Those who follow me on social media know that I’ve been playing a lot of games online, namely Board Game Arena. I am still not comfortable resuming my weekly game nights at my place, which bums me out as now I have a lot more space in our new house. One game that I’ve discovered on BGA — and have never heard of before until a few months ago — is Cinco.
Cinco is a quick end-of-night filler game that my friends and I have all enjoyed playing online. Think Connect 4 but with 5! Plus, fivefold more strategy than Connect 4. It plays about 15 minutes and worth checking out online.
In Cinco, you’re first dealt a hand of 4 cards. The cards go from 1 to 90, and when it’s your turn, you can either play a card, draw a card, or exchange your entire hand of cards if you have exactly 4 cards in your hand.
When you play a card, you place a marker on the board, which is this numbered hexagon, on any space the value of the card or higher. So, if you play a 65, you can place your marker on the 65 or any open space higher than that. When you select a card to play on your turn, the BGA interface actually shows you where you can place a marker. When you or your team connect five markers in a row, you win!
The 1 and 2 are valuable cards, because you can place the almost anywhere on the board.
You can play Cinco with up to 6 people, either two groups of 3 players, or three groups of pairs. We’ve enjoyed it as a 4P, as you play in two teams. You have no idea what cards your teammate holds, so it’s always so satisfying unknowingly working together to maximize your five-in-a-row options.
Cards can also become wild if you play it and that number and all the numbers above it have markers on them. It’s sometimes strategic to fill up the higher numbered spaces to make one card you have in your hand wild. Having a hand-size limit of 4 cards though really makes the game tight. You should always try to have the most cards in your hand, but sometimes you have to play a card to block your opponent — and even more painful if it’s a low-numbered card — instead of being able to draw on your turn.
Lastly, it’s also advantageous to hold on to really low numbers because you’ll be able to use them for almost any space, and they can be placed in the tough-to-reach center of the hexagon. For a game I’ve never heard of a few months ago, Cinco has quickly been one of our go-to games each game night.
And this was the end. I could not stop the black player from getting five in a row. *Yells Cinco! into the void*
We’ve made it to the ninth month of 2020, folks! Pat yourselves on the back. It’s been a busy two months for me, as I’ve been moving and undertaking some home projects in between organizing boxes and boxes of board games. I am seriously never, ever moving again.
In all honesty, I haven’t had much bandwidth or time to play a heavy game recently. I’m hoping to get back into that soon. In the meantime, a shorter game I’ve been truly enjoying is Pan Am, which plays in about 60 minutes.
I’ve been really enjoying my games of Pan Am recently.
It has all the elements I enjoy: worker-placement, bidding and route building (and blocking!), all packaged in a gorgeous game. And for a company that hasn’t existed for almost 30 years, that iconic logo immediately transports you to the golden age of flying. And with my personal travel in short supply these days, it’s fun to travel the world via the beautiful destination cards that the game comes with.
In Pan Am, players are competing to build a network of air travel. They’re bidding for airport landing rights, purchasing planes that fly longer ranges, claiming routes, and buying Pan Am stock. You’re also trying to create favorable routes in order for Pan Am to purchase them at a profit so you can invest in growth for your company.
There are a couple of event cards for each round to randomly choose from when creating your event desk. It creates a unique game each time!
The game plays for seven rounds, and at the start of each round, an event card is drawn. These events tweak the rules for the round and affect the stock price of Pan Am. The goal of the game is to have the most Pan Am stock, and while it’s good to purchase the stock early while the price is still low, you usually don’t have enough income to do so.
The stock price of Pan Am will fluctuate throughout the game. Best to get it early — if you can afford it!
For our 2P game, you start with 5 engineers (this number varies based on player count), and you take turns placing one engineer on action locations on the board. Some of these locations have numbers on it, so placing your engineer indicates your bid for that action. Another player on a future turn can outbid you by placing their engineer on a higher-valued spot in that location. Your engineer is then returned to you to place somewhere else, or at a higher-valued spot in that original location on your turn. All the locations with a bid can only have one winner on it when resolving.
In our 2P game, players start with 5 engineers, 2 destination cards, one hidden directive card, 3 planes and $12.
Other locations, like routes, resolve in placement order and don’t require a bid. This makes claiming routes especially tight as your opponent may want to build before you and foil your plans. To build a route between two cities, you’ll need landing rights either by having an airport in one of the cities you’re connecting, having the city’s destination card in your hand, discarding a card in your hand from the same region as one of the cities you’re connecting, or discarding two cards from the same region that’s different than the one you’re connecting. Lastly, you’ll need a plane from your fleet that can fly the route between the two cities. You place the plane on that route and then your income increases by how long the route was.
I absolutely love the bidding mechanism of this game. Even though I’ve only played this game as a 2P, it makes all your actions extremely tight and tense. Players might be fighting for that one destination card that satisfies the route they want to build, or maybe you’ll spend your action to be the first to build a route this round. You have to keep an eye out for what your opponents are planning!
