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?
A week before Consimworld, I had mentioned on Twitter that I was excited for the con, and someone had asked if there were any games I was looking forward to playing, and friends, I didn’t have an answer. I felt a little disconnected from the wargaming community this past year, and me not being able to answer that question created a little bit of anxiety, with various thoughts swirling around in my head, the loudest one that said, “do I belong here at this convention?”
Well five days of nonstop gaming in Tempe from Aug. 27-31 shut down my fears about that and I ended up having a wonderful time! There are so many different games you can play in the wargaming sphere, from megagames that last multiple days (something I hope to get into next year!) to 2P card-driven games that can be played in under an hour. Plus, a small highlight of attending an Arizona con during the summer is hearing Midwesterners say, “Oh, 100 degrees isn’t so bad!” when we’re walking to dinner. That #desertlife!
The main room at Consimworld at the Tempe Mission Palms hotel.
My buddy and game designer Dan Bullock arrived on the Friday the day before the con so we did some pre-gaming with a 2P game of Squaring Circleville. I really like the rondel mechanism of this game! My husband usually teaches this game, so I was a little unprepared for teaching it but we got through another enjoyable game of it.
We’ve succeeded in Squaring Circleville, a real town in Ohio that the game is based on.
Aug. 27
This was the first day of Consimworld! Here’s Dan and me arriving bright and early for gaming!
Dan and I are ready for all the gaming! This was taken before temps hit 110 degrees. It was a hot week!
We started the con with a 3P game of Passtally. This quick filler is such a brain burner! I finally own a copy of it, after playing it at BGG Con Spring eons ago! This is a tile-laying game in which you’re building routes to connect to your markers. You can also build on top of other tiles, which elevates this cute game into super crunchy puzzle. For each turn, you get VPs based on how many tiles your route goes through — horizontally and vertically!
Passtally is so pretty yet will probably melt your brain.
I then busted out my new copy of Twin Palms, a game I first played at Dice Tower West 2022. I backed the game on Kickstarter and it arrived the day before Consimworld. What luck! Twin Palms is a neat trick-taking card game, where you play pairs of cards and there are only 1-3 suits in the game, depending on player count. The highest pair of cards are determined by a hierarchy of pairs and/or suits, and you may bet before each turn how many tricks you’ll be able to take. It’s a neat twist on an otherwise very familiar mechanism.
I love the cool retro artwork for this trick-taking game with a twist.
Next up was Pax Pamir. This is a game we play at every single Consimworld, but I am still not very good at it. Players are purchasing cards and creating their tableaus, while trying to gain control of territories at the right moment. Every game I’ve played is so different. I’m hoping to get my copy from their Kickstarter soon, so maybe there’s a chance for me yet to improve my game!
Pax Pamir never disappoints! I can never get enough of these components and linen map.
We then played A Study in Emerald, a grail game that’s, for the lack of a better word, insane. The Great Old Ones have taken over the world, and historical figures from the 19th century are either Restorationists fighting against the creatures or Loyalists attempting to defend the status quo. There’s a giant map of Europe, and players are depositing influence into various locations to attack monsters and/or gain cards. There’s hidden roles, deck-building, area control, and possibly zombies! Paranoia is at an all-time high, and when certain markers hit the end of their tracks, the teams compare scores and the side with the lowest score automatically loses. It is quite the experience, and I’m still not sure I’m describing the game correctly!
A Study in Emerald is quite the experience! And sometimes there are zombies.
The last game on Saturday night was Crescent Moon. This is a new asymmetric area-control game set in the 10th century Middle East, which is laid out in a very small hexagonal-tile map. There are five different factions, and each faction takes 4 actions over the course of 3 rounds, making it a total of 12 actions total. There just aren’t enough actions to do everything you want to do. Each faction has a very clear objective, and the player guides clearly explain what that is and how to best go about your relationship with other factions. And while there are some similarities to Root, there’s a lot more wheeling and dealing to negotiate with your neighbors while you work toward your win conditions.
A lot happens on this small map for Crescent Moon.
Aug. 28
Sunday began with an epic game of Dune! It was my very first game of this, and we had a complete game with 6 players. I played as the Harkonnen, which excels at treachery, so basically the complete opposite of me in real life. The game plays out over 10 rounds, unless a win condition is triggered (controlling a certain number of strongholds) beforehand. The Dune planet is represented on the main board as a giant circle separated into sectors. At the start of each round, the storm moves, spice shows up on the board and the sandworm can appear to wreak havoc on players’ troops. There’s also battles, which players set up secretly with cards and leaders in their hand and discs showing the number of troops they want to commit. There are also traitor cards, which allow you to activate an opponent’s leaders to immediately lose your conflict. This game is so fun!
The spice must flow! But watch out for the storm and sandworm — they’re both pretty treacherous.
I would totally love to play this again, especially because I nearly won and lost in the same round! During Round 8, I had a traitor leader card of my opponent I was battling, and I had a 50/50 shot of him using that leader. Unfortunately he didn’t! And I almost lost b/c if I had won that battle, the Bene Gesserit would’ve stolen my victory from me because they had made the prediction (at the beginning of the game per their faction power) that the Harkonnen would’ve won in Round 8.
We then played La Belle Epoque, a euro-ey cube-pushing wargame. In this game, Central Empires, France, Great Britain and Russia compete with each other to gain control of countries across Europe during the time between the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the start of World War I. The game continues for 9 turns, separated by 3 eras, in which the game could end anytime during the 3rd era with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
We all were learning La Belle Epoque together. It’s a cube-pushing euro-y wargame.
We then ran into Bobby Factor, and it was such a pleasure meeting him in person and gaming all week! He has so many hilarious stories, ones that he’ll love sharing if you ever end up at a convention with him.
These fun guys! From left, Dan, me, Cory Graham, Bobby Factor and Sobhi Youssef.
Aug. 29
Monday began with a game of Dominant Species: Marine. I love, love this game, and I think I played my best game yet! (I came in second, fyi, as the reptiles. Please cheer for me.) I love the worker-placement mechanism of this game, with the limitation that you can only place your worker on a space after your last one on the board, meaning you can’t take an action you’ve already passively skipped. But once dominate in an element, you take a special white pawn that allows you to break some of the worker-placement and unlock some extra action spaces, but most importantly, it allows you to take an extra action before you spend your turn recalling your workers off the board.
I love the Dominant Species: Marine’s board and color scheme.
I then played a prototype of Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India 1290-1398. One of the designers Cory Graham is local, and I had a great time gaming with him all week. This COIN-inspired game is so, so good, and I think will usher in a new wave of more accessible wargames. The game is currently on GMT’s P500, and it’s the first game of their new Irregular Conflict Series. Vijayanagara is a 3P game that plays out in about 2 hours, with little downtime for everyone. Players take on the roles of the Delhi Sultanate, the Bahmani Kingdom and the Vijayanagara Empire, and like a COIN game, there’s a deck of cards that determine which two factions can take a turn. But unlike a COIN, the third faction can take a limited command and is still eligible for the next turn. Plus, a good number of events on the cards make it appealing to take the event instead of a full command because it allows your faction to stay eligible, a new twist to other COINs. I can’t wait until this game comes out.
