Friendship Con 2023: Ark Nova, BSG and multiple Chudyk games

Hello, friends! It’s been a busy few months (I feel like all of adulthood is saying this phrase over and over again but I digress). In between multiple trips and family coming to visit, I managed to get some gaming in. Most notably, last month I saw my friends in Atlanta where we met up for our annual Friendship Con. 

Upon arriving in Atlanta on a Wednesday night, we all went out for dinner at Ponce City Market. This place is so neat! It’s a big fancy food court inside a converted Sears building from the 1920s. I most definitely enjoyed this Thai iced tea popsicle from King of Pops. 

My friends in Atlanta surprised us with swag bags that contained this amazing Twilight Imperium 3-D printed war sun. Behold its gloriousness!

The swag bag, which had our names printed out, also contained the Critters of War board game and game and card component holders. Always a fun surprise! 

The first game to kick off the convection for me was Air, Land and Sea: Critters of War. This was a fun 2P game where players use 12 of their 18 cards to try to win majorities in the air, land and sea theaters. Some cards are played face-up or you can use the backside of a card, which is the same for all the cards in your deck. The game is fast-paced and tactical, and you play 3 quick rounds to determine the winner.

We then played Red 7. I can’t believe I keep forgetting how great this game is! The goal is to play all the cards in your hands first by beating a card that’s always been played. If you can’t do that, you can also play a card to change the rule in play so that you can somehow beat the cards that have been played. I really should add a copy for my collection. 

Thursday

The next day, I taught a game of Trajan, my favorite Stefan Feld game. It’s a point salad where your actions are determined by moving your pieces around a rondel, and if you end certain pieces in a space that matches the pieces where a Trajan tile is sitting, you can combo your actions. There are a lot of ways to score — from shipping cards, having points in the Senate to pick up end-game goals, construction and even area control. 

I then learned how to play Ark Nova. This game has been on my radar for a while but have never gotten a chance to play it. Friends, I LOVE THIS GAME. It satisfies many itches for me — puzzle placement, hand management and cute animals, and I especially enjoy the mechanism to trigger the end game, which is when your two opposing scoring tracks (prestige and conservation points) cross each other, and the biggest gap between those two points results in the winner. What a fun race! 

While we played Trajan and Ark Nova, another group of folks were playing Fortress America. Old school! 

I then played FlowerFall, a unique game by Carl Chudyk, who designed Glory to Rome. In this game, you are literally making flowers fall! It’s an area control of sorts, think Carcassonne, where you’re making the biggest continuous path of flowers with patterned cards that are at the mercy of gravity. It’s very hard to beat gravity. 

We then played Scout, my favorite trick-taking game of late. The game has a twist though: once you’re dealt your cards, you cannot rearrange them at all. You can either use the numbers at top, or flip the entire hand over and use the cards at the bottom of the card, for which they’re different. It feels like Bohnanza in that sense, but you can take card or cards from the middle of your hand, and then make runs or pairs with the leftover cards as they slide together. Super fun and since it’s an Oink Game, it comes in a very small-size box. 

We ended the night with my absolute favorite game ever: Battlestar Galactica. We played a 6P game, and us humans narrowly avoided disaster! The game ended really late, and there was a point that people were asking, “are they a cylon or just super loopy and tired?” I love this game so much. 

Friday

On Friday morning, we played another Chudyk game: Bear Valley. This was a push-your-luck game where you’re trying to make a path in the woods and not run into the bar.

I’m so bad at push-your-luck games because I tend to take it all the way to the edge, and unfortunately, the bear got me. You can also end up lost in the woods if you don’t plan your escape correctly. 

I then played a 2P game of Revive. Ever since I played this game a few months prior, I have not been able to stop thinking about it. I love the combo-ing of the actions, the hand management (in the sense that you can’t play your cards again until you refresh), and the multi-use cards, which you can tuck into your board from either side, so you can get different benefits. This game is so fun! 

Next up was Tyrants of the Underdark. I hadn’t played this in years, but I remember when I first played it years ago I played it a lot. It’s a cool deck-builder area control set in the Dungeons and Dragons world (a world I’m not too familiar with). Cards enable you to send and move troops out, or send spies infiltrate the board for control. There’s also an action to promote cards, which removes them from your deck but will still score VPs for you at the end of the game. Just don’t do what I did and promote powerful cards too early! 

The rest of the evening was spent playing a few more casual games as some of my friend’s family came over: Giant Codenames and Just One. These are always a hit!

We closed out the night with more Scout and Akropolis. Akropolis, one of my favorite games of 2022, is a quick and elegant filler game that streamlines drafting and tile-laying. Players are building out their cities with tiles they’ve drafted (that are shaped with 3 hexagons), and scoring each colored district requires acquiring the scoring tile for that same color. It’s a neat puzzle, whether you build up or out! 

Saturday

Saturday was an epic day of Twilight Imperium! We busted out our giant war suns, which definitely set the mood for this game. I played as the Yssaril Tribes, a faction I had never played before, but unfortunately, I got super pinned in the far reaches of the universe and wasn’t able to be as effective as I wanted to be. Our game lasted from morning to early evening. 

After dinner, we played a game of Villagers. This game is so fun! I like to joke how it’s tech tree the game with cute artwork, and I don’t think that description is too far off. Players are drafting characters into their village, and some villagers can hold more specialized versions of themselves, which give better bonuses or powers. Sometimes though to play a specific person, you’ll need to unlock a technology for that card — if you have it, you pay yourself; if you don’t, the bank will pay the person who has it. As you build out your village, you can draft even more people and/or build more buildings. Scoring happens twice in the game, and then you calculate end-game bonuses to see who wins. 

And if you’ve been reading along, we played another game of Red 7 to close out the night. Good times!

Sunday

Sunday was the last day we were all going to be in Atlanta. Friendship Con went so fast! We started the day with Dune Imperium and added the Rise of Ix expansion, which was my first time playing that expansion. It added airships to the game, and a new board where you bid on some really strong technologies. I thought about purchasing this expansion but haven’t gotten around to it yet. 

Lastly, we played a final Chudyk game: Impulse. This felt like the most Chudyk game that we played all weekend (sorry, Cocaine Bear!). Impulse uses multi-use cards to explore, expand, exploit and exterminate in outer space, and the game comes with these little rocket ships. The game has a map of cards, and you seed the Impulse track with tech cards from your hand. The game is a race to 20 points. It was so hard to wrap my head around this game, but I feel like now that I’ve got a play under my belt, it’ll be easier to jump into. Shoot, it took me quite a few games to understand the flow of Glory to Rome and now can almost jump into any game without a problem. 

And with that, we had to leave for the airport to fly back home. I had a great time in Atlanta with all these people. There’s something so special about spending five days with the same group of folks, year after year after year. Lots of laughs, yummy food, conversation and, of course, gaming. Can’t wait for next year! So, which of these games have you played?