Last weekend, Chris and I got invited to Tucson to play some games for the weekend. It was a nice trip out of town to see board gamers, and while I was there, I played a dozen games, some of which were new to me! And by the way, I did not misspell Arizona; that’s from “What We Do In The Shadows.” Highly recommend that show!
We began Saturday morning by teaching a game of Iki. It’s been so long since I’ve pulled this from my shelf, as we have the first edition version. The game is set in feudal Japan, and you’re hiring professionals to set up storefronts with their trade, but you’ll have to watch out for fires, which can burn those stores to the ground! I really enjoy the rondel mechanism of this game, traveling across the streets of Edo, to take your turn.
It’s feudal Japan yet people still need to travel the streets of Edo for goods in Iki.
Next, we played Carnegie. This is a game I’ve been wanting to learn since its release, especially since it’s on Board Game Arena, but I never got around to it. It’s a strategic euro, so I knew it would be right up my alley. Carnegie was inspired by the life of Andrew Carnegie, who became one of the major players in the rise of the United States’ steel industry. During the game you will recruit and manage employees, expand your business, invest in real estate, produce and sell goods, and create transport chains across the U.S. as well as become an illustrious benefactor.
Trying to build connections among U.S. cities in Carnegie. And make philanthropic donations as well.
I really enjoyed the action-selection mechanism of the game. There’s an action board set up randomly for gameplay, and when it’s your turn, you choose a main action, which could also correspond to a section of the map activating or other actions, and then everyone else has the opportunity to follow through with those same actions. Meanwhile, you’re building out your player board to add buildings, hire workers and increase your income.
Next up was Montana. I have not played this game in forever (even though we actually own it!). And seriously, more gamers need spinners. Wheeee! In Montana, it’s a race to build your settlements on the wide open land. On your turn, you can recruit the right workers to later purchase matching goods, deliver goods on time, and choose your settlements tactically. The first player to build all their settlements onto the board wins the game.
This version of Montana is deluxified. Those cow meeples are so cute!
I then taught a game of My Favorite Things. This trick-taking game can always be so random but I like knowing more fun stuff about who I’m playing with. One didn’t like the work of taking a card out of the sleeve to write answers in the middle of the game, as it goes for two rounds, but I think the game is just delightful as it is.
I love the randomness of the categories in every game of Eye My Favorite Things.
We then played a quick game of Tinderbox, a tiny dexterity game about building a campfire using teeny tweezers. You draw a card on your turn, and you have to complete that structure and put it onto the existing campfire. Sometimes you have to use your non-dominant hand, too! It’s silly and short, and I like that it fits into a small tin about the size of a deck of cards.
Look at this demure campfire! Very mindful.
After dinner at Serial Grillers, a fun restaurant with menu items named after movie serial killers, we played a couple of party games. First was Belratti: Is This Art or Can It Go? This neat deduction game splits the group into buyers and painters, and they’re both playing against a dirty counterfeit painter rat named Belratti. Buyers ask for a certain number of cards from artists to match a theme, and artists submit paintings of items face down into a pile, as well as four cards from Belratti. Buyers must then pick which cards are from the artist. If you pick one of Belratti’s paintings, he scores the point, and if he scores too many points, everyone loses the game.
What is art and what is a counterfeit? The buyers have to figure it out themselves!
The next party game was Green Team Wins! This was super fun but I’m so bad at it! A card asks a question, and everyone has to write down an answer. It’s not about writing down the right answer; it’s about writing the answer that you think everyone else will write down. If you’re in the majority, then you get on the green team and score points. If there’s a tie among the answers, then Green Team Wins!
Whatever the answer is, Green Team Wins!
The last game of the night was Sandbag, a trick-taking game with a mechanism that allows you to delay playing cards, i.e. sandbagging, because you do not want to win any tricks. You can play a card from your hand, or play it face down in front of an opponent to play one of the two cards in front of them that are face-up. As these face-up cards get replaced and played, the trump card changes based on the majority of the colors showing. Players also have one face-down card that represents the actual sand bag, which then basically becomes almost zero when playing, thus preventing you from taking that trick.
Sandbagging your turns so you don’t win any tricks in Sandbag.
On Sunday, we played three games before heading back to Phoenix. Chris and I played a 2P game of Nanga Parbat, where you’re a member of the Sherpa community establishing base camps and trapping animals. On your turn, you take an animal off the board in the section where the guide is situated and replace it with one of your meeples. The guide then moves to the location matching the number of the space where you just placed your hiker meeple. Once you have meeples all lined up in a group, you can replace them with basecamps and score them. Also, once you have a certain number of matching or different sets of animals, you can score them as well . Each scoring threshold can only score once, so if your opponent has done it, you can only score something larger or smaller. I really enjoy the mechanism of choosing when to score things, as you only have a certain number of scoring cubes to do so.
Collecting animals and placing camps in Nanga Parbat.
We then played Isle of Skye, a bidding tile-laying game. Players draw three tiles each round, and behind a screen, they price out the cost of two tiles with money in their bank and ax one of them (to be returned to the bag). When ready, players go around buying tiles based on their cost, with the opponent’s money and the money you placed to price it going to you, to place into their landscape. If your tile doesn’t get purchased by another player, you send the coins placed to price it to the bank but you get to keep the tile. There are four scoring objectives chosen for each game, and for each round, two to three of those scoring objectives will be scored, so you can play your strategy around that.
Building my landscape with ships, stables and animals. Hope they all score big!
Next up was Wandering Towers. This game was a hoot! And like, I had never heard of this game before until that day. The game comes with these cute cardboard tower sections that can be stacked and it begins with everyone’s meeples placed on top of them. The black Ravