Category: Board games
Consimworld 2023: People Power, Land and Freedom

Consimworld 2023: People Power, Land and Freedom

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This year, I was only able to make it for a few days at Consimworld, the annual wargaming convention in Tempe, Arizona. I got sick the week prior (derailing a bunch of other plans), which, of course, left me super bummed, but I made the most of the time there — and got some great gaming in! The convention this year went from Aug. 25-Sep. 1, 2023, at the Tempe Mission Palms, and over 240 people attended. 

The main ballroom at Consimworld, held at Tempe Mission Palms in Tempe, Arizona.

Wednesday

I arrived on Wednesday and started with Brass: Birmingham. This sequel to the classic Martin Wallace game Brass has you developing, building and establishing your industries and network, in an effort to exploit low or high market demands. This game differs from the original as it adds the beer market, and there’s a chance to discard cards from your hand in order to take a wild card. In the original game, you would’ve been stuck with what was in your hand until you drew a card you could use. This was my first time playing Brass Birmingham, and I can see how Birmingham is popular with many gamers. Would definitely play again!

Brass: Birmingham’s color scheme is what I imagine cities looked like during the Industrial Revolution.

I then scoped out the vendor hall and picked up Land and Freedom: The Spanish Revolution and Civil War, a recent release from new designer Alex Knight and Blue Panther Games. This is a three-player wargame where Spain’s three fighting factions — Anarchists, Communists and Moderates — must unite and fight off right-wing army generals aided by Hitler and Mussolini.

Land and Freedom: The Spanish Revolution and Civil War just came out from Blue Panther Games.

This semi-cooperative tug of war is super fun (and not too long at about 90 minutes) and the game is powered by a card-driven mechanism to complete objectives that enable you to seed a draw bag, for which a random chit-pull will give you VPs throughout the game. 

We used a plexi since my copy was brand-new. It’s great for gameplay but bad for photos.

I then had to leave early because I went to a Weezer concert. I had a blast. They were playing in downtown Phoenix, and it’s probably about 10 years since I last saw them in person.

Weezer played a few songs from Pinkerton, which is my favorite album of theirs.

Thursday

Thursday was a full day of gaming! We started with Obsession. I love the theme of this game — think Jane Austen society where parties, gardens and marrying well were your family’s only priority — and it works so well as a resource management, deck-building, worker placement game. Each player plays as a prominent family of the time, and you have a hand of cards that represent different family members.

Your meeples represent servants you employ in Obsession.

On your turn, you’re working to invite people to your parties (playing cards from your hand) to a room in your house (in an effort to upgrade the room). These guests sometimes require servants, of which you have a small army of them and can hire more, and in return, most guests can increase your reputation and/or give you money. Unfortunately, some guests are worth negative points — those rich new money Americans (but they give you a lot of money!) or those cads who are just awful at your parties. After your party, that card is exhausted until you refresh your deck, and your servants get to rest a round until they can be used to help your future guests. It’s such a thematic euro!

Next up was People Power, taught to us by the designer himself Kenneth Tee! I had actually met him on Wednesday and got him to sign my game. (If you must know, I was totally fangirling). I think his friends were very amused. 

Me and People Power designer Kenneth Tee. I had just asked him to sign my game.

So on Thursday, we played Obsession with him and he was kind enough to run a 3P game of People Power. You all know I’ve been waiting for this game FOR YEARS, and even did a fun photoshoot on Instagram when the game arrived earlier this summer, but I haven’t had a chance to get it on table yet. 

Kenneth Tee is about to teach Dan Bullock, Cory Graham and me how to play People Power.

People Power is the latest COIN (CounterINsurgency) game from GMT Games. This one is special to me because it deals with my motherland, the Philippines. Most wargame and board game conventions I go to, I stick out like a sore thumb, and it’s even rarer to play a historical game where that representation is evident. And now it’s here, and I can’t stop raving about it. 

There are over 7,600 islands in the Philippines. This map does a great job of simplifying the main areas for the purpose of the game. I even got to see all the islands I visited this past year.

People Power plays in about 2 hours, which is fairly short for a COIN. And you know what that makes it? Accessible to more people. Seeing people of color as well as not needing a 30-minute video to explain the battle action (I’m looking at you, Pendragon) is one of the very things that would help diversity this very niche area of board gaming. The actions in People Power are streamlined, the player aides are very easy to follow, and, with such a small map, it makes the game tense and fast-moving game to play. And dare I say, this is a COIN that I could actually teach to others? I could not have said that with previous COIN titles. 

We then played a 4P game of Dan Bullock’s prototype: Blood and Treasure, a game about the U.S.-Afghan War and the contractors who would profit from it. Contractors bid for contracts, specialize in industries, and hire workers to complete projects — without getting inspected by the government too much. I enjoy this game the more I play it, but I have to remember it’s not always about completing the most contracts; the name of the game is collecting those government contracts and secretly undercutting your opponents. And with 4P, it’s much more cut-throat.

When Blood and Treasure gets published, we’re all expecting giant chonky pieces in the game, like these weighted chess pieces.

We then played a quick game of Fit to Print! I just received this game in the mail the previous week, and this was surprisingly a big hit! In Fit to Print, you’re all working at a newspaper trying to design A1 (the front page) with a good mix of various articles, photos and advertising while maintaining a balanced set of sad and positive news — in real time! Game play goes for three days (rounds), and each day begins with the reporting phase where you’re simultaneously flipping over pieces from the center of the table one at a time at your little cardboard desk. You then decide if you want to keep that piece for the layout phase or put it back into the middle of the table. You do this for a limited number of minutes, and by the end of it, you’ll have a stack of tiles on your deck. 

I love, love everything about Fit to Print — from its cute artwork to its theme and its gameplay!

Then comes the layout phase: place those tiles onto your blank newspaper page, following guidelines (which you’ll get penalized for not following) and photos next to stories (of which there are three different types) they like. With each day, starting on Friday to Sunday, the size of the paper gets bigger, so it’s such a challenge to figure out how many tiles you’ll need for each day — and if they’ll be able to fit nicely into your template while the clock winds down! 

Consimworld attendees attend the board game auction and raffle.

That evening was the auction and raffle. I stopped by for the raffle part and won this cool game! If any of you have played this, let me know how it is. 

I won a game! That’s always super fun.

We ended Thursday night at Fate Brewing Company for some yummy food and even yummier beer. There are three locations in the Valley, and we went to the one in south Scottsdale. Definitely worth checking out if you’re ever in town. 

Cory, Dan and I enjoy our drinks after a fun day of gaming.

Friday

We started our last day with our annual game of Maria. We play this every year, but I always kind of feel like I’m coming into this game cold. I’m definitely putting a calendar reminder for next year to brush up on the rules for next year’s convention! I must get better at this game! 

Maria is a game based on the War of the Austrian Succession, between 1740 and 1748.

The last game I played at the convention was The North Provenance. I had never heard of this but I was immediately intrigued by the box and card art! It’s a 2P card combo game with multi-use cards where you reprogram Ancients, build Facilities and power up Nodes in an effort to chip away at your opponent’s VPs.

The game has some really net artwork. And depending on if you play it or activate in your tableau, either the protocol or spark action activates.

It’s a constant tug of war, and when your engine gets really built out, the action combinations are so satisfying! 

The box art is also so slick!

I had a great time at this year’s Consimworld, even though I could only make three of its eight-day run. I hope my plans go much more smoothly next year! And for those interested in next year’s convention — mark your calendars! Consimworld 2024 will be held on July 12-20, 2024. Thanks, Consimworld, for having me! 
Starry Night Sky: Twinkling stars and exploring the constellations

Starry Night Sky: Twinkling stars and exploring the constellations

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Arizona is a great place for stargazing — it is even home to 19 dark-sky communities! There’s something so magical about looking up at the sky and imagining far-away stars and galaxies. Exploring the cosmos will probably not be something us non-millionaires can do in our lifetime, but on a game table, Starry Night Sky transports you to the heavens and the twinkle of the stars.  

Starry Night Sky is the latest from Emma Larkins. Look at that box art!

Starry Night Sky, designed by Emma Larkins (who also designed the adorable card game Abandon All Artichokes), is published by Buffalo Games and came out in 2023. It plays 2-4 players, and playtime is about 30-45 minutes. 

Thanks Buffalo Games for sending me a copy of this game!

In Starry Night Sky, players are astronomers taking to the heavens, exploring and mapping constellations, while completing goals and finishing end-game myths. Starry Night Sky is a beautiful family game — with vivid shades of dark blues and celestial gold — with a wonderful astronomy theme. The game comes with plastic telescopes, which players use to travel across constellations. The bag full of star tokens — sparkly plastic red, yellow and blue shaped pieces — makes the game extra delightful to play with. 

The celestial constellations of Starry Night Sky.

Each turn has two phases: Gather and Explore. During Gather, you draw an exploration goal (if you don’t have three in front of you already) and draw new stars from the bag. You must then assign each star to one Star Pool, of which you have three on your player board. Star Pools can only hold 4 stars maximum, and once a star is in your star pool, they cannot be moved somewhere else. This small yet important decision where to place your stars adds some strategy to this gorgeous game.

Players randomly draw twinkly stars from this bag.

Then it’s time to Explore. To Explore, you move your telescope to a neighboring constellation on the board along the lines that connect constellations. Do you move toward the Vivid Orchid or the Energetic Houseplant? Such whimsical names and charming artwork! If you are the first player to move into a constellation, you place a discovery marker on it from the discovery track on the board. These tokens mark the timing of the game — once a certain number of discovery markers are removed from the track, the end of the game triggers. 

Each player tracks their movement with these cute little telescopes.

Players score points for discovering constellations as well as placing stars on your board from exactly one of your star pools during this turn. Each star you place is another victory point and if you place the last star on the board for the constellation, the discovery market is flipped over to its completed side. That means the constellation is fully mapped. 

Fully mapped constellations are important for myth cards, which are end-game objectives that score when certain constellations are mapped, regardless of whoever mapped it. These myth cards that you receive at the start of the game help guide you across the galaxy toward the constellations you want to map out but, like in real life, the galaxy is vast and sometimes it’s just plain difficult to make it all the way across. Luckily, you can still score points each turn with exploration goals. 

Players all have their player board, which has three star pools to hold their stars, and three myth cards.

Exploration goals are challenges that you can complete during the course of the game for extra points. Challenges such as “Place 1 yellow and 1 blue star in 1 constellation on your turn” or “End turn with 2 stars in each Star Pool.” In a pinch, you can discard exploration cards to grab a star you need. Players can also do a bonus exploration once per turn if they move into a partially mapped constellation. 

The exploration goals allow you to score a few extra points each turn.

As the game progresses, it becomes easier to move across the board as you can pass through mapped constellations and land on the next available partially mapped constellation. But by that point, the game is nearly over and hopefully you’ve accumulated enough VPs to win the game.

Taking advantage of the bonus exploration helps your telescope zoom around the board board, and sometimes just dropping off a few stars at a constellation nets more VPs at the moment based on what your exploration cards say. The game ends when a certain number of constellations are mapped; it varies with player count.

The game ends when the constellation tokens are removed from this track.

Starry Night Sky is perfect for those who love stargazing and those who love a strategic family game. It’s fun, beautiful to look at, and players can feel accomplished semi-working together to map the stars. Maybe one day you’ll discover a new constellation and name it the Distinguished Snail. Look at this dapper little fellow! 

Is this a top hat or a fanny pack? Either way, it’s adorable!
RinCon 2023: Back better than ever in Tucson!

RinCon 2023: Back better than ever in Tucson!

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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. 

This is the pool and view from the Casino Del Sol Resort and Casino in Tucson.

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. 

Will America vote into law the right for women to vote?

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!

This little bot plays as the third person. It was totally getting in the way of our grids!

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. 

For once, I was not a dollar short in many rounds of Power Grid.

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.

Let’s toss some marbles!

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. 

There is a lot going on in Golem! But the combo-ing of actions is so satisfying!

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! 

You also have a player board that marks your resources, and you can add extra golems to the board.

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. 

I carry Scout with me a lot, because it’s fun and it fits nicely into my purse.

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.

Twilight Inscription looks bonkers but once you’re underway, the iconography is easy to follow.

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.

Chopping down some wood and fulfilling contracts.

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. 

Got a chance to hang out and game with David Short and JJ during the convention!

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>.  

Look at all those rondels in Sabika!

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! 

I mixed and matched my Eegee’s flavors. So refreshing during hot desert nights!

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.  

Dan Rice’s first game Trailblazer was a success! I’m looking forward to this new one.

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

This little pirate ship was super cute!

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. 

I really liked the music theme of Lacrimosa, plus its multi-use cards.

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. 

Here’s how you use the cards to take actions or bonuses. You tuck them into your player board.

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! 

You can’t really tell but this is a strawberry old-fashioned donut. It was heavenly!
Friendship Con 2023: Ark Nova, BSG and multiple Chudyk games

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

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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. 

This mixed-use place in Atlanta has so many different food stalls and shops — something for everyone.

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

This war sun is ready to do some damage! It’s ginormous!

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! 

My friends who hosted Friendship Con this time around gave us these awesome goodies! Plus a war sun that I forgot to add to the photo.

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 immediately opened Critters of War to play.

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. 

Love me some rondels and Trajan!

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! 

I’m building out my zoo in Ark Nova! Gotta get those conservation points!

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

The other table was playing this classic!

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. 

If you told me that Carl Chudyk made a gravity-based card game, I’d think you were lying to me.

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. 

Scout is such a great game! Love how you’re stuck with how the cards were dealt to you.

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. 

So say we all! The humans were victorious against the toasters.

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.

Is this Cocaine Bear the game?

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. 

You don’t want to get lost in Bear Valley!

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! 

Revive is a game that I want to play over and over again.

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! 

Look at my red army taking over! But alas, that didn’t last too long.

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!

Akropolis is one of my favorite filler games.

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! 

Giant Codenames makes it easy for people to gather around a table and read all the cards.

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. 

Look at how bonkers that war sun is! Seriously, one year I will figure out how to do well in this game.

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. 

The artwork in Villagers is delightful.

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. 

I played an expansion to Dune: Imperium for the first time.

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. 

Exploring space and collecting multi-use cards in Impulse.

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?  

Thanks for another fun Friendship Con!
We went to the Philippines and played some games! 

We went to the Philippines and played some games! 

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In February, my husband and I went to the Philippines and had an amazing time with family in the Manila area. We even visited two other islands! For those unfamiliar, the Philippines has over 7,500 islands, with Luzon the biggest and most populous island and it’s where the nation’s capital Manila is located. It has been decades since I’ve gone back to the motherland, and there is something truly special about connecting with relatives you haven’t seen in person in a long while, while being around the culture and people just like you — all the Filipinos! 

During my trip, I was able to squeeze in some gamine and visited a Gaming Library store (the one inside Alter Ego in Mangaluyong City) and buy some games. The employees were really nice and answered my questions about games, mainly if the Tagalog version of a particular game was similar to the English version or was it something different. I ended up purchasing Just One — in Tagalog! 

The cards in this version of Just One are all in Tagalog.

I also asked if they had a copy of the card game Darna at ang Nawawalang Bato, and they searched high and low to give me a demo copy that was a little beat up. It absolutely did not matter to me its condition, as I was so happy to take it! Darna is a Filipina superheroine that first appeared in 1950. 

I’m so happy to finally own a copy of this game, which is now out of print.

I also purchased my own sungka game at another store in the mall. Sungka is a Filipino mancala-type game that uses this wooden board and seashells as the counters.

I played a lot of games of sungka with my grandma growing up.

I also played a bunch of games with my game-loving family. During one weekend, we played a bunch of games outdoors near the pool. My cousin gifted us Games of the Generals, a Stratego-type “fog of war” game where you’re trying to capture your opponent’s Flag by marching your army pieces, which has a hierarchical order to their strengths. The game can play 3 players, with one person playing as the arbiter, who determines which piece wins battles, as you and your opponent can only see what’s behind your metal pieces. You and your opponent then only can deduce which army piece eliminated your piece, and a lot of the game is remembering where your opponent’s potentially strong pieces are. You can also play as a 2-player game, and in that version, when a battle happens, players reveal the two pieces in the battle, and you both can figure out which piece is stronger. I also learned this game is also called Salpakan, which means to slap. Let the slapping commence! 

I eventually could not hide my flag and my opponent captured it during this game.

Next up was chess. (I am very bad at chess but I know all the rules to play it. My nephew totally kicked my butt!) I also learned that when their pawn gets to the other side of the board, it gets promoted to a stronger piece. I told Chris that I never saw that on “Queen’s Gambit,” and he’s like, it doesn’t happen when people are good at playing chess. 🙃

I really should be playing more chess to improve my game. It’s one of the first games I learned.

We also played backgammon on an old set from Greece. My cousin owned this board after a neighbor gave it to her before they moved, but she never played it, so she gifted it to us. One of the pieces is missing, so there’s a 10 peso coin on the board in its place, and it’ll always remind me that it came from the Philippines. 

My cousin gave me this older backgammon set from Greece.

If you ever attend a Filipino party, there’s always mahjong. This is the quintessential gambling game that Filipinos love to play. The rules are a little different depending on each culture, but it’s a game that I’ve grown up playing and it always makes me feel nostalgic for the family parties of my childhood. 

Trying to complete my hand of tiles during our mahjong game.

My other cousin also owned this charming deck of Byzantine-themed playing cards that Byzantine Time Traveler designed and sells. I was able to buy a deck when we visited the Ayala Museum in Makati later in the trip.

The artwork for this deck is just delightful and super informative!

Lastly, we also played a lot of Pusoy Dos. According to Wikipedia, “Pusoy dos (or Filipino poker, also known as chikicha or sikitcha), a variation of big two, is a popular type of “shedding” card game.” The object of the game is to be the first to discard your hand by playing poker hands to the table. I played A LOT of this game in college because it’s fast, strategic and can be played with any deck of cards. The lowest value card, according to the rules I play, is the 3 of spades and the highest is the 2 of diamonds. I use the the mnemonic Daly City High School to remember the order of the suits. When someone plays a pair of 4’s, then the next person has to play 4’s of a higher suit or a higher pair in general. If everyone passes, then that person can lead the next thing to beat.

I have the 2 of diamonds, which is the highest card the version of Pusoy Dos we play.

In addition to spending time in the Manila area, we island hopped to Coron in Palawan as well as Boracay. Though a little remote and rural, Coron was breathtakingly gorgeous. I had never ever seen water so clean and clear — it was just like a movie set!

The water in Coron is so crystal clear, with a bright turquoise tint to it!

We took an all-day boat tour to explore small nearby islands and we snorkeled, kayaked, hiked and swam, even eating a seafood lunch on picnic tables with food cooked on the boat. We especially loved seeing the fish, the Twin Lagoon Lake and Kayagan Lake, which requires climbing 163 steps up and 204 steps down to access the lake. And then you need to climb the reverse of that to get back to your boat! Just stunning! 

We purchased a Go Pro right before we left, and we got so many photos during our water excursions!

During our time in the Philippines, we also visited Boracay, which has a completely different vibe than Palawan. Boracay is a resort town with lots of hotels, restaurants and water activities.

The white sand beaches of Boracay. It was about 9 a.m. and the crowds hadn’t woken up yet.

We signed up for helmet diving, which is walking across the ocean floor in a pressurized helmet. It takes a little getting used to to pressurize your ears as you climb down the ladder, but nothing too bad. It was so much fun! We did helmet diving on Valentine’s Day and snapped this photo. 

Happy Valentine’s Day from Boracay!

Overall, the Philippines is a must-recommend travel destination! The Manila area is just like a big city — densely populated with lots of traffic — but it was nice staying in a walkable city with access to so many restaurants, malls and things to do. For the other islands, we took small planes via Philippine Airlines, and stayed at beautiful resorts there. Most everyone speaks English in the country, the food is so diverse, yummy and cheap (based on the U.S. dollar exchange rate), and the hospitality is top-notch.