I really enjoyed playing Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India 1290-1398. I can’t wait until it’s out!
Aug. 30
Tuesday began with a quick game of Dan’s card game Bowie where you’re playing as four different David Bowie personas trying to stay alive while earning points for recording music. Meanwhile various threats, dark princes and figures of the occult going after them. If any of the Bowies die, everyone loses.
The Bowies must work together so one of them doesn’t get killed.
We then played Dan’s prototype of Blood and Treasure, a game about the U.S.-Afghan War and the contractors who would profit from it. Players are secretly bidding for market contracts but the trick is you want to bid lower than your opponents but enough so that you’ll receive the cash from your bid. That money can then be used to bid on other contracts but also gain extra pawns to take more actions. Your company will also need to diversify in various industries so that you can collect more contracts and put cubes on them so that when it’s inspection time, you won’t get penalized for non-activity on the contract. It’s an unflattering look at the U.S. government, a unique departure from your usual wargame themes.
I played a 3P game of Blood and Treasure, a game about American contractors during the U.S.-Afghan war.
Next up was Flashpoint: South China Sea. Harold Buchanan designed this game in the GMT Lunchtime Game series (games that can be played under an hour for two players). I had a chance to playtest this years ago at a previous Consimworld, and I’m so happy to see his design here on table! It’s another accessible wargame that borrows the card-driven game mechanism for its gameplay. Players take on the role of China vs. the U.S., and the game begins with secretly bidding VPs to go first. Players then place economic and diplomatic influence across various regions and countries in the South China Sea to score for VPs each round. I’ll be doing a more in-depth review of this game soon!
Flashpoint: South China Sea is 2P game that simulates the complex geopolitical contest currently taking place in the South China Sea.
I then played a quick game of Watergate. This is such a tense 2P game, also one that plays in under an hour. One player plays the side of a Washington Post Editor trying to connect Nixon to his informers, while Nixon is trying to hang onto his presidency and not be forced to resign. The cat-and-mouse feel of this game makes this game so good and enjoyable to play.
Watergate is so tense! Every small move could have giant consequences in this game.
Lastly, I ran a game of Battlestar Galactica, a tradition for Consimworld. This is my absolute favorite game and each game is so much fun, even if us humans lose! So say we all!
It was such a joy gaming with Harold Buchanan (left) and Bobby! My buddy Mark (back left) joined us for this game.
Aug. 31
On Wednesday, we played a game of Angola. I first learned this game last year (and it was one of my top games that I played in 2021) and have been looking forward to playing another game of it at this con.
Playing Angola a second time, I had a much better grasp on the game. But we still got outmaneuvered!
I played as the FNLA this time around, and it was nice not having to use the blank cards during your turn. I started out strong, getting lucky with the random start of most of my troops being in the north, but then I just got closed in on by FAPLA and by a few turns in, our side had lost the game. Still a great experience (it took most of late-morning to early evening), and I learned a thing or two about clipping chits.
A similar photo like this got roasted on Twitter because some of the chits were not clipped! The horror!
I then played the working prototype of Forward Ever by designer Sobhi Youssef. This game is set during the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and it’s a trick-taking game where you’re placing influence on the board.. We got through a couple rounds of the game before Sobhi took some notes from some of the players’ feedback.
We played Sobhi’s prototype for Forward Ever.
Sobhi is also designing After the Last Sky, set during first Palestinian Intifada from 1987-1993. I, unfortunately, didn’t get a chance to play his prototype. Hopefully I’ll get a chance next time we all meet again. There’s been talks to meet up at Harold’s convention in San Diego in November: San Diego Historical Con! I’ve already purchased my ticket for it. Looking forward to more wargaming then! I’ve only ever attended the convention online during the pandemic.
I’m hoping to get a chance to play After the Last Sky next time Sobhi and I are at the same convention.
By then, it was Wednesday evening. We all then thought we were going to do more gaming but instead winded down at a local Mexican place across the street from the hotel, partaking in food, drinks and great conversation. And that was a great ending to my time at Consimworld.
Cheers, Dan! We took a celebratory shot in honor of Dan’s birthday!
During the con, I played 16 games, 17 if you count Squaring Circleville the night before. The convention continued until the following Saturday, but I couldn’t stay the whole week because I had to get ready for another convention. (That post will also be coming down the pike). The only game I purchased during the convention was The Chase of the Bismark, designed by VUCA Simulations, which had a booth at the con.
There was a demo copy of this game during the con. It just looked so awesome!
I enjoyed playing all kinds of games: some new, some old, some under an hour and others that lasted a big chunk of my day. I met some lovely gamers and game designers, and learned more about design and the publishing process during my week with them. Thanks, Consimworld, for having me this year! It’s been a blast! See you next year!
It’s July and the summer is halfway over! The heat in Phoenix is getting to be unbearable (112 degree days, anyone?), and one way to combat the heat is by staying inside and playing board games. During the last week of June, my two friends flew to Phoenix to visit my friend and me so that we could host this year’s Friendship Con! I look forward to this week every year so that I can disconnect from work and just hang out and play games with friends for five days!
We love good swag here at Friendship Con. We got water canteens for everyone, plus a variety of stickers.
Wednesday
We kicked off gaming with QE! This has been my go-to short-ish game of late. The game is just bonkers because it’s essentially no-limit betting! Nations are secretly bidding on industry tokens, which are worth VPs and other points for set collection purposes, and the winner is the one with the most VPs. But if you’re the person who bid the most during the game, you’re immediately ineligible to win, despite possibly having the most VPs. It also has an element of hidden information because only the starting bidder on each turn can see everyone’s bid.
QE is a delightful game of no-limit bidding!
We then played a game of Container. I can never quite wrap my head around this economic simulation game, in which you’re building factories, producing goods, selling goods, storing goods, auctioning off goods and storing them on your island, but I always have a good time playing it! The trick is that you can’t really do any single of these things from your port (except build factories and produce goods), but instead they have to come from other player’s supply chains and warehouses. I also enjoy the auction element of this game: bidding on ships that get to the island, ships that you don’t always completely full of goods. The final score is also calculated based on a personalized secret objective card where goods are worth different points, but the goods that you have the most of are removed from scoring.
Shipping and bidding on goods in Container. Dang, those supply chain issues just get to you!
Wingspan was next. From its superb components (don’t you just want to chomp on those eggs like they’re filled with chocolate?) and engine-building game play, Wingspan never disappoints. And while I haven’t deluxified my game (other than a giant 3D printed bird that I use as the first-player marker), the game just feels so lux and fun to play with. There’s also something super satisfying about the combos and activating your birds, while learning all about them. I also enjoy that as the rounds progress, you’re left with fewer real actions, yet with the birds you have laid out in your tableau, it feels like you’re doing even more with each turn.
All the pretty birds — and some murder birds — in Wingspan.
We decided to continue the nature theme with a game of Cascadia. This puzzly tile-laying drafting game is always such a delight to play, even if the player to your right keeps taking your salmon tokens! It was one of the top 10 games I played in 2021, and every game is slightly different based on the random animal goals that are selected for each game. It’s gorgeous and easy to teach, and I can’t stop recommending this game to people!
The beauty of the Pacific Northwest is evident in the artwork of Cascadia.
We then took a quick break for dinner. I cooked a giant pot of chicken adobo. Yay! I’ve been trying to learn more Filipino recipes, so I’m glad everyone enjoyed this dish. We ate this over rice and had plenty for leftovers the next day.
Chicken adobo is a Filipino dish made chicken, garlic, soy sauce and vinegar, and served over rice. It’s yummy!
After dinner, we busted out Hello Kitty Monopoly. There is something super Boss Lady about asking your husband and three male gamer friends to play this adorable version of Monopoly, which actually ended up being really cut-throat because we played with the real rules. None of this Free Parking cash collection nonsense. I remarked during the game that its second half felt like the wheeling and dealing chaos of Sidereal Confluence, because we needed to make those monopolies to start bleeding our opponents dry. I loved the metal Hello Kitty character tokens, but for those who aren’t familiar with Sanrio, it was a little difficult to figure which piece was yours. Overall, the game was intense and it did eventually end (not like those games during childhood where everyone just got bored because it went on too long), but I was disappointed that I was never able to buy Hello Kitty’s Hotel (aka Boardwalk).
Hello Kitty Monopoly — all the characters may look cute but they will cut you for your property.
Thursday
Thursday was our D&D day. My friend has worked so hard at painting minis of our individual characters and setting up a game for us as DM. He also gave us sparkly dice to play with! My character was a monk tiefling named Sevi Olum, and she kicked so much butt!
Friendship Con swag also included these sparkly dice for each player for our D&D game.
Our group was Earth’s last hope against an alien invasion, and we worked hard to complete some adventures in a tavern, cave and the sinewy tendrils of a giant eyeball. Ewww! Despite my aversion to eyeballs in general (and not being familiar with too many D&D campaigns), I had a good time with my friends!
The minis are painted, and ready for battle and to save the planet!
We ended our Friday with Just One. Last year, we played a lot of Just One, and I was especially amused that a lot of our inside jokes carried over from those games. It’s truly one of the best party games I’ve ever encountered, and it plays up to seven people.
Just One is a guaranteed good time!
Friday
We started Friday morning by playing Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition, but changed it up by adding the Prophecy of Kings expansion. Since we had never played this expansion before, we dealt out three characters from the expansion to each person and chose one to play. This expansion adds mech leaders with some special abilities. I chose the Naaz-Rokha Alliance, which basically looked like space cats with monkey aliens on their backs.
These space cats look so intimidating!
Our game lasted about 7 hours, which is quite speedy! The game randomly ended though during Agenda, which gave one player 1 VP to put him at 10! We all got thrown off by the agenda card, but the game was close anyway between him and another guy.
The most epic of board games: Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition!
After dinner, we played Battlestar Galactica, one of my absolute favorite games ever! I will only play the base game and with 5P, so we enlisted our friend to come over to run the game. I can’t tell you how much I love this game: the paranoia, the semi-cooperativeness, and the fear of secretly being activated halfway in sleeper phase to become a cylon. It’s always such a great experience, no matter if you win or lose, and especially if I get to play as Helo (which I did!). Unfortunately, us humans did not win this time!
Sadly, us humans could not fight off the cylons. But my man Helo is still looking fine.
We ended Friday night with a 3P game of Dune: Imperium. I’ve been enjoying this worker-placement deck builder the most I play it and wish that more games have this combination of mechanisms. The Lost Ruins of Arnak is the only other game that feels similar to this one! Are there other deck builder worker placements that you can think of?
The more times I play Dune: Imperium, the more I’m liking it!
Saturday
We started Saturday with Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile. I love, love the adorable artwork and quality components of this game but honestly, something about the chaos of a game in which you need to hang on to your win condition until the start of the next round drives me bonkers. I do enjoy the exploration of the action spaces of the game and moving around the board, but I’ve come to accept that Oath is just not for me. And that’s totally fine! We like what we like!
The gorgeous board and world-building in Oath is top-notch.
I then taught a game of Project L. If you want to learn more about Project L, check out my latest segment on The Five By Episode 123. Project L is a neat engine-builder puzzle where you’re using Tetris pieces to complete cards with puzzles on it for VPs and/or more puzzle pieces. The more cards you solve, the more pieces you’ll have to tackle even bigger puzzles that are worth more points.
In Project L, you complete the puzzle cards in order to gain VPs and even more pieces.
I then learned how to play Tranquility, a cooperative card game where you work together by putting a card down so that cards fall in ascending order — in silence! This was such a neat yet mildly stressful game because you have to figure out which cards you need to save in your hand to play, or which ones you can discard. If you discard the wrong cards, you and everyone else will get backed into a corner in the display and will be unable to complete the objective. What a fun filler! We actually played this twice because we did badly the first go-around, and we won in our second game!
Tranquility: a silent game of card-counting.
Next, we played Shipwreck Arcana, a deduction and logic game in which players are trying to figure out which fates (numbered chits 1-7) are in your hand while placing drawn fates onto logic cards that can help others figure out which fates are in your hand. I liked the dedication aspect of this game, which reminds me of those logic puzzles growing up.
This logic game relies on placing the correct fates under a card so others can guess which fates you have.
After that, we played Long Shot: The Dice Game. This roll-and-write captures the chaos and excitement of a day at the races. Horses move along the track with each dice roll, and players can choose to bet on horses, buy horses, or collect bonuses. It’s seriously a lot of fun, and even though it’s not your turn, you’re still highly invested in how the race is going and making decisions to win the most money.
Which horse will cross the finish line first? It’s anyone’s guess in Long Shot: The Dice Game.
For dinner, we ordered some Korean corn dogs for dinner from Two Hands, since these things aren’t readily available on the East Coast. Behold!
Korean corndogs have some crazy combinations such as spicy dogs and potato dogs.
The last game of the night was Alea Iacta Est, a dice worker placement game. I honestly hadn’t heard of this game before, and, despite its goofy 2000s Roman art, I really enjoyed this! Alea Iacta Est is Latin for “The Die is Cast,” and players are using their dice to conquer new provinces and recruit patricians for those provinces. I also thought it was hilarious that unused dice end up in the latrina.
The artwork on this game just takes me back to the 2000s in board gaming.
Saturday night was the last night we were all together gaming. One guy had to fly back home on Sunday, while the fourth guy was flying back on Monday. Here we are very chipper after long days of gaming!
These guys are the best! One guy from Atlanta couldn’t make it this year. Hopefully he’ll join us in 2023.
Sunday
We began Sunday with a quick 2P game of The Field of the Cloth of Gold. It’s incredibly tense, and the passive-aggressive gift-gifting is just so amusing to me! The game plays in about 20 minutes, and it’s perfect to bust out when you have a small pocket of time.
A gift for me means a gift for you!
My friend who was still in town and I did some thrifting looking for board game deals and books at various second-hand stores throughout the Valley. My big scores for the day were Pipeline, Kraftwagen and Star Cartel. I’m very excited to try out Pipeline next game day!
My friend also wanted to try Sonoran hot dogs, something of a specialty here in Arizona. A Sonoran hot dog is a hot dog that is wrapped in bacon and grilled, topped with pinto beans, onions, tomatoes, and a variety of additional condiments, often including mayonnaise, mustard, and jalapeño salsa.
You can’t see it underneath the sauce but those hot dogs are indeed wrapped in bacon.
After that, we drove to my friend’s house to play Alien Frontiers, another dice worker-placement game! It’s a game of resource management and planetary development, where you roll your dice and place them on various action spots on the board. You can unlock new technologies as you control locations on the planet as well as by gaining technology cards. This was the first time I had played this game, and I actually won! But I think I got some practice the night before from learning Alea Iacta Est. Apparently, manipulating dice pips to take action spots is my jam!
It was my first time playing Alien Frontiers, and I won!
In true Friendship Con fashion, we then played a game of Glory to Rome, with Imperium rules, and our game was so ruthless! I built the forum, which required me to have every type of card in my clientele for a victory, and my alleged friend kept preventing me from doing that. Good times though!
Rome demands all the things!
And lastly, the final game of Friendship Con was another play of Dune Imperium. It was really nice ending our convention with a game I’m very familiar with.
And just like that, five days came and went so quickly! Thanks for making it all the way down here. I played a total of 20 games, sprinkled in with endless snacks, mostly home-cooked meals, and lots of catching up with my dear friends. Last year’s Friendship Con was in Atlanta, and I hope they had as great of a time coming out here to the Valley of the Sun as I did going there in 2021. And with that, we sail into the second half of summer, hoping the weather will cool down, even just a wee bit. Like seriously, I will gladly take 105 degrees here in Phoenix. What are some of your summer plans?
Do you like wargames, whether COINs or the hex-and-counter variety? Well, you need to come down to Consimworld! This 8-day wargaming convention happens every year in Tempe, Arizona, literally in my very own backyard. I love attending this convention every year it allows me to play some games that normally wouldn’t come out at other conventions, plus I get to hang out with some of the wargaming legends!
Look at all that cardboard, plexiglass and chits! Gaming is officially underway.
Consimworld was June 22-29. Sorry for the delay of this post; it’s been a whirlwind few weeks. Consimworld is located at Tempe Mission Palms, and the location is so convenient. You don’t need a car as the hotel provides a shuttle to the airport, or you can take the light rail to it. The best part too is that there are plenty of food options in walking distance. (I’m giving a lot of other conventions the side-eye here.)
I arrived on Day 1 and learned to play Maria with my buddy Dan flew into town from Milwaukee. This 3P game is so freakin’ awesome! It’s set during the War of the Austrian Succession. One player is Austria, the second player is France and Bavaria, and the third plays as Prussia and the Pragmatic Army. Each army has their own set of cards, and armies battle each other based on the suit of the location they’re fighting from. You have to manage your card hand, as well as ensuring your troops are still within range from their supply line. I really want to get a copy of this game!
Maria is such a great game! It’s a 3P wargame, where battles are resolved based on the suited cards your hand and which suitted terrain you’re sitting on.
Dan then showed me his game that’s he’s working on. It’s an Age of Sails wargame that plays in about 2-3 hours set during the Battle of Virginia Capes, a crucial naval battle during the American Revolutionary War. One player plays as the French, and the other as the British, and they move and position their boats along a checkered board (in accordance with the wind direction), and they take turns battling each other. You then both secretly decide which order your ships will fire, and you roll dice to fire upon your enemy.
Dan always has the fanciest prototypes! Here are the ships battling each other out at sea.
Hit points are marked on individual boat cards and designated to an area on your boat based on your opponent’s directive, which makes for interesting player decisions of how to allocate damage. If your boat can no longer move, then it’s removed from the game. The French are trying to last 12 rounds — which killing British ships shortens the game — while the British are trying to move up a track by destroying French ships. The game was tense and super fun, and I liked being able to allocate where on my enemy’s boat they should mark the damage. (It’s like a wargame roll-and-write!) I’m crossing my fingers that it gets picked up by a publisher.
Dan created these ship cards that you mark you hit points on with a dry-erase pen. If your ship can no longer move, it’s out of the game.
Next up was Fire in the Lake. The last time I played Fire in the Lake was at last year’s Consimworld. Man, I was so rusty! And the last few times I had played as the NVA (because I like red), but this time, I played as the VC for the first time, and it took me a bit to start terrorizing and spreading out my VC guerrillas. This game lasted way late into the night, and we had to call it. It looked like the Americans were winning.
Fire in the Lake has the most vibrant board and is one of my favorite COIN games.
Day 2 began early by cracking open Gandhi. Fire in the Lake ended so late on Saturday night that it was a quick turnaround for a 9 a.m. game of Gandhi, one I had briefly looked over the rulebook, but luckily another player read the rulebook as well, and we all decided it was going to be a learning game that morning.
Gandhi is the latest COIN game from GMT Games.
I had been excited to see how a nonviolent factions play out for a COIN, and was equally surprised to see that two of the factions do not have any currency. The British Raj’s actions are tied to the Restraint track, and the Revolutionaries’ actions costs resources. I played as the British and particularly liked being able to affect how much my actions cost. I plan to write more about this after a few more games under my belt. All I can say is this: Gandhi is a great COIN and seems more accessible than the other ones. Here’s me playing Gandhi:
— Harold Buchanan 🔜 Gen Con (@HBuchanan2) June 23, 2019
I then played the first of many games of Pax Pamir (second edition) this convention. Oh. My. Goodness. Love at first play! I’ve played Pax Porfiriana and Pax Renaissance before, and while I enjoyed both of them a lot, the game ALWAYS seemed to take so much longer to explain than the actual game itself. And especially with Pax Porfiriana, it was difficult to visualize and keep track of who is dominating what.
Look at these amazing components! Pax Pamir is really well done.
That’s not the case with this second edition of Pax Pamir. The added map and individual player dials make this game much, much easier to see which faction is dominating. The components are gorgeous, and each game I’ve played of this has been different. There are just so many cards, and I ended up playing this game two more times during the course of the convention. I played it as a 3P and as a 5P. I think Pax Pamir plays best at 4P, even though I did end up winning my 5P game.
I absolutely cannot get enough of Pax Pamir! I wish I owned a copy of this game.
Saturday night ended with another awesome game of Battlestar Galactica. This is the second year in a row I’ve played with Dan, Mike, Harold and Jordan. We even got Kurt into the mix! These guys are always so much fun! I became a cylon sympathizer during sleeper, and despite two cylons and me as the sympathizer, we still lost to those awful humans. The worst!
These guys are so much fun! I look forward to avenging my loss next year!
I took a day off on Day 3 since it was a Monday. I played a quick game of Sekigahara, and by quick it was about 2 hours. The game continued through all seven weeks and came down to victory points. I love this game so much!
My favorite part of Sekigahara is the hidden info of which armies are going toward you.
I then played my other two games of Pax Pamir at the various player counts. I then got a chance to play Rococo. It’s a shame that this game isn’t more widely available! It’s a deckbuilder about making dresses. Players collect materials at various locations on the board, and ultimately, it’s an area control game in regards to where you display your dresses and coats. The game plays out over seven rounds.
Making dresses in Rococo can be cut-throat!
In the middle of Rococo was the welcome ceremony. John Kranz took time to welcome everyone and give expo updates. Altogether, over 350 people had signed up, with more than 60 newcomers. Very cool! He also highlighted those who came from afar — some as far as the Philippines and Bahrain! That’s super neat to see people travel for all the wargames!
Everyone’s all gathered! John Kranz likes to give updates about the convention, and there’s a giant raffle at the end of this meeting as well!
One slide featured a nice tribute to my buddy Tom Wells. I miss gaming with him; there was never a dull moment gaming with him.
I finished Monday night with another tense game of Maria! My buddy Mark and I did better this time, but Dan still beat us. (It’s one of his favorite games, after all.)
Dan and Mark are too much fun! Dan and I are heading to SD Historical Con in November. I’m looking forward to that!
The rest of the week I worked during the day but I stopped by afterwards to get in a game or two. On Tuesday night, I got a chance to play a prototype of Barrage. What a clever eurogame with very specific spatial and timing quality to it! You are all companies trying to harness the power of water to get electricity. You have to build dams, conductors and power factories on this hill so that you can capture that energy as water flows down.
There’s an intricate network of how things need to be powered, and when you spend resources to build your buildings, they’re locked up on this wheel on your personal board, and they can only become available to you again when you build more buildings, which you probably won’t be able to do since your resources are tied up in this wheel! What a dilemma! You can, however, spend actions on this main board to move that wheel along. The main board is where the majority of the worker placement happens.
Stuff rolls downhill! Here are are trying to harness the power of water, and hoping someone’s dam doesn’t get in your damn way.
Each player has a team of engineers, and you can allocate however many you want to an action spot when it’s your turn. Players take turns placing their engineers until they’re have no more workers and must pass. So you need to manage your pool of engineers with the actions you want to do, while also trying to complete objectives during each round. Lastly, the last piece of the puzzle is that water isn’t always available each round. It will flow according to the cards drawn, and if someone else’s dam blocks water flow to your buildings, well, that’s a damn shame.
On Wednesday, I fangirled sooooooo hard. I got a chance to sit in as the awesome Mark Herman taught one of his games, Pericles: The Peloponnesian War to John Butterfield, Nick Karp and Bruce. They all go way back to Victory Games, and it was like being among the wargaming legends.
Here’s me being chill, even though I’m fangirling so hard inside.
Mark taught one round of Pericles, and I jumped into a second round, (holding my own I might add!) and pushing the Demogogues forward. It was great hanging out with them and hearing about old industry stories. Also, achievement unlocked below: my dinosaur dress got into a C3i report!
The last night I attended Consimworld, I played Root twice, first with Kurt and Jordan, and then we picked up a fourth player for our second game. Kurt LOVES, LOVES Root (and if you want to be highly entertained, next time you see Kurt at a convention, ask him about COIN games.)
Our first game of Root that evening. I won as the cats!
And just like that, an entire week of wargaming ended. I always have such a great time at Consimworld, and I always feel included among all the gamers here. That said, I’d love to see more younger folks here, especially more women and people of color. If you’re interested in these types of games, please let me know and maybe we can schedule something special for next year. I’d love a chance to teach some of these heavy games! Save the date: next year’s convention will be June 6-13, 2020. You’ll find me in the back with some giant tweezers pushing some cardboard chits.
Thanks for having me, Consimworld! Can’t wait until next year’s con!
Holy forkballs! It’s December already! Where did November go? Man, it’s been a busy, fun, amazing few weeks, and now that I’ve had some to come up for air, let’s talk about all the gaming I did at BGG.
This is my fifth consecutive BGG Con, and my fourth year volunteering for Team Geek. If you’re on Team Geek, you work eight 2-hour shifts throughout the course of the convention. And you get to do so in a sweet, sweet jersey. There’s also a volunteer dinner the Tuesday night before the convention so you can meet and hang out with fellow volunteers before the con gets underway on Wednesday. Here’s a photo of Team Geek from Jenny, who is also on team Geek:
I arrived in Dallas on Tuesday morning, had a wonderful breakfast with an old Phoenix friend at Yolk. What an adorable breakfast place, and my skillet was hearty and tasty. I was pleasantly surprised that they had an option for turkey sausage, considering I’m in the heart of Texas, where everything is all about other meats that I don’t eat.
I arrived at the Hyatt Regency at DFW after breakfast, checked in, took a quick nap (don’t judge — I flew out of Phoenix at 5:30 a.m.), and started volunteer shifts. As a veteran Teek Geek member, I got the first selection on volunteer shifts, so I was able to knock out three of my shifts on Tuesday before our welcome dinner of Mexican food. Yums!
Julie was leading volunteers on Tuesday who had signed up to work that day. Jon of JonGetsGames stopped by to help, too!
After dinner, we got our badges and free games, one of which was a sweet Everdell glass pint, and started gaming! First up was Teotihuacan: City of Gods, which was high on my to-play list for BGG. Kevin Russ, who I had met at RinCon two months prior, taught us how to play, and man, do I love this game!
Teotihuacan was my favorite game of BGG Con this year.
In Teotihuacan, each player is a powerful noble family working to build the temple of Teotihuacan. You’re using your workforce of dice to move around the board like a giant rondel. Depending on the value of your dice, you receive various resources at each location, and then at the end of your turn, your dice levels up.
The board looks incredibly intimidating but the iconography is clear in terms of what rewards you’ll receive at each location, and game play, in my opinion, is pretty straightforward. Making the most of those actions is much more difficult.
As with its predecesor Tzolk’in, the game is a lot about timing your actions correctly. Instead of the giant wheel cogs in Tzolk’in, the game is all about moving your dice in a way so that it levels up at the right moment, so that you can get resources to build temple steps and gain technology, among other things. Dice are moving in one direction in order to ascend to 6 pips, and then you get a reward and start over again at one location. Can’t wait until my game group gets of a copy of this game!
Next up, I learned and played Catch the Moon for the first time from Eric. I can’t say enough great things about this darling game. It’s one of the few games I purchased at BGG Con because I immediately fell in love with it. And true story: Eric is really good and mean at this game!
Catch the Moon is darling! Don’t mess up and make the moon cry!
Besides it being just adorable to look at, this dexterity game is easy enough for people to jump into and interesting enough to keep even the heaviest of gamers engaged. On your turn, you roll a die, and you place a ladder onto the cloud either touching one other ladder, two other ladders, or it has to be the highest point on the cloud platform. If you make ladders fall, the moon gets super sad and you receive a teardrop. If you get the last teardrop, the game ends and you’re eliminated, and the person with the fewest teardrops wins the game.
Getting some pre-con gaming in with Netters, Mitch, Eric, Daniel, Kimberly and Sum Fat Kid.
I then played Tokyo Jidohanbaiki, which is a game about Japanese vending machines and drinks. It’s a little — literally, teeny tiny — game where place your smol soda bottles on drink crates and not have them explode, but also when you choose for them to explode, you can wipe out your opponents.
Look at these teeny tiny soda cans!
Wednesday
Today was the first day of the convention. I worked two shifts at registration, which I love doing. I love greeting folks and seeing everyone’s excited and happy faces on Day 1.
I then met up with some Arizona folks to play some games before dinner that evening. I got a chance to play Meeple Circus for the first time. That game is a riot, and the circus soundtrack adds a nice touch for this game. I’m not normally a fan of adding apps or tech to board games, but this was stupid fun. I mean, who doesn’t love stacking meeples in a dexterity race while circus music is playing in the background?
Stacking meeples and animals in real time in Meeple Circus, which has its own circus soundtrack.
We then all went out to dinner to a vegan restaurant called Spiral Diner. This was all of our first time visiting this place, and, even though it’s quite a haul from the Hyatt Regency, it’s definitely worth checking out.
It’s Greg Dickson of Hooked on Geek, Andrew, Dr. GloryHogg and GloryHoundd!
I ordered an El Paso burger with a cashew patty and pistachio ice cream for dessert. Both were super yum and tasted like what I would normally eat as a non-vegan.
I ordered a cashew-based patty for my El Paso burger.
I had to try the pistachio ice cream. Excellent!
We then arrived back at the hotel to teach my favorite game to run at a convention: Sidereal Confluence. I enjoy having a large amount of people playing this game since it makes for a better economy, and luckily, seven people signed up to play. And I know live negotiation games aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, or that maybe I’m not even the best teacher of it, but I do enjoy sharing this game with others as I feel like it’s not a game that would normally get on table on a regular game day.
Sidereal Confluence is a table hog! I also love using my giant tweezers in the game.
I then ran across Eric teaching Eco Links, which is another real-time path-building game in which you’re trying to connects animals through a path. Even though the game is light, it reminded me of playing an 18xx because you’re playing these tiles on a board and looking for that sharp curve.
Eco Links is a real-time tile-laying, road-building game where players connect all the bears.
Thursday
On Thursday, I woke up early (for me) to game with Moe and play Fort Sumter at 9:30 a.m. Fort Sumter is a 2-player card-driven game that pits the Unionist and Secessionist player against each other. The game plays for 25-40 minutes, and takes place over three rounds and ends with a Final Crisis confrontation.
Here’s Moe teaching me to how to play Fort Sumter early Thursday morning.
Similar to other CDGs like Twilight Struggle, players have a hand of cards and play them for events or action points. What’s different about this game, besides it taking a fraction of the time of a game of Twilight Struggle, is that in each round, you get a secret objective that you’re playing toward for extra victory points.
Fort Sumter plays in 25-40 minutes, and it’s a tense CDG!
I enjoyed the push and pull of this game, and that escalation of the game as more cubes come into play. This game is part of the GMT Lunchtime Games series, strategic games designed for the lunch hour. It’s a great game to play if you’re interested in learning how to play a card-driven game and don’t have an entire half-day to play.
Next up was lunch with Netters and Mitch, and then Netters taught me The Estates. Jeremy and @fencedingates also joined in on the game. This game is right up my alley! It involves bidding and blocking people, and is all kinds of mean! You are bidding to build pieces to place along three different streets, and any incomplete streets will score negative points in the end. Players can also dictate how long the game will go, and I love the closed economy of it.
Netters did a great job teaching this game. I enjoyed the bidding and just hanging out with all these cool folks. I wish Netters and Mitch lived closer to me!
I then taught this game I had heard about on Tuesday from JonGetsGames: Eye My Favorite Things. This game can be a tad absurd but it’s fun with the right folks. You pick a category for the person on your right, and they write down their top 5 items for that category and rank them, as well as something they hate in that category and rank them as a zero. Then you get the cards they wrote on, and then it becomes a trick-taking game based on what you think they ranked all the items they wrote on their cards. You do this three times, and then the person with the most VPs wins the game. It’s a game that compares random categories like soup, world problems, board games and ice cream flavors altogether.
Eye My Favorite Things was the biggest surprise of BGG Con!
I then met up with some friends at a meetup for female content contributors and their friends. Netters and I organized one last year and it was a nice refuge from the hustle and bustle of the main convention floor, and it gave people a chance to get to know each other in a smaller setting. The two games I played were — yep you guessed it — Catch the Moon and Eye My Favorite Things.
Oh, hai, friends! A great time was had by all!
FridayF
I started my Friday with a lovely game of Coimbra with these cool folks, Joe, Julie and Chris. I absolutely adore this game, and, even though I’m completely horrible at it, I’m always down to play it. It was a wonderful way to start my morning.
Coimbra is soooo good! So many tough decisions and working hard to make all your character cards work well together.
Chris and I then went to meet Jason and Donna Dinger for lunch, and Jason taught us Ground Floor, designed by David Short. In Ground Floor, you’re the CEO of a company, and you have to manage hiring new employees, expanding your office and scheduling your shipments. In addition, you’re literally building floors into your office building. That was a neat visual component to the game! The game plays for about two hours, and man, you quickly start running out of actions and can’t do everything you want to. I had a great time playing this!
Each player has their own board, which you start to build out for your company.
Jason then taught us another game, The King of Frontier. It’s one of his favorite games, and he managed to secure a copy of the first edition, since the new one has been completely revamped with a completely different aesthetic. I mean, who doesn’t want to play a game with these stick figures?
This little stick-figure guy is ready to build his lan, and do some funky dance moves, too.
It’s a neat tile-laying game that has a follow mechanism, and you’re building out a little kingdom and collecting resources on your player mat. Jason showed me photos of what the new edition looks like, and I think it has lot a lot of its charm with the new art.
I then attended a meetup from the Inside Voices Network. I played Wangdo with a different Eric and Chris. It’s a cute little area-control game where you draw bears from a bag in order to place them on the board. But you can only place a bear when you have the appropriate colored bears matching the spots surrounding that location. There are also cards you can play to benefit yourself or hurt an opponent, and the game is a race to collect all the tokens.
Wangdo is a fun quick area control, set collection bear game.
And the bear pieces look like yummy gummy bears.
Squee! These cute bears are not candy though.
Next, we played a prototype that Chris was demo-ing called Hour Town by LO5 Games. This game is a real-time worker-placement game where you collect resources to build buildings, some of which are multiple levels tall. And there’s also an area-control element in which you contributed the most resources toward a building. I like the up and down frantic-ness of this game, which lasts about 20 minutes. I hope this game gets published!
Hour Town is a fun prototype that Chris taught Eric and me. Sand timers galore!
I then played a game of Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra. I was a little skeptical about this game, mostly that it was relying too much on being gorgeous and like how could it be better than Azul, which was one of the top games I played in 2017.
I didn’t think it was possible to make Azul tiles look more like candy, but here we are!
The verdict is that this sequel is worth playing! It changes up gameplay to make it more puzzly, and more importantly, it’s a fixed amount of rounds. You’re working to complete vertical columns, and there’s an added element where you only score columns to the right of the pawn. Thus scoring can ramp up if you build your window in the right order. I enjoyed that extra elements to the game. And it comes with this little cardboard box to discard pieces in it, which makes it easier to pour back into the bag. I don’t need both copies though. One should suffice in your game collection.
I ended Friday night with my usual BGG Friday Night Shenanigans by playing Yummy Monster and Coconuts with my girlfriends.
My girlfriends and I are ready to feed the monsters! Now where’s the food items?
Yummy Monster is a flinging dexterity game in which each player is feeding a monster. Each player wears a mask over their face and slides cardboard claws onto their hands, and you throw pieces of food into the monster’s mouth, which is depicted as one of four walls you set up in the game box. It’s super ridiculous, but we had a lot of fun.
And of course, we love Coconuts. So much shenanigans.
Fun fact: the longer we play this game, the worse we become at it. How does that happen?
Saturday
Saturday began with seeing some sun (even though it was freezing outside) when Rand, who is originally from Dallas, invited us and took a car-load of us to his favorite BBQ joint Lockhart. The place is a tad farther from the convention, but definitely worth checking out if you have access to a vehicle. The meat was tasty, and there wasn’t a 40-minute wait for the meats, which is the case when we go out to Hard Eight This place is casual, homey and right in the middle of the Dallas arts district.
Amid the chowing down of the meats, I completely forgot to take a table photo of what we ate. But trust me, guys, this place was yum!
Saturday gaming began with Rescue Polar Bears. I’ve already been bracing myself for this game because everyone has been telling me how hard it is, and when you lose, these little guys die.
Please save my polar bear family!
This game is a co-op action-point-allowance game where you’re trying to save the polar bears before all the ice melts. Brutal! But these components are just darling, and they make you super motivated to try to win the game by getting polar bears onto your boat and helicoptering them away!
We gotta rescue the polar bears before all the ice melts!
Saturday night was closing ceremonies. This is always a great time because so many game prizes were awarded! One year, I’ll totally win a prize package.
The main ballroom is packed for closing ceremonies. People want to win games!
I then unknowingly started a new tradition with my friends: teaching Battlestar Galactica immediately after closing ceremonies. This is my absolute favorite game, and I love teaching it to new people. I played this with Greg, Chris, GloryHoundd and DrGloryHogg. It’s my third year in a row that I’ve done this on the Saturday night at the convention.
All of our happy faces before the cylons tried to take over. Those dirty toasters!
GloryHoundd even had this shirt on, which I totally should’ve guessed she was the cyclon. She later revealed she was, after DrGloryHogg brigged her and Chris. DrGloryHogg has no reason to brig Chris but Chris ended up being the other cylon. Good job, humans!
GloryHoundd was absolutely the cylon.
The final game of BGG Con for me was Iki. The game is based in Edo, Japan, where artisans, street vendors and professionals are setting up shop. Players move their meeples along the city like a rondel. There’s also a track showing how protected your stores are from fire, and that determines the order for choosing how many spaces you want to move in the next round and the order to purchase character cards. This entire game has many clever elements! And some of the Japanese professionals are charming and based on historical writings.
When you do business with shop owners, you get resources and the shop owners gain experience. Timing also plays a large role because as shop owners maximize their experience, they move off the board and into your personal supply. So you might be expecting some resources, but another player has triggered your shop owner to be removed from the board. Iki is such a hidden gem, and I’m super sad that I can’t find a copy of it that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
And then just like that, six days came and went, and it was time to return to Phoenix, which was Chris’ first time visiting. Every year I say that I had an excellent time at BGG, and this year is no exception. It’s my one giant con for the year, and it’s truly an amazing experience hanging out and gaming with people I call my friends, even though they live all across the U.S. This year’s BGG was particularly special for me. Board-game Twitter just brings people together, you know?
I miss all these cool people and many others who had left by Saturday night! Can’t wait until we can all game again!
Anywho, if you’re interested in going to BGG Con next year, it’ll be moving to a bigger location in downtown Dallas, which means more tickets will be on sale! Staying at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Dallas will result in access to restaurants and nearby attractions, something I’m very much looking forward to. Because, man, does it get expensive uber-ing out of DFW to get some good grub.
If you made it all the way here, thanks for reading about my experience at BGG Con! I hope everyone is having a wonderful December!
It’s been two weeks since Consimworld (I had an LA trip in between since so I apologize for the write-up delay), and all I want to do is play more wargames! Consimworld, short for conflict simulation, is a wargame convention that lasts for eight days in Tempe, Arizona. You need eight days, because some of those games take literally three days to play!
I was lucky enough to be a special guest at the convention, now in its 18th year. I went the entire first weekend, and each day after I got off of work for the rest of the week. I got a lot of gaming in, folks! And of course, it was great seeing out-of-town friends and hanging out.
The front of the gorgeous Tempe Mission Palms, my home away from home for a week.
The convention is super informal; there isn’t a sign-up sheet for gaming. Instead, there’s an Excel file online and you can contact people who have expressed interest in playing a specific game. The only events scheduled are the Mega Games, which require official participation since they take a few days to play. There are also nightly seminars, a large flea market and an auction at the end of the week. I got an excellent deal for Thurn and Taxis at $20!
Consimworld is held at the Tempe Mission Palms, which is right off Mill Avenue in downtown Tempe. That means plenty of food options within walking distance and convenient light-rail access. Pretty darn sweet.
It was great seeing Harold Buchanan (center), of the San Diego area, and Dan Bullock, who is from Milwaukee.
My buddy Dan Bullock, designer of No Motherland Without, came into town and we started the first day by playing Pax Porfiriana, Churchill and John Company. I ended up losing Churchill on the die roll because I was 17 points ahead. It was a fun experience though as we played all 10 rounds, which was my first time playing the long scenario.
I ALMOST won Churchill as FDR in our long scenario. Alas, that die roll.
Harold Buchanan, podcaster and game designer of Liberty of Death, taught us the John Company. I ended up playing this game twice during the convention — first as a 6P and then as a 5P. I liked the experience much more as a 5P. John Company is so bonkers! There’s a lot of randomness in the game, but I’ve come to appreciate that at its heart, it’s a negotiation game moreso than an economic game, which is what I had originally thought it was going into the first game. I ended up winning my second game with zero points. ZERO?!?
Should we let the company burn? But I need to retire first! And watch out for that elephant. John Company is all kinds of bonkers.
Day 2 of Consimworld started with Fire in the Lake, my favorite COIN game from GMT Games. I’m most familiar with this war compared with the other COINs I’ve played, and the board is just gorgeous.
I love using my giant tweezers to pick up cubes.
Dan then picked up a copy of The Big Push, a new game from Hollandspiele, and he cracked it open and learned how to play the game right on the spot! I don’t think I could ever do that; the pressure would be so huge that I’d completely mess up a first play.
The Big Push is the newest game from Hollandspiele, who were at the convention selling games and gave a presentation.
The Big Push is a 2P World War I strategic card game in which you program your cards along various battle areas on the board, and resolve them. The order by which you resolve battles matters, and depending on which cards you play, you can add to your attack or defense value with leftover cards in your hands. Lots of tough decisions about timing and card play in a game that played in about 90 minutes. I’m still kicking myself for not picking up a copy. I did purchase Supply Lines of the American Revolution though!