There are always four destination cards in play, and players must bid on the card they want to take into their hand.
The last location that hasn’t been mentioned is Directives. This allows players to draw a directive card, which gives them a one-time or end-game bonus and can be powerful when played during the right phase. This location also allows your engineer to get Priority Access during the next round, meaning you’ll get to place your pawn first before the first player takes their turn.
Directive cards offer bonuses and are kept secret from other players.
Once everyone places their engineers, you resolve each location in order, paying your bid if you need to. If you’re unable to pay your bid, you have to sell back any Pan Am stock you have at half price to gain some money for the bid.
The last phase of each round is the Pan Am phase. This is where Pan Am expands along one of its route, hopefully hitting a route you’ve already built so you can sell it to them. When you sell them a route, you get a payout based on how large it is and your plane is returned to your fleet. Your income, however, does go down, but the nice profit bump is well worth it. Players then get their income and move onto the next round. The player with the most Pan Am stock after seven rounds wins.
Here’s Pan Am expanding along its South America route.
Pan Am is super enjoyable, and the artwork is just delightful to look at. The game is widely available at Target for about $30. And while I personally am not flying anywhere in the near future, I can dream of faraway locations to visit while playing this game.
We are officially almost through the seventh month of 2020 — also known as the longest decade ever — and it’s times like these when I get nostalgic for a much simpler time. A time when kids could actually go over to their friends’ houses and play in their yard, a time when kids, pizzas and toys ruled.
Fort, now available on preorder from Leder Games, is a game that takes you back to that time — complete with endearing and whimsical artwork. This unique deckbuilder is all about recruiting friends and building forts, and it plays 2-4 players in about 20-40 minutes.
Fort includes four sturdy player boards and a score tracker.
The game box is compact, but it has a lot of neat components in it. The player boards are made of thick cardboard with cutouts to place your pizza, toy and fort tokens in. I love it when player boards do this as it eliminates the accidental swipe of pieces with certain body parts. The cards are glossy, sturdy and colorful, and just a delight to hold in your hand. The game also comes with made-up rule cards and perk cards, which are smaller in size but also made up of the same glossy card stock. Lastly, there’s a scoreboard to keep in the middle of the table and marks the park area for the game.
I love how the tokens fit nicely into the player board.
And then there’s the top-notch artwork from Kyle Ferrin, whose artwork has created the enchanting world found in Leder games. The kid cards come in all types and colors, and they’re are just so fun to play with. I mean, who doesn’t want to play with Puddin? She seems so sassy!
How freakin’ adorable are these kid cards?
So back to the game. On your turn, you play one card, and sometimes you can add extra cards of the same suit (there are six suits in the game) to improve some actions. The one card you played has a public action, which other players can follow, and a private action, which is something only you can do.
Actions on the card range from gaining resources to put into your stuff or your pack, adding cards to your lookout, recruiting friends, or upgrading your fort. The amount of items that can sit in your lookout or pack depends on the size of your fort.
The goal of the game is to upgrade your fort to a level 5, and you’ll have to spend resources to do so when you use an action card that allows you to upgrade it.
The private or public action can be played in any order, and then players can follow your public action if they spend a card matching the suit of the active card. Once that’s done, the active player recruits a kid card from the park, which always has three face-up cards in it, or from their yard or an opponent’s yard.
If you build your level 5 fort, you gain the macaroni sculpture card, triggering the last round of the game.
Then, all your played cards and your best friends — the kid cards with stars on them that you start with at the beginning of the game — go into your discard pile. The unplayed cards are then placed at the top of your player board, putting them in danger of being recruited by others! There’s something a little heartbreaking about the Rocket Bros being taken by your opponent but that’s sometimes how life goes.
Lastly, you draw five cards from your deck. If you can’t draw five cards, you shuffle your discard pile to make a new draw deck. When it’s your turn again, you first clear out your yard of kid cards not taken by others and place them into your discard pile.
Play with your friends close! Don’t let them start wandering into other players’ yards!
I love the mechanism of following the leader’s action. It allows you to take extra actions when it’s not your turn and reduce the amount of cards left over at the end of your actual turn. Both of these mechanisms — hand management and the follow action — are what elevates Fort from your standard deckbuilder. It keeps all players engaged throughout the entire game.
Fort is based on designer Grant Rodiek’s game SPQF from 2018. I love the retheme and update to it, and I think many others will, too. And even though I’ve only had a chance to play this game as a two-player, the game still had plenty of memorable moments. I can’t wait to get this on table with more people when it’s safe to play with other people again.
Thanks Leder Games for sending me a copy of this game!
Truth be told, it’s been a little difficult being inspired to write while we’ve been on lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic. But in light of recent events and protests erupting across America, it’s important to take a stance. #blacklivesmatter. Period. There is so much racial injustice happening all over — it’s heartbreaking, and serious change needs to happen. We must do better.
