dead, and his final wish was to finish composing the Lacrimosa movement of his Opus Requiem. Players work as Mozart patrons helping to sell or exhibit his works, commission missing parts of the requiem and traveling across Europe to various courts and theaters. 

The game is a deckbuilder that isn’t a deckbuilder that’s filled with multi-use cards. You draw a few action cards each turn and decide to use them for actions or rewards based on how you tuck them into your player board. And instead of buying new cards, you’re upgrading your cards and discarding the old ones. This was probably my favorite game that I played at RinCon. I immediately bought a copy at my local FLGS when I got back into town. 

I cannot express how much fun I had at this year’s Rincon. Last year’s gaming was tough, if I’m being honest, but this year made up for it tenfold. The new venue is fantastic, and the leaders and volunteers always work so hard to make the convention inclusive, inviting and so enjoyable to attend. The RinCon chair Karen had estimated that over 600 people attended this year’s convention. What a great turnout, and I can’t wait to go back next year! P.S. If RinCon is back at the Casino Del Sol next year, I highly recommend getting donuts at Sweetscapes Desserts inside the casino. The donuts are amazing!