Some Filipino street food — chicken and pork isaw — at a small eatery on the University of the Philippines campus.

We did so much and visited so many places in two weeks, and I’m so grateful to be able to spend time with my relatives. Can’t wait to go back (hopefully it won’t be decades until we return) and visit other islands next time!

An overhead shot from the airplane of Coron Island in the province of Palawan.
War Room: Where Axis and Allies meets Diplomacy

War Room: Where Axis and Allies meets Diplomacy

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I recently got a chance to play another all-day game of the global WWII game War Room. And by all day, the game continued on for about 8 hours before folks decided to wrap it up because it seemed inevitable that the Axis were going to win in one to two turns. After 8 hours, we had taken seven turns, so it could conceivably have continued for another one to two hours — and it was getting late already. I’ve played this game twice already, and this time I was on the Axis’ team as scrappy little Italy holding on to assist stronger Axis powers and being a big pain in the butt against Great Britain’s navy in the Mediterranean. 

War Room is a 2-6 player game where players take on nations during WWII: three people will be the Allies as the U.S., Great Britain and Russia, while the rest will play as the Axis: Japan, Germany and Italy. Players can also play only the Pacific theater with 2-3 players if you can’t manage to round up enough folks for an all-day game. While it plays similarly to Axis and Allies (with some streamlining during combat), the preplanning of military orders and discussing strategy with teammates are very reminiscent of Diplomacy — but without the backstabbing!

War Room is so large that players need command staves!

First off, to play War Room, you need a very, very large table, and preferably another side table or two to place the battle boards. The player board is a puzzly configuration of a giant circle, similar to those world maps you’ve seen in war movies. Each player receives a slim rectangular box containing command markers and flag tokens, as well as a cardboard pegboard and pegs keep track of their resource tracks.

The game also comes with a million plastic pieces, representing infantry, tanks, planes and bombers, and an assortment of ships, from submarines (yellow ones specifically!) and aircraft carriers and others in between. For those who opted for a game upgrade, the game also comes with large branded sand timers and command staves to move your forces across Europe.  

Each stack of units is assigned a number, which will come into play when you assign orders for them.

There are seven phases of War Room: Direct National Economy, Strategic Planning, Movement Operations, Combat Operations, Refit and Deploy, Morale, and Production. 

Game play isn’t too difficult, if you’re familiar with either Axis or Allies, but there’s plenty of room to make errors. During the Strategic Planning phase, players secretly write out orders on their O&P chart to reveal simultaneously at the end of this phase. Some countries have more command boxes than others, so you’ll have to strategize which units you want to move to which location, and orders can’t be changed once the phase ends.

These fancy sand timers will tell you when time is up!

During this time you’ll also be bidding with your oil resources to pick turn order. Sometimes it’s better to go after everyone has made their move, while other times you want to first so that your troops get pinned. 

Players write down commands on their O&P chart. Italy has 6 commands; others have more.

Pinning happens when an enemy unit moves into your location. If you had planned to move that unit out during Strategic Planning, it now is stuck. During the Movement phase, armies can move one space, or many spaces along the train rail route in friendly spaces. 

You can see the railroad tracks going through Germany and other countries.

As forces move into contested areas, battles happen! Players move their units to the provided combat boards, both both sea battles and land battles. Each side places their forces based on the chart and they roll color-sided dice to determine who is the victor. Various units give you a different number of dice (increasing your odds of winning), and they also may take more damage, while others will get wiped out upon immediate hits. The chart makes it so easy to figure it out. Player roll all their dice and assign hits. If units are damaged, players can spend resources to keep them in play. If they’re destroyed, they go to the Morale Board, which then calculates stresses for the next round. 

This combat board simplifies battles. It tells you how many dice to roll and how much damage units can take.

A country suffers morale penalties when it receives too much stress at the end of the round. Such penalties include no rail usage or disrupted supply lines. These are not good, and it’s hard to lower these penalties once you’ve moved into a higher category, which can be seen in a circle on the turn order track in the middle of the board. 

After the stresses are calculated, players can order new troops or forces by buying them during the production phase. You can write down the calculations for these on your player board. When you put new pieces of plastic on the board, they enter the game at your factory locations, and the factories’ smokestacks show how many items may be placed there for production. But they are not quite available yet to your armies. They’re being “produced” and will be available for use in two rounds. When you produce forces, you move your resource markers down based on how much you’ve spent. 

Units that were destroyed get placed on the Morale Board, which is used to calculate a nation’s stress level.

Then so begins the next turn, which is the first phase: Direct National Economy. You calculate your income based on all the territories you control. This is really easy to figure out because you’ll have the individual card for that territory and it’ll tell you how much oil, iron and OSR (other strategic resources), and you’ll move your little peg up your box. 

Each player gets one of these boxes, which stores your command markers underneath the peg board that tracks your resources. These were all the territories I controlled at the time.

The game continues until the Allies control both Greater Germany and Japan, or the Axis controls two of the following areas: the Eastern United States, Great Britain or Moscow. Players can also play a 6-turn variant if they are unable to devote that much time for a full game.

I’ve quite enjoyed my two plays of War Room, with each game being completely different. I’ve learned that moving across the Pacific takes a long time (I played as the United States in my first game), and Italy, while small, can be strategically helpful to Germany and Japan. War Room is such an epic game — to look at on a table and to play! The tension never eases up, and while it does require a time commitment, the game moves quickly and there’s never a dull moment! 
Top 10 games I played for the first time in 2022

Top 10 games I played for the first time in 2022

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The end of 2022 is almost here! Dang, that went by so quickly! In all honestly, this was the first year that it felt like life in general was returning to a somewhat new normal. I feel so fortunate that I got to travel and attend multiple game conventions, where I played a lot of games and hung out with some good people. Here are the top 10 games I played for the first time in 2022. 

10. Dune 

The spice must flow! But watch out for the storm and sandworm — they’re both pretty treacherous.

This Dune is a streamlined version of the 1979 game that many people grew up playing. I played this game for the first time this past Consimworld, and I had a great time. It’s definitely a convention game because it can run a little long, depending on how experienced the gamers are, but it’s a great implementation of all the different warring factions in the source material (for me, it’s just the 2021 movie — I’ve never read any of the books. Don’t take my nerd card away from me). There’s treachery, secrecy, negotiations, battles for spice, an always-moving storm and the most dangerous thing of all — the sandworm! I would definitely love to play this again at the next con I go to. 

9. Project L

Project L is a Tetris-inspired engine builder that comes in a small minimalist box.

I love puzzles, and Project L is a Tetris-inspired board game that is also an engine builder. Pretty cool, right? It comes in a sleek little black box, with lots of plastic tetromino pieces and decks of thick-cardboard puzzle cards, in which you place those plastic pieces to complete a puzzle. When you complete a puzzle, you gain victory points and/or new puzzle pieces, enabling you to complete more challenging puzzles that require more pieces for more VPs. Placing all those colorful pieces to create a mosaic puzzle feels just so satisfying, as does the stack of puzzle cards you accumulate throughout the game. It’s a great short game, one that I’ve played a lot throughout the year. 

8. Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road 

There are literally many paths to victory in Merv but you’ll need to do it in 12 actions.

Merv is a crunchy, city-building economic game, one that follows a trend in the past couple of years where the entire game comprises of very few actions — 12 to be exact in this game — but many things will happen as a result of that one action, making the game both brain-burnery and fulfilling. Players make their way around the board three times, and on each side, they take a turn, first by placing a building on a location in the row or column where you decide to place your meeple or activating a building in that row or column if there’s a building already there. Buildings will net resources, and then you can choose a site action (caravansary, palace or marketplace), gain a favor or deploy a soldier. If you move ahead on your turn farthest on a side, you’ll start as the last player on the next turn, unless you pay camels to bump ahead. The goal of the game is to gain favors with the palace, collect resources to fulfill contracts, move along the Silk Road to trade and build city walls to avoid the Mongol destruction that happens at the end of the second and third year, which is the last round of the game. 

7. Heading Forward 

The days are counting down on your rehabilitation process in Heading Forward.

I never play solo games but was intrigued by Heading Forward. Based on designer John du Bois’ own experience, in this game you assume the identity of someone embarking on the long road to recovery following a traumatic brain injury. This solitaire card game mimics the choices one must make while rehabilitating, deciding which skills to relearn or which will atrophy based on non-usage, while under a deadline pressure before your medical insurance will run out. It’s a unique experience that offers a glimpse into rehab’s long and difficult process, and the uncertainty of recovery, the result of which could be uplifting or heartbreaking.

6. Stonewall Uprising 

Lots of support tracks in Stonewall Uprising that could have dire consequences for the Pride side.

I got a chance to learn how to play Stonewall Uprising at SD Hist Con with the designer Taylor Shuss himself! Stonewall Uprising is 2-player asymmetrical deckbuilder in which one side plays as The Man and the other as Pride and they fight each other for or against civil rights. It is a notable moment in board game design when a game with this subject matter that’s near and dear to the designer can be published by a wargaming company. Taylor told me about all the research he did on the various historic people who helped the Pride movement get to where it is today. Each side starts with a basic deck of cards, and the game eases you into building your deck. It plays through the 1960s-1980s, which leads into the catastrophic losses the gay community faced with the AIDS epidemic. There are also rule twists that set this apart from a standard deckbuilder. When folding early, which will give your opponent some traction on one of the support tracks, but you’ll be able to draw more cards the following round. 

5. Long Shot: Dice Game 

Which horse will win? It’s anyone’s game! But make sure you bet on the right one.

Who knew betting on horses would be so fun? Long Shot: The Dice Game manages to capture the chaos and excitement of a day at the races — all in a compact roll-and-write package that plays 1 to 8 people. With each turn, the active player rolls two dice, one that pushes a specific horse and the other one by how many spaces along the race track. Players then take one action based on the horse die, and they can either take a concession, mark a helmet on a horse, mark a jersey on a horse, bet up to $3 on a horse that matches the horse die, or straight up purchase a horse. The helmets enable you to make bets on that horse after they pass a certain point on the track, and the jersey allows you to attach a second horse to a primary horse to move one spot after the primary horse moves. The concessions action allows you to get bonuses when you cross off a row or column. The game is fast-paced, and you’ll never know whose horse will cross the finish line! The person with the most money at the end of the game wins.

4. Akropolis

Akropolis is a short yet strategic tile-drafting and tile-laying game.

Akropolis was a total surprise for me. It’s a game that was introduced to me at the end of a game night when we had about 30 minutes left before calling it a night. What I thought would be a quick filler is an elegant, streamlined drafting tile-laying puzzle, a game that plays in under 30 minutes. On your turn, you choose a tile from the construction site; the first one costs zero, but if you want to get one farther down the line, it’ll cost you one stone each spot. You then place the tile into your city. The tiles themselves are one large shape made up of three hexes. When you place the tile into your city, it must border at least one edge of another city tile, or you can place it on another level as long as it covers three hexagon tiles underneath it. The three types of construction: quarries, plazas and districts. Quarries don’t score points but get you stone when they’re covered. There are five types of districts, which score differently and have their own placement rules. Lastly, the plazas are multipliers for these various districts. But a district won’t score any points until you get a matching plaza of the same color into your city. The result is tense drafting and an enjoyable city-building puzzle.

3. Paint the Roses

This is the deluxe version of Paint the Roses, where the tiles are made of acrylic.

I am not the best at deduction games, but there’s something about Paint the Roses and its semi-cooperative deduction gameplay that makes this game so worthwhile. The theme is Alice in Wonderland, and you’re all trying to finish the Queen’s garden before she cuts off your head. On your turn, you choose one of the four tiles face up and place it in the garden next to other tiles. Each tile has a colored flower and a shrub behind it, one of the four symbols, a heart, clubs, spades or diamond. You and others then place cubes to determine if the placement satisfies the secret objective card in each of your hands. After each turn, you have to make a guess about someone’s objective, based on the cubes on the board. They can either be colors or shapes, or both, as objectives get harder. If you guess wrong, the Queen starts chasing you across the board — faster and faster as the game progresses — and you need to win before she gets to you. And because nobody exactly knows what everyone’s individual objective is, there’s no problem of one player taking over the game and making decisions for everyone. 

2. Honey Buzz

The bees are buzzing along and collecting resources to complete orders.

Honey Buzz is an excellent worker-placement economic game, all packaged together in the cutest way possible: bees, flowers and whimsical animals. This game is delightful and crunchy, and you place your beeples on the board to collect various tiles to place into your hive. If there are already beeples at that action spot, you must place exactly one more beeple to take a tile. When those tiles create a pattern, all the symbols on the tiles activate, either producing nectar, coins or more beeples; selling items to the market or completing an order; or activating any other symbol in the pattern if you have a wild symbol. As various types of nectar are sold to the market, their price drops and multiple nectars drop too low, the market crashes, triggering the end of the game. There are also objectives that players can claim throughout the end or at the end of the game. Honey Buzz is a fantastic combination of economics, worker management and puzzle-laying. This game is definitely buzzworthy! 

1. Twilight Inscription

The most epic of roll and writes: Twilight Imperium. Everything about this game is just so slick.

And here we are at No. 1: Twilight Inscription. I seriously have not stopped talking about this game since playing it for the first time. It’s the most epic of roll and writes, an ambitious project set in the world of the galactic classic Twilight Imperium. It feels so much more than a regular roll and write, while maintaining the feel and characters of the TI4, all in a game that’ll last about 2 hours. The game can also look intimidating upon first glance, but once you get started, the symbols are all easy to interpret and gameplay feel sintuitive. The hardest part of the game is deciding which direction to go and which boards to invest in. Each player has four boards: Navigation,  Exploration, Warfare and Industry, and each round begins with an event. There are 25 event cards in the game. During an event, there are dice rolls preprinted on the event card, and each player can choose to cross off those symbols on one board of their choosing. Once everyone is done, the dice are rolled, and players must cross off those new symbols to the active board they’ve already chosen from the event card. This is how everyone’s game can branch off in different directions. Should I explore more systems, or should I invest in warfare? Or maybe it’s worth unlocking these technologies and collecting bonuses for later. So many choices! There are also bonuses for reaching Mecatol Rex first, naturally, and other game objectives scored at the end. Overall, Twilight Inscription just looks so slick, especially with the fancy orange shiny markers that really pop against the blue backdrop of each sheet. Plus, the big chonky dice feel good to roll. 

And that’s my list for 2022. Thanks, friends, for making it all the way through this list. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season, and here’s to bigger and better things in 2023! What are some of your favorite games you’ve played in the past year?

San Diego Historical Games Convention 2022: My first time going in person

San Diego Historical Games Convention 2022: My first time going in person

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Last month, during Veterans weekend, I drove to California to attend the San Diego Historical Games Convention, or SDHistCon for short. It was their first time having the convention in person since 2019, and my first time attending it in person; I’ve only attended virtually during the pandemic. The convention this year was held at the San Diego Jewish Academy, which was a gorgeous location and lots of space for gaming. SDHistCon is an intimate, laid-back and friendly convention, with about 130 attendees, and a fantastic place for game designers, especially those in the historic gaming realm, to meet with industry veterans.

The convention went from Friday, Nov. 11, to Sunday, Nov. 13. On the Thursday evening before, organizers held a casual event at Sky Deck in Del Mar Heights, which was an indoor/outdoor food court with some yummy restaurants and breweries within it. 

It’s always a fun time hanging out with Dan Bullock, and I got to meet Joe Schmidt for the first time!

I then met some cool designers for the first time, and reunited with some friends that I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. 

Here’s me with awesome designers Drew Wehrle (from left), Cole Wehrle and Mark Herman.

On Friday morning, I showed up at the convention to check in and scope out the gaming areas. The gaming areas were on two different floors, with each space very sizable and tables spread out.

You can see some nice views from the windows on the second floor.

The upstairs had games on display for the raffle, and where most of the demos were happening. There was also a smaller room for panel and game design discussions. The bottom floor had the snack bar and sodas for purchase, as well as large tables for open game play. 

This is the gaming space on the first floor.

I ran into Harold Buchanan, wargame designer and founder of this cool convention, who then introduced me to Terry Leeds, an artist who designs a lot of the artwork for GMT Games.

It’s me, Terry and Harold! The maps on those GMT COIN games are gorgeous!

I got a chance to see a copy of Fort Circle’s upcoming game, Votes for Women, which is said to be arriving at my mailbox pretty soon! I’m super excited by that game and can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Some players had packed up the game, so I didn’t get a chance to take a photo of the board.

My first game of the con was a quick route-building area control game called Streetcar Suburb. This was a quick 2P game where you’re building a streetcar line and maximizing placement of buildings around the track and running it throughout the city. 

We’re building out our streetcar track in this prototype.

My first game of the convention was learning and playing Twilight Struggle: Red Sea — Conflict in the Horn of Africa. Game designer Jason Matthews was on hand to teach multiple games, and a tournament was even on the convention schedule.

Jason Matthews, who co-designed Twilight Struggle, is teaching Twilight Struggle: Red Sea.

Jason said that impetus behind TS: Red Sea was so that people can learn and quickly jump into the Twilight Struggle system with a game that lasts about an hour. This game is part of the GMT Lunchtime Games series meant to be played in under an hour. The original Twilight Struggle game can often last 2-3 hours if you are not familiar with the cards, and can be daunting to folks new to this style of gaming. 

Twilight Struggle: Red Sea deals with the conflict in the Horn of Africa.

The deck is smaller, and you get dealt a hand of cards, with players going back and forth playing cards, until the turn is over. The game only plays three turns, unlike the original game. I unfortunately did not win my game but enjoyed learning it from the designer himself.

TS: Red Sea is quick and plays only three turns, i.e. rounds for non-wargamers. My opponent was Monte Johnson.

I then learned a trick-taking prototype game about getting tenured. When you win a trick, you can either place a card from your hand to one of the matching stacks in front of you or take a card from the trick to place back into your hand. The stacks in front of you represent books, and you’ll need three of the same type to “publish” your book, eventually making tenure when three of your books are “published.” It’s a neat take on a trick taking because you want to keep your cards to win tricks but you also have to save some cards for those stacks in front of you. 

I love the flavor text of this game. Hoping it’ll make it to a publisher someday!

I then got to meet Kai Jensen, game developer extraordinaire, who was interviewed on an episode of Dan Bullock’s podcast Game Design Deep Dive. After listening to that episode, I was just in awe by her experience and knowledge in developing games. As a side note, Dan’s got some really excellent interviews with game designers, so you should check out the podcast.

Kai Jensen has developed many games, including Dominant Species: Marine, which I love.

We all then took a dinner break at Urban Plates, which is a yummy, healthy place in the plaza with the Sky Deck. Here’s the dinner gang.

Taking a break from all the gaming and getting dinner.

After dinner was a raffle. There were so many games, and a different set of games to win for Friday night and Saturday night. Everyone received one raffle ticket with their SDHistCon ticket, and people could purchase more tickets to drop in. 

These were all the games for raffle on Friday night. A new set of games came out for Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Wow!

The last game of the day was 1714: The Case of the Catalans. 1714: The Case of the Catalans is a strategy and negotiation board game set in the War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the 18th century. The players represent the powers of the Grand Alliance constituted in 1701 to prevent the dynastic unification of France with the crowns of Castile and Aragon by the Bourbons after the death of Charles II.

The concessions you’re trying to obtain are on the right side of the board.

I’ve never encountered a wargame such as this before — there is sooo much negotiation, and I’m here for it! Each power — Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, Austria, the Duchy of Savoy and Portugal — is trying to obtain concessions that match the goals of their countries, while moving troops across the map and attacking Bourbon armies. Sequence of play also factors into this game a lot, as depending on which concession you obtain, determines your turn order on a future turn. I ended up coming in second place, missing first place by one point! (All that negotiation did me some good!)

Game designer Taylor Shuss teaching us his game Stonewall Uprising on Saturday morning.