Here in the board gaming community, we can listen, we can educate ourselves, we can speak out against racism and microaggressions, we can create a safe gaming space, and we can amplify black board game designers, artists and creators.
Rap Godz, designed by Omari Akil and Hamu Dennis, came out this year.
Omari Akil is a cofounder of Board Game Brothas and the lead designer of Rap Godz, a game about becoming a hip-hop artist. In this article written by Omari, he discussed how few black board gamers he encounters in the hobby — and even fewer game designers — and he wanted to change that.
I first encountered Rap Godz through my partner Chris who received his copy a few months ago. Chris enjoyed playing a demo of it at a local Unpub event in North Carolina in 2018 and ordered the game when it hit Kickstarter. We’ve had so much fun playing it since, often jamming along with one of our rap playlists!
This is hands down one of the most unique and colorful games I’ve ever played.
Rap Godz is a 2-4 player game that plays in about 60 minutes. Each player plays as an up-and-coming rapper trying to take over cities, hit career goals and earn the most record-sales plaques through three albums.
The whole board is laid out like a giant turntable, with crossfader markers indicating which album and track players are on. The entire game is three albums’ worth, with five tracks — or turns — for each album. That’s fifteen turns for everyone, which leaves a short amount of time to go platinum! Painted grooves on the record represent the three resource tracks: swag, skillz and street.
Turn up that track! Isn’t this crossfader piece just so cool?
On a player’s turn, they get a card and play a card. To get a card, they can draw one from the current album deck or discard three cards to grab one of the face-up Come Upz cards.
Cards give you resources and plaques. The ones with a lock and key can only be played if you’ve reached or passed that number on the resource track.
Players then play a card from their hand in front of them and create a timeline of their career. Played cards dole out plaques and resources to the player. Some cards though feature a lock and key, and players cannot play that card until they have equal to or more than the number of resources shown in the lock.
Players can also instead play a Beef card. When they do this, they pick another rapper to start beef with, roll their die and the red die. The other person rolls their die. The player with the highest number on a single die wins the beef. The loser puts the Beef card into their timeline and hands over resources and plaques on the Beef card to the winner. The winner collects a red Beef cube, which can help score an objective at the end of the game.
Do you have enough swag, skillz and street to be the top rapper?
As players cross resource thresholds on the record, they collect Pick Upz tokens, which gives resource, beef or card bonuses and can be used for a later time. The goal of the game is to score objectives by collecting Goalz, Citiez (each city has a different objective such as having the most Yellow cards in your timeline) and the most plaques. The player who has the most points after three albums is the Rap God.
The Goalz (pictured) and Citiez end-game scoring conditions change with each game.
The game has lots of replay value, as the Goalz and Citiez objectives change every game, and the interaction between the players by starting beefs always makes for a fun time. You also have 24 characters — and their distinct abilities and end-game scoring objectives — to choose from, and even Troopers and Cthudus want to be rappers!
The unique theme and components set this game apart. The game comes with a hefty gold medallion to indicate the first player, and I enjoy how the game ramps up with phased in album and Come Upz cards. Giving otherwise regular resource tracks a unique look is pretty creative. I also love and appreciate the diversity of artwork and experiences represented on the game cards.
I love the diversity of the artwork, including the range of looks on these female POCs.
One of the biggest things I’ve been an advocate for is representation in the board gaming community. Often, whenever I walk into a room at a game convention, there aren’t many people who look like me, and I want to see more people of color break into and thrive in this hobby I love. And we can do our part by taking action and fostering a more diverse and inviting community.
My oh my, how much life has changed in the past few weeks. I hope this blog post finds you all healthy and safe — and with enough toilet paper! Yeah, I still don’t understand why people are hoarding that.
I’m now entering my third week of working from home, and, if I’m being honest, the extrovert in me had a really tough time in the beginning not being able to hang out with coworkers and friends on the daily.
Me, working from home, my board games keeping me company.
Sure, I take my daily walks outside with my dog and then my partner comes home from his workday, but it’s really not the same when you can’t do all your favorite activities because of social distancing. Even my weekly game nights have been canceled in order to stay healthy and not catch the coronavirus.
So what have I been doing in the meantime? We’ve all jumped online.
I wrote about online gaming years ago, but now we are knee deep in it. Our current gaming workflow has been logging into boardgamearena.com and a Discord channel so that we can all talk to each other while we game. Though, just an hour ago, my buddy said that premium members can now activate the voice chat room on BGA. I’m very excited to try this out next time we game!
BGA has a bunch of games, and most are free. To play the rest of the games, you’ll need a premium membership, which is $4 a month. I like having access all the games and I feel like I’m doing my small part to keep the website running in tiptop shape now that we’re all online.
Some of the games I’ve been playing are Sushi Go, Takenoko, 6 Nimmt, Caylus, Race for the Galaxy and, of course, backgammon.
Who doesn’t love cute sushi? My girlfriends and I have been playing Sushi Go online.
I love how I’ve been playing with my gaming groups as well as my girlfriends, whom I all made sign up on BGA for the first time. Every online session with friends makes me feel a little bit more human during these uncertain times.
Luckily for me, my partner also likes to play games. We’ve been playing games that don’t take up a lot of table space, as my workstation has taken over half of the dining table. I’m home all the time now, but I have less space to bust out that giant Lacerda. Talk about bad timing!
Recently I really enjoyed playing Bruxulles 1897, the card game of Bruxelles 1893. It’s quite enjoyable and equally tight as the original, but with a much smaller footprint.
Bruxelles 1897 is a card game worthy of its predecessor Bruxelles 1893.
So what games have you all been playing, and what are some of the new routines life has foisted upon you? Also, is it too soon to play Pandemic? What about Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, my favorite iteration of the game?
Anyway, here’s hoping the state of the world improves quickly. Stay well, avoid others, wash your hands, and practice self-care and check in with your friends. We’re all in this together!
This profile on the Tyson Wells Game Store is part of an ongoing series about Friendly Local Game Stores I’ve visited. Read other profiles here.
In the Arizona desert, just before the California border, sits the town of Quartzsite, which has a population of nearly 3,700. Folks driving into California often make a pit stop there as it’s about 2 hours west of the Phoenix area.
The Tyson Wells Game Store is open seven days a week.
Quartzsite is mostly known as a snowbird destination, as the town’s small population swells to about 250,000 during the winter seasons.
Snowbirds — people who move to warm weather locales during the winter — set up camp in their RVs and enjoy the town’s famous rock and gem shows, and vendor fairs. Most surprising, visitors can also purchase their favorite board games at the Tyson Wells Game Store.
This side of the store has a lot of new releases.
The Tyson Wells Game Store stocks over 2,500 games, and the selection is vast and top-notch — everything from new and Kickstarter releases, as well as old favorites and classics. The 2,000-square-foot store also sells miniatures, paint and supplies, and gaming accessories. It’s a board-gaming oasis in the Arizona desert.
Old favorites and classic games are also on store shelves.
The store has two rooms full of games, and it’s something you’d expect in the middle of a large-sized city, not one you’d find on a dusty road surrounded by RV parks.
In addition to the snacks and knick-knacks it also sells, the space is the home base for owner Kym Scott’s many businesses.
“I do rock-gem-mineral shows, arts and crafts shows, RV park and self storage,” he said.
Kym Scott is the owner of the Tyson Wells Game Store.
Scott was born and raised in Quartzsite. He grew up playing games such as Risk and Axis & Allies, and now plays Arcadia Quest, Star Realms, euros and worker placements. “Back when I was growing up here, it was about 400 people,” Scott said.
The store has a large room and one in the back with even more games.
The game store started small about seven years ago when Scott had extra office space. “Then four years ago, I connected with bigger distributors and game publishers and started carrying a full line of games,” he said.
The games in the other half of the back room.
The business is named after Charles Tyson who owned a well nearby during the 1800s called Tyson’s Well. When Scott’s stepfather started the business, he changed it to Tyson Wells. The Sell-A-Rama, Scott’s event where vendors sell their gems, art and jewelry, just wrapped up its 42nd show in January.
Scott is active in the gaming community on both sides of the Arizona-California border, attending meetups in Blythe, California, and Lake Havasu, Arizona. Scott also attends local conventions like Dice Tower West and Arizona Game Fair.
Of course Quartzsite has its own Monopoly game!
Scott said the gaming community in Quartzsite consists of snowbirds from across the U.S. and Canada, and people in RVs. “Because they’re so limited by space and the size of the games,” Scott says his best seller is the card game Five Crowns. Ticket to Ride and Catan are also popular.
Lastly, the best part of owning a game store is “Every time I get a delivery, it’s kind of like Christmas. I get to see all the new games,” Scott said.
Information and photos
Tyson Wells Game Store is located at 121 Kuehn St, Quartzsite, AZ 85346. It’s open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. You can find more information on its Facebook page and website.
My gaming group really loves 18xx games. But since there’s a whole lot of AP during our games, there’s no way we can really play one on a weeknight. Hence, we try to schedule our games on Saturdays as one game seriously takes an entire day for us.
Last Saturday, we punched out and busted a new 18xx game to most of us: 18CZ, set in the Czech Lands. As with most other 18xx games, the purpose of this game is to have the most personal money, and to increase the stock price of companies you own while also owning high-valued stocks.
The game is unique to other 18xx games we’ve played recently as there are a fixed number of rounds. Usually, when players break the bank, that’s when the game ends. In 18CZ, there are eight stock rounds and the number of operating rounds with each stock round increases as the game progresses, culminating in three operating rounds in the last phase. And trains rust after each set of stock round and operating rounds.
The game ends after 8 rounds, which include a stock round and three operating rounds.
But before the game gets started, a pre-stock round occurs where players can purchase private companies. The privates are randomly placed on this board based on their sizes (there are small, medium and large companies), which prices then in increasing order, and players take turns in a snake draft, buying them until they all pass.
These privates provide income to whoever owns them, and they can later only be purchased by a company of the same size or larger. For example, a medium company later cannot buy a large private company. They also provide a one-time use to build a special tile upgrade. Other than purchase price, they’re all identical.
The pre-round for buying private companies in 18CZ.
Small, medium and large sized companies — and their matching sized trains — make up 18CZ. Trains rust immediately when another player purchases a larger train of that type. And it’s printed on the train card itself too as a reminder.
Unlike other 18xx games, when you float your company, it’s fully capitalized. You don’t need to try to convince others to buy into it. But you suddenly flushed with $1,000 in your company coffers if you set its initial stock price at $100. Having all this money is great — you can immediately buy a train or two. But being fully capitalized makes it much, much harder to funnel money into your company when you need to purchase a very expensive train.
You’ll have to withhold payouts to add to your company coffers, which decreases the price of your stock. And unlike some other 18xx, regardless of how much you pay out to stockholders, your stock will jump once, and twice if you’re a large company.
Some of the early trains in 18CZ. How you orient them determines their scope.
Maximum ownership also varies for the different types of companies. Players can have 75% of their small company, and 60% of medium and large companies. Lastly, there’s no bankruptcy in this game.
Starting a large company can’t occur until later in the game. And players get to select their starting location from one of two hexes on the board. This is another neat mechanism of this game. You can start building your network over on this side of the map, but there’s a chance you won’t be able to build that large company near it to connect everything.
Mergers allow you to fold a company of the same size or small into your new company, and you can upgrade your trains this way as well. You can flip the orientation of your current train card or scrap it to get a larger train, and you’ll only have to pay the difference. This was helpful later to acquire larger trains.
Each company comes with fewer station tokens than other 18xx games I’ve played, so you have to be judicial during placement. In other games, you can use one to block another player, but there didn’t seem to be much blocking in this game as you couldn’t afford to waste a station.
Our recent 5P game of 18CZ. You can see from the red hexes that the large companies have been floated.
Our game ended up going for about 6 hours, which seems on par with the box description of 4 hours. My gamer group is slow and methodical, and we usually tack on some extra time to what it says on the box, even though we have cut time by not using actual paper money in the game. We just write everything down in our ledger. I highly recommend it!
I really enjoyed how unique 18CZ is compared with other 18xx games I’ve played recently. There’s a running joke among us saying that we play an 18xx game once and then never return to it. Maybe that pattern will change this year, and we’ll actually play the same 18xx twice! 18CZ is the one I’d totally recommend for that.
For those train folks, what’s your favorite 18xx game?
It’s officially been five years since my first blog post. I wrote about last year’s anniversary, and with every passing year, I like to take a look back down Memory Lane.
As I sit at my dining table plugging away on my laptop, my back toward my Kallax shelves full of board games, I can’t help to think of the first games to enter my collection, the catalyst to the inevitable transformation of my dining room area to board gaming central — mini-studio lights and all.
The first five games in my collection were Catan, Ticket to Ride, Agricola, Arkham Horror and Twilight Struggle. Catan, TTR and Twilight Struggle were all gifts, and Arkham and Agricola I purchased after a deep dive into the BGG rankings.
The first five hobby games that started it all for me.
A few months ago, after a game of Agricola, nostalgia spurred me to share on Twitter these five games and asked followers which five hobby games first entered in their collections.
Feeling nostalgic since my Agricola game last night. What were the first five hobby games in your collection? Mine were:
I received over 850 board game submissions, and I thought it’d be fun to compile that information and see which games were most often mentioned. A good majority of my Twitter followers seemingly entered the hobby around the same time I did, based on their responses.
For clarity’s sake, I lumped versions/editions/expansions into the base game of the same name. For example, I grouped all of The Settlers of Catans and Catan Seafarers all under Catan. The top 12 results are below in a nifty data visualization I created. (You can hover over each bar to get more information.)
And here are the top 25 games mentioned, broken down by years. There appears to be a dark period there, based on the responses, between 1985-1995. (I’m pretty sure a lot of people were playing all those Milton Bradley games, such as Shogun).
Then in 1995, Catan debuted and helped usher in the Golden Age of board gaming. And as they say, the rest is history.
I still have a fondness for my first five games (which are all still present in my collection), but, in all honesty, I’d probably only play four of them if asked right this minute. I’ll let you guess which one wouldn’t make the cut.
What were the first five hobby games in your collection, and which of them do you still own?
Two weekends ago, I went down to Tucson for their annual board game convention RinCon! I particularly love how a bunch of us from the Phoenix area all trek down south to Tucson to game nonstop for a few days. I also love all the unique perks that RinCon offers its convention-goers — from nightly midnight snacks to the wonderfully curated Women’s Space.
Here’s one of the main rooms at RinCon. The tablecloths are color coded, so you’ll know if a table is reserved for scheduled gaming.
It’s the third year in a row I’ve gone, and the second year in a row I’ve been a special guest. About 600 people attended this year’s convention, which was held again at the Sheraton Tucson Hotel and Suites.
Gamers setting up giant Azul in the RinCon lobby.
Friday
My buddy Mark and I arrived Friday afternoon, and we dove immediately into a game of Mexica. I love, love this game, and it never fails to disappoint! Everyone always falls in love with the game’s components, and, for me personally, I enjoyed easing into a hectic convention with a game I’m quite familiar with.
Mexica has such table presence! But it can be so mean! The new players in this game learned quickly that blocking people is the way to go.
I then taught a 4-player game of Irish Gauge, a stock-based cube-rail train game. It’s the first title in the Iron Rail series by Capstone Games, first published by Winsome games back in 2007.
These guys are always so fun to game with! I wish they all didn’t live clear across town and, for Mike, in Tucson!
It’s a 3-5 player game that plays in about 60 minutes. Learning the game is easy; there are 4 actions to choose from after the initial stock bidding around. Players are building track to expand their train company, auctioning of stocks, upgrading towns to cities, or calling dividends. When dividends are called, cubes are randomly pulled from a bag, and that determines which routes will pay out. It’s a very stripped down stock game — complete with adorable candy-like train pieces. Irish Gauge was the first of many train games I played during the weekend.
Irish Gauge is a quick 3-5 player stock–based train game.
I then taught a 3-player game Dead Man’s Cabal, a clever puzzly strategy game where players are trying to raise the dead. It has skulls, spells and zombie cards! Players have a private action, and then everyone does a public action, based on the skulls in play, and each skull represents a board that has actions associated with it. If you don’t have a particular color of that skull in your supply, then you can’t take the action. I really enjoyed this midweight euro!
So many skulls! This game has been delightful each time I’ve played it.
Next up was Tokyo Metro, an economic stock game from Jordan Draper games. This is probably the heaviest of his games — and a little busier and fiddly, too — where players are investing in stocks and working to increase the values of stocks, as trains pass through rail stations along a giant cloth map of the Japanese metro. Trains only move a certain number of spots, so you’ll have to calculate payout based on that train schedule, and only certain actions will come out each round, based on the action cards that are phased in. I’d love to try this again, as my train was totally melting down by this time of night.
So many trains, and so many rail lines! Tokyo Metro is based on the Japanese metro.
Then at 11 p.m., I hosted a Mega Game of Welcome To. About 20 people came out, and we used the Halloween expansion pack for our game. Welcome To is a roll-and-write game that doesn’t involve dice but instead cards containing numbers and special abilities that players use to fill out a map of their city. Everyone selects a number simultaneously so it’s a game that can be played out on the big screen in a large group.
GloryHoundd took this photo of me hosting Welcome To on the big screen.
And even though I was nervous running my first mega game ever, I had a great time, and I think everyone did, too. The winner was GloryHoundd, and she received the game, as well as a couple expansion packs, and the second- and third-place winners received some Halloween candy.
Winner winner chicken dinner! The winners of the Mega Welcome To game.
At midnight, RinCon served its first midnight snack of the convention: Eegee’s. For those unfamiliar, Eegee’s are Tucson-based frozen fruit drinks, and people lined up to get a cup of this sweet treat. All attendees get tickets with their badge, which they trade in for the midnight snacks on Friday and Saturday night.
Saturday
I then started early on Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m. by teaching a 2P game of Abomination. I love this game so much, and I believe it’ll be more widely available now for more folks to check out! But I like to preface that this is not a short game by any means. Even with our 2P game, it took well over 2 hours.
Building bodies early on a Saturday morning.
I then was invited to do a noon panel called “How to Teach a Game in 5 Mins.” Five us from the board game industry talked with a group of folks about methods that worked for us for teaching games, whether light or heavy. The discussion included how to teach teenagers how to win graciously as well as empowering new gamers to teach other gamers. Also, we had a legit space scientist Dante Lauretta among us panelists who is a board-game designer and does educational outreach at the Boys and Girls Club in Tucson.
GloryHoundd and I then hung out at the bar after our panel and caught up for a bit while drinking our respective signature drinks. Our drinks were super yummy and provided a midday breather to an already busy day.
Drannnnkss! GloryHoundd and I both enjoyed our signature convention drinks.
My next game was The Soo Line, where I learned that it’s pronounced like the name Sue and not so. That’s the Valley girl in me coming out!
Always a fun time with Greg, Dr. GloryHogg and Brian!
Anywho, The Soo Line is a 45-minute pick-up-and-deliver stock train game. I made some poor choices for bidding in the beginning and never quite caught up again! How does the Soo Line actually made any money when it has to come all the way across the board? Tell me your secrets, folks!
It was so hard getting the Soo line all the way across the map!
I then joined a group of a dozen people to play Blood on the Clocktower, a giant social-deduction game described to me as similar toWerewolf but gamier. Benjamin led many, many games of this during the entire convention, and it was SUCH. A. BLAST.
Our fearless leader Benjamin running Blood on the Clocktower.
Unlike Werewolf, when you die in Clocktower, you can still have one vote for the rest of the game so that you can help your side win the game. It’s humans vs. demons, and there’s even a character sheet so you can deduce who is which character, and strategically reveal information about yourself or others.
I was the ravenskeeper, and even though I died, I was instrumental in finding the imp, leading the humans to victory!
After a quick dinner break, I taught a 4P game of Tiny Towns. I was so involved in teaching this game that I completely forgot to take a photo, but friends, let me tell you that I crushed the game. I played a second game of Irish Gauge with 4 different players and immediately after a few games of Strike.
Strike is such a bar game, in which you’re tossing dice into the box stadium, and if there are any pairs, you take back dice into your hand. Players get eliminated when they run out of dice, and the last person standing wins the game.
Throw in your dice to get more dice! Strike is a fun filler!
I then got to hang out with David Short and taught him and my buddy Rob Watergate. I always get kind of nervous getting games I love to game designers, because they know game mechanisms so well and I’m afraid they’ll find something really off or broken about said game. Luckily, everyone ended enjoying the game!
The rest of the night was a series of shorter games. We played NMBR 9 (always a good time) and Illusion (I can’t for the life of me figure out these color percentages) before getting pizza for our midnight snack.
And then some late-night shenanigans 1 a.m. happened with my buddies Mark, Greg and Brian.
We then played Giant Rhino Hero, Point Salad and Skulls. This was my first time playing Giant Rhino Hero and it was a riot! Players are basically stacking cards to build a giant tower for the Rhino Hero to move up in.
This is when it got called than me, though some people might say that it doesn’t take much to reach a height taller than 5’3″!
The tower eventually got much taller than me, and its ultimate demise was captured on video. (Notice that I am in fact standing on a chair!)
Forgot to send this on Twitter last night, in case everyone was wondering how it ended. Tragically, I'm afraid. 🦏🦏 pic.twitter.com/F19ZnAzcwB
Point Salad is a quick card drafting game in which you’re collecting fruits and veggies to score objective cards. And Skulls is a fun bidding, bluffing game that has gorgeous artwork.
Sunday
I began my day teaching Watergate at the Women’s Space. Folks, I cannot tell you how amazing this space is. I love that RinCon sets aside a suite for women to relax, get away from the crowd, and learn scheduled board games from female GMs. Mari runs the space, which is fully stocked with meeple cookies, snacks and drinks.
A nice couch to chillax on during the convention!Here’s Mari, who keeps the lovely Women Space up and running.
Two ladies signed to learn Watergate, and they enjoyed the game so much that they switched sides and played again. The same player won both times!
These ladies are ready to go head-to-head in the battle for the White House.
I ended the convention playing another game of Mexica and Coimbra, which was the top game I played in 2018. And in case you were wondering, I crushed my two opponents in Coimbra.
Coimbra is such a good game. We need to get to get it on table more often!
And just like that, another awesome time in Tucson was had at RinCon. This convention never disappoints, and I love how friendly everyone is here. Karen Arnold Ewing is the chair of the convention, and she succeeds in making this con inclusive and inviting, especially with the incredible women’s space. There are gamers of all ages, and there is definitely something for everyone!
Here’s RinCon’s fearless leader Karen Arnold Ewing, who, along with an army of volunteers, works tirelessly to put on a wonderful convention.
And just like that, three days of gaming came and went. I had a lot of fun hanging out with friends and meeting new ones, and hosting/teaching games. Thank you so much for having me, RinCon, and I can’t wait to be back next year!
I love these pronoun badges that are provided at every RinCon convention.
I don’t play too many monster-themed board games. Unless it’s in the Cthulhu world, and even then I’m referring strictly to Arkham Horror or Cthulhu Wars, monster games don’t usually draw me in. That is … until Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein by Plaid Hat Games. This worker placement game is strategic and fun, and, surprisingly, oozes with a unique theme that even a sometimes curmudgeonly eurogamer like me can appreciate.
In Abomination, scientists are working in Paris to “collect” muscles, organs, blood and bone, and the occasional animal part when really, really needed it. And I say “collect,” because what you’re really doing is raiding hospitals, morgues, cemeteries and other suspicious Parisian locations for the freshest cadaver parts required to create your very own monster!
The board features locations across Paris where you can collect cadavers, atone or do research, which will help you gain expertise and make better creatures.
Each player comes with a player board to place your resources, and three dials that keep track of your humanity, reputation and expertise. They also get a character card, which gives you variable player abilities, as well as two assistants and one scientist meeples. Later in the game, as your reputation increases, you can add an additional assistant, and you can trade them out for scientists, too.
The player board features dials, which are various tracks that will give or take VPs, as well as other benefits.
Acquiring more scientists is important because locations on the board have placement restrictions and they show which type of meeple will activate that location. Some are either/or, but the majority of them are reserved for scientists. If you don’t have an available scientist during the round, you cannot place your meeple there. Also, some locations give you more benefits if you place your scientist there instead of your assistant.
Abomination goes for 12 rounds, with four phases each round. At the start of each round, the event phase happens, and the first player draws from a deck filled with events or encounters for the round. The city phase is when players place their meeples one at a time on the player board. In addition to locations to find cadavers, there are also places where you can work for money, gain expertise or reputation, buy and sell items at the market, or hire some questionable characters to acquire some resources.
Abomination plays for 12 rounds, with an event or encounter happening each round.
In most eurogames, when a meeple is placed at a location, that location is closed to the rest of the players for the round. This isn’t the case for Abomination. Players can pay money to bump a meeple, so that the location will be available for them to use. There are only three meeples that can be bumped in each round, and those meeples go to the bump track at the bottom of the board. The bumpee pays the person who is being bumped 1 franc (or 2 francs if it’s the third and last bump in the round) to go there (or pay nothing if you’re bumping yourself). There is a lot of bumping that goes on in the middle of the night.
Bump, bump, bumpity bump. Such a fun mechanism!
Lastly, the person who took the first-player spot can place that meeple can make a legal move to an open location. We always call this mechanism the Waterdeep move (because in Lords of Waterdeep, there are meeples that get to move after everyone has taken their turn.). The person who took the first-player spot cannot be bumped during the round.
When everyone passes or have no more legal moves to make, the lab phase occurs. This is when people turn in their resources to make body parts, according to the resource and expertise requirements. Complicated body parts like the head require more expertise than say an arm. You gain VPs based on the decomposition of the body parts, as well as 1 expertise.
If you time it correctly, you can actually gain the expertise and VPs by building body parts in a certain order, so that you can meet the next expertise threshold. Super neat! Players can also complete a monster part, which involves collecting blood in addition to body parts, by flipping over their body part from the muscle side to the skin side up.
These are the requirements to start a monster part. The head needs the most expertise of course.
Players can also throw the switch to shock their monster to life, but they also run the risk of inflicting damage, which can degrade your body part if you have enough of it. The dice rolls are this stage in the round can be a little punishing, but there are research cards you can gain at the Academy location that can mitigate the dice effects. Plus, gaining expertise will give you the option to use the more favorable blue dice.
When you’re ready to throw the switch, you roll 2 dice per Leyden jar you have charged.
The last phase of the round is the reset phase. This part, in my opinion, features the most clever mechanism of the game. On your player board, when you find a cadaver, the cadaver card will give players either expertise or body parts. If you go to the hospital, you will receive Stage I or Stage II body parts; if you go to the cemetery, you’ll get less fresh parts, more likely Stage III or Stage IV parts.
These are a few examples of cadavers and the body parts you’ll get for them. Or you can forgo body parts and move up in expertise, which is the brain symbol.
During the reset phase, after you’ve built your body parts for the round, all your unused body parts will decompose one stage. This timing element is important because when you build body parts with less-fresh body parts, you will net fewer VPs. If you haven’t used your body parts by Stage IV (or preserved your materials from the lab phase), they you lose them. You can purchase ice from the Market to stop the decay though. The reset phase also wipes cards on the board for new ones and moves the round marker forward.
The VPs you receive when you build a monster part depends on the resources’ state of decomposition. The fresher, the more VPs.
Abomination is great for horror fans and heavier gamers alike. Even though the box says 60-120 minutes, I cannot imagine ever getting through a game in under two hours. The 12 rounds take a while — even though there are events or cards that can move the round marker meeple forward — and there are a lot of difficult decisions to make, with decomposition creeping up on you.
I love the variety of locations on the board, including the Dark Alley, where you’ll get the freshest body parts — and a lot of them — for the dark price of some of your humanity. You can always visit Saint-Roch to atone though, but if you murder too many times, well, you’re irredeemable because the humanity dial locks you into that super negative space, and you lose a lot of VPs in the end. The events and encounters keep the rounds different, and the objectives also help factor into the decisions you make in the game.
I love the diversity in the cast of characters, even on the box cover!
The artwork in Abomination is gothicly interesting, and I appreciate the diversity in the cast of characters, even if it can be a bit too morbid for some folks. The game is not light by any means, so you’ll need to devote some time to playing it. The game really comes alive as people start assembling their monsters, which takes a few rounds to get going, and hopefully your creature is alive at the end as well!
Thanks Plaid Hat Games for sending me a copy of this game!