Lots of tough decisions about where card placement, and if that battle is attacking or defending. Crunchy!
Dan, Harold and I then finished Day 2 with a game of play Battlestar Galactica, my favorite! I ended up being a cylon this time. One guy was being super shifty, so Harold brigged him and I became the CagMiral (Cag and Admiral). I was able to just let resources die down for the cylons to cruise into victory. It was marvelous!
About 270 people attended Consimworld, held at the same hotel for the past 18 years. There were 54 newcomers this year. Some attendees even came in as far as New Zealand and Japan!
I arrived on Day 3 after getting off work. I attended the Welcome Reception, where I learned that the convention has been going strong for 18 years! Even more impressive was that there were a group of folks who had attended every single year. The organizer, John Krantz, is now based out of Texas but used to live in Phoenix when he first started the convention and has kept it at the same location since its inception. Which is awesome for me as a local gamer! The reception also raffled off a lot of games!
Here’s me with John Krantz, organizer extraordinaire of Consimworld.
Dan and I also got a chance to play Flashpoint: South China Sea, Harold’s new game. Flashpoint is a 2P card-driven game that pits China and the U.S. in the hotly-contested area of the South China Sea. The Chinese player works to influence countries while the U.S. is works to maintain influence in the region and keep China in check. Meanwhile, tensions between the two countries can escalate through events and actions that take place.
We’re about to play Harold’s Flashpoint: South China Sea. And Tom Russell hung out with us, too!
The game takes place over four rounds in under 60 minutes, and Dan and I had the chance to play the prototype. At the start of each round, a new crisis card is flipped and the text is triggered. Each player then draws up to a hand size of seven event cards and selects a card to bid for initiative. On each event card, there’s a number for action points as well as an event. When bidding for initiative, the event does not trigger, and the person with the higher number on the selected card is the winner. The winner then gets to decide who goes first.
Here’s the prototype board for Flashpoint: South China Sea.
Players then take turns going back and forth playing a card and taking actions based on the action points on the card. In this phase, no matter what, the event always triggers first, and the text is supposed to be taken literally. Dan and I had to get out of the mindset, a la Twilight Struggle, that the event will only affect you negatively. Some of the event cards will say something like “Chinese remove 1 Economic influence from Vietnam,” which means that the Chinese player can remove either the U.S. or Chinese influence cube from the board. (They will likely remove their opponent’s cube, unless there aren’t any left. In that case, then they have to remove one of their own cubes.)
A sampling of the event cards for Flashpoint. The event always triggers first for this game.
After the round ends, countries are scored based on majorities, and players have the option to add add cubes from the Political Warfare track to boost majority. I really enjoyed playing Flashpoint! There’s so much tension in a relatively short game, making hard decisions about the order to play your cards or forgoing an action you had originally planned to instead reduce the Tension track so you can put influence cubes back on the map. Plus, it plays so quickly in 60 minutes, so every majority and VP matter. I can’t wait until this game comes out!
On Day 4, I attended an evening seminar from Hollandspiele. Tom talked about how he and Mary started the company, and how using a print-on-demand business model allowed them to enter the board-game publishing company. Thus, in having their own company, they can publish the idiosyncratic wargames that they want to.
Here’s me with Tom and Mary Russell, who are Hollandspiele. It was lovely meeting them and seeing how they work so well together.
On Day 5, I played The Grizzled twice and learned how to play Cataclysm: A Second World War. It’s a recent release from GMT Games, and the “learning round” took 2 hours to play. The game uses a chit-pulling mechanism, in which your flags and operations are placed into a cup or put on an initiative track. Play is determined by which chit is pulled, or if you’d like to use an interrupt with your chit on an initiative track.
One of GMT Games’ latest releases is Cataclysm. It’s a very long game, my friends.
I then spent the next two nights playing this game, and we only got to Round 5. The first two rounds breezed by, but by Round 3, whenever you do an action that’s next to another power, they get a flag that’s placed into the cup. So then the length of these future rounds exponentially gets longer as more and more chits need to be pulled from the cup. The box says the game lasts for 90-600 minutes. I believe that!
The Cataclysm maps usually go side by side, but we placed them this way because we were on a round table. So many chits!
On Day 6, I stopped by the room where Mr. President was on display. I sat with Gene Billingsley, Rick and Tom as they playtested a scenario for the upcoming title from GMT Games. Mr. President is a ginormous solo game about being president for four years, about advancing your agenda, dealing with diplomatic and war crises, and keeping the U.S. safe.
This is Mr. President. Not shown is a board to the left that dictates the round sequence and tracks your Cabinet, bipartisan cooperation, scandals and a whole host of other things.
This board is a giant map with a bunch of tracks that tell the story of your diplomatic relations and threat levels in various regions across the world. There are events from Crisis cards that come into play, and at its core, it’s a resource management game. It was so inspiring and humbling to sit in on the playtesting process where they were tinkering with various track values. These guys know so much about that point in history! Mr. President aims to give a deep and immersive experience for the solo gamer. But man, it looks so intimidating!
It’s always great seeing Gene! I hope to make it back to GMT Weekend one year.
Lastly, Harold interviewed me for his awesome podcast, Harold on Games. If I’m being honest, it’s always nerve wracking being on the opposite side of the interview chair. I’m used to interviewing people and asking the questions. Check out the episode and listen to all his other interviews as well!
I first met Harold over a year ago at Strategicon in LA. He hosts his own convention in San Diego in November called SD Historical Con.
And then just like that, an entire week of gaming passed. I had a great time at Consimworld, playing both old and new-to-me games. If you love wargaming, then this is the convention to be at. Next year’s dates are already set. Hope to see you there on June 22-29, 2019!
Thanks for having me, Consimworld! Can’t wait for next year!
I got the chance to go to BGG Spring in Dallas for the first time at the end of May. My lovely friends from Phoenix, Ohio and Atlanta wanted to meet up somewhere in between all of them, and we all stayed at an airbnb near DFW Airport. I had an amazing time with these guys, and it was just what I needed to de-stress from a chaotic few months. We usually met up yearly for Friendship Con, which I’ve written about here and here.
Hello, friends! I know I’m totally super duper late with this post, but immediately after BGG Con, my family came to visit for Thanksgiving (which was an awesome time!), and I’ve been taking some time to catch up on life events. So, without further ado … grab a drink and settle in, it’s gonna be a long recap. But that’s cool, right?
BGG Con 2016 came and went, and it was a blast! It still blows my mind that five days can go by so quickly! And I can’t wait to do it all again next year.
I’m planning to do two posts on BGG Con. In this post, I’m going to write about all the games that I played. The next post will be about gaming with friends and the overall con experience, and, most importantly, which board games I came home with. My board-game play total for the convention: 23. And away we go!
My friends and I decided to host a second-annual Friendship Con last week, and I had so much fun. It was nice seeing friends who moved away from Phoenix and those friends I haven’t seen since last year’s event.
We played a lot of games, though sadly we didn’t get through all the games on our uber ambitious list. There were a couple sleepless nights for me (I am so not a morning person, and, not gonna lie, it was rough getting somewhere by 8:30 a.m.), but in the end, I got some good gaming in with fun folks!