On Saturday morning, I learned how to play Stonewall Uprising with the designer Taylor Shuss himself! This 2P deckbuilder pits Pride vs. The Man and covers the period through the 1960s to the 1980s. There are also three different tracks that represent the tug of war between the two sides: systemic support, public support and individual support.

I know the colors are thematically accurate for the Pride movement but it’s just so cool seeing them on a board game.

The Man’s goal is to detain and demoralize 10 people from Pride’s deck to take the wind out of Pride’s movement. Pride’s goal is to shift the Overton Window and to organize protests, demonstrations, and sit-ins to sway the public, represented by their dice pool, to keep their movement’s momentum going well past the ‘80s. I love the theme of this game, one hardly ever seen in games, much less a wargame, and while events can feel bleak, it’s a period in history worth learning about and exploring. 

Pride and The Man both get their own player sheet, which works as a player aid for the deckbuilding.

I turn played this neat little game called Turncoats. The game is literally glass pebbles in red, blue and black, all in this little cloth pouch that doubles as the game’s cloth board when flattened and opened up all the way, revealing a stitching of a map with territories.

Turncoats, which comes in this bag and looks so unassuming, is so, so tense.

The game is about area control on the board and which color is the dominant pebble, all the while having a hand of pebbles in your hand, hidden from the rest of the players. The struggle is setting up majorities on the board using stones from your hand, while keeping stones from those majorities to score in your hand at the end of the game. Elegant and simple to learn, but strategically difficult and so tense! 

I love how the map in Turncoats is built into its bag, which serves as the game’s carrying case.

I then played a game of John Company with the designers themselves: Cole and Drew Wehrle. I had a blast meeting these guys for the first time at this convention, and it was so neat to see them in action, whether explaining the rules of John Company, checking out a new prototype at this con, or talking about the inner workings of board game publishing.

I got hang out with these guys for a few hours as we played John Company. The guy in the middle told me that he had played the game a few times during the course of the convention.

I am still not confident in myself to teach John Company to others, but I feel like I had a better grasp of the game, especially now that the 2nd edition board is much, much better and easier to follow along! 

Here’s how our game ended. That’s me in pink — in first place!

After dinner, there was another raffle drawing, and this time I won Nicaea by Hollandspiele. I had been eyeing this game recently and had been planning to buy it during the Black Friday sale they have every year so this was a total score! I still did purchase a few games during their sale though because I enjoy their games so much. 

Woot! I bought a couple more extra raffle tickets and it totally paid off!

I then stopped by the giant Liberty or Death game, which pitted Harold, Volko Ruhnke, Mark Herman and Jason Matthews as the four factions, but I couldn’t stay when they started as I had another game scheduled during the time slot.

Harold stands over the giant Liberty of Death board before the game gets underway on Saturday night.

I finally got a chance to meet and chat with Volko, whose COIN games got me into this niche corner of board gaming. My first COIN game that I played was Falling Sky: The Gallic Revolt Against Caesar.

It’s my first time meeting Voko in person!

I then went downstairs to play an 8P Game of Thrones, which included the Mother of Dragons expansion, which adds House Targaryen and House Arryn into the game. The game included some cool dragon minis for House Targaryen and while we didn’t finish our game before closing time, I had a lot of fun! I don’t think I’ve played GOT in over 6 years and I loved revisiting it. 

The Targaryens keep flying dragons over to attack everyone. They’re the worst!

Before closing, I took a quick photo with Treg, one of the guys I had met back at GMT Weekend at the Warehouse many years ago. Even though we didn’t get to play a game together, it was good to see him and catch up all weekend!

I last saw Treg at Dice Tower 2022, where we got a chance to play some games.

On Sunday morning, I taught a 4P game of Twilight Inscription. I love this game so much! The game plays for about two hour and always preface a teach by saying it looks so overwhelming at first, but once you get going, it’s not as difficult as it seems because the symbols and iconography are well done and easy to understand. It’s a epic roll-and-write in the Twilight Imperium world, and each player gets four player boards. When an event is read out loud, you choose one of those boards to be the active sheet, and you cross off symbols matching what shows on the event card. Then, the speaker rolls these big, nice chunky dice, and players then get to place those symbols on the active board they chose for the event. The four boards are navigation, warfare, exploration and industry. It’s seriously so epic.

My last game of SDHistCon. I got to teach these cool guys how to play Twilight Inscription.

By noon, I had to get back on the road to go home. I had a blast in San Diego gaming with friends and meeting new people. The SDHistCon organizers really make you feel welcome, and everyone I had encountered was so chill and friendly. If you’re a game designer, especially in the historical gaming field, this is a great convention to go to with your prototype. I saw so many people with their prototypes out on tables because experienced designers will play your game and give you feedback. The weekend went by so quickly that my only regret is that SDHistCon isn’t one day longer! I’m definitely planning to come back next year.

One of the signs throughout the facility to help you find the gaming rooms.
Flashpoint: South China Sea

Flashpoint: South China Sea

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The first card-driven game I learned to play was Twilight Struggle. It was early on during my entrance into the hobby, and, at the time, the game was No. 1 on Board Game Geek. I used to play it often way back when but, times have changed, much like the rankings on BGG, and I don’t often have the time to devote to that particular 2P game. Luckily for gamers, GMT Games created a Lunchtime Game Series, and Flashpoint: South China Sea is the latest game of the series, which consist of smaller-format strategy games designed to be played in 20-60 minutes.

Flashpoint: South China Sea’s box is slimmer than other GMT games.

Flashpoint: South China Sea, designed by Harold Buchanan, is a tense yet much more accessible game than its CDG predecessors. Set in the conflict between the United States and China in the disputed region around the South China Sea, the game pits two players against each other as they try to assert economic and diplomatic influence across various regions and countries using cubes and event cards. 

But first, a big thank you to Harold for sending me this game!

The game begins with a board, event cards, scoring cards, wooden cubes, player aids and rulebooks. There’s also another deck of cards for those who like to play games solo. First and foremost, I appreciate how the rulebook immediately indexes and explains important terms and concepts on the first page — this makes jumping into this game less daunting for less experienced wargamers. 

In the Philippines, you can see the darker-colored triangle corner in the square to indicate starting cubes belong at that location.

Setup is really easy. On the board, squares with a darker-colored triangle at its corner shows where starting cubes begin. You then set up the 7 scoring cards face up near the board and shuffle the 48 event cards. Deal out 6 event cards per player, and set the tension to low and the campaign track on the 1. The game plays out through three campaigns. 

On campaigns 2 and 3, the person with the fewest VPs gets to decide who goes first, but in campaign 1, choosing first player is a little different. Each player secretly bids the number of victory points they’re willing to give to the U.S. player in order to play as China. I’ve never encountered starting instructions like this before, but it immediately puts pressure on the players before even starting the game! You probably don’t want to give the U.S. too many points to play as China, but maybe you’ll be better at this than me! 

Here are the different type of event cards: red is for China, blue for the U.S. and the third card is neutral.

Players then alternate playing event cards until each side’s hand is empty. Event cards are friendly to one side, and they have an operational value, a mode and a scoring impact. If you play a friendly card to your side, you can play the event or use the operational value to conduct actions. If you play it for the scoring impact, score one of the scoring cards sitting next to the main board, execute it and turn it face down. That scoring card cannot be scored again during this current campaign. 

There are 7 scoring cards altogether. Here are four of them.

Cards are then discarded to a discard pile, and the next player takes their turn. If you play a card that matches the mode as the top card in the discard pile, you can either execute the discarded card’s event or scoring impact. There are three different modes in the deck. 

China and the U.S. both have an available pool and reserve pool of cubes. The available cubes can be brought onto the board through cards, while moving reserves to available will cost 1 Operation value. Certain actions will also cost more to carry out as the tension level increases throughout the game. 

Here’s the setup of the game, along with all 7 scoring cards visible.

At the end of the first and second campaigns, each country moves economic influence cubes to available, and the tension level moves one space to the left. If a side reaches 15 VPs during play or final scoring, it’s an instant victory. If no one reaches 15 VPs after the third campaign, the side with the most VPs wins the game. 

The game is a constant tug of war for political and economic influence, and there are never enough cubes to do everything. Plus, timing is absolutely key when activating the scoring cards. But sometimes your opponent will score before you, or, based on the random draw, you do not have the matching symbol to activate that scoring card. The game’s well-written rulebook shows plenty of examples, and even provides several Spotify playlists, depending on how intense you want your game to be. I most definitely always crank up the HIGH tension playlist. 🤘🏽

I was so surprised by these playlists at the end of the rulebook. Super cool!

So if you’re looking for a 60-minute, two-player wargame, Flashpoint: South China Seas is worth checking out. And with that, I’m off to Harold’s San Diego Historical Con for the weekend. I’ll be writing about that convention next time!
Rincon 2022: Surviving Rincomicon

Rincon 2022: Surviving Rincomicon

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The pandemic has changed many things in our lives, and that rings true for board game conventions. A few conventions have folded up during this era, while others have had to tweak their programming. Case in point: Rincon, Tucson’s Tabletop Game Convention! Last month, Rincon paired up with Tucson Comic Con during Labor Day weekend to feature gaming at the convention and after-hours gaming and dinner at a nearby hotel, the Ramada by Wyndham Tucson.

Rincon attendees needed to purchase a ticket to Tucson Comic Con and Rincon after-hours if they wanted to participate in both things each day. And while the setup wasn’t ideal, it was still great to see the wonderful people who work so hard to get this convention back on its feet. I even received a pencil from the a conventiongoer that said “I survived Rincomicon!” Yes, indeed!

An overhead shot of the exhibitor hall at Tucson Comic Con. So much shopping!

I only attended RinCon for two days — Friday and Saturday — as I couldn’t stay away from home for too long (more on that at the bottom of this post). I arrived in Tucson on Friday afternoon to get ready to teach Cascadia at the women’s table in the gaming hall.

I personally love teaching all types of games at the women’s table because it gives us a chance to learn a game in a stress-free, ask-as-many-questions-as-you’d-like environment. I taught two games of Cascadia, one 2P and another as a 3P, and it was a hit! 

I am always so happy to teach Cascadia. It has such a pretty table presence.

After teaching the game, I was able to walk the Tucson Comic Con floor and see all my fellow nerds — and buy some nerdy things, like a giant Kirby fan (which came in handy as it was hot that weekend) and some D20 earrings.

I love this giant Kirby fan!

Once evening hit, Keep it Rollin’ w/RinCon festivities moved over to the Ramada, which was a quick walk on the other side of the freeway from the Tucson Convention Center, where Comic Con was being held. Evening tickets provided dinner and ballroom space for gaming and smaller rooms for LARPing. 

The gaming room at the Ramada by Wyndham in Tucson, where scheduled gaming took place.

On Saturday, I spoke on a panel called Diversity and Inclusion in Tabletop Gaming. We had a great discussion about inclusion and diversity, which touched on topics such as themes, game choices, welcoming spaces and many others. 

I was on the panel with Lizzy Jayne Took (from left), Mariah Johnson, Darrell Lynn aka Sosha Justice, and Karen Arnold Ewing) at the Diversity and Inclusion in Tabletop Gaming panel.

I then walked the other half of the exhibitor floor to for more shopping (as one does at a Comic Con) and literally squealed when I saw this: The Batmobile! 

Holy smokes! It’s the Batmobile!

The 1960s Adam West Batman is my absolute favorite version of Batman. I grew up on this show in reruns and literally know every single episode and famous cameos on the show. I also own a copy of The Official Batman Batbook and spent childhood memorizing it. Ah, the days before the internet!   

I then taught a game of Honey Buzz to three other women. One lady said she had wanted to learn how to play the game before purchasing it, and everyone enjoyed the game! Plus, the components are always so delightful to play with!  

Honey Buzz is just so adorable and it’s a quite a strategic economic game! Plus, who doesn’t love beeples?

After leaving the convention center and walking over to the Ramada, I met Zach of Korrosive Games, who brought their prototype Fate of Venterra. It’s a 4x game with a gorgeous build-out of various terrain, and there are five different factions you can play from. The company is local to the Phoenix area, and the game is still being developed, eventually getting on Kickstarter.

Fate of Venterra is a 2-5 player strategy game that’s being developed.

The Ramada had some signature drinks at its bar, so naturally I ordered a drink that was named after me.

Being on the drink menu was a nice surprise!

It was yummy and sweet! And that garnish was of a fruit roll-up consistency.

I need to figure out how to make these small meeple garnishes!

And with that, I drove back home to Phoenix on Saturday night. It was wonderful seeing gamer friendsI hadn’t seen in a few years because of the pandemic, especially Karen, chair of the Rincon Convention. She is truly one of the nicest people out there in the gaming sphere and worked hard to make it happen this year. Thanks for having me, Karen!

It’s always a pleasure seeing Karen Arnold Ewing!

And for those who have made it down this far, I’ll circle back to why I couldn’t stay at RinCon for the entire four days. The day before Rincon …

My husband and I adopted a new dog! He’s a 10-year-old dog that we adopted from the Arizona Small Dog Rescue. He’s a handsome boy, and we’re so happy to have him. My husband was originally supposed to come with me to Tucson but he stayed home with our new dog, and I just couldn’t wait to get back home to this smiling face.

The face of a handsome doggo who is always looking for snacks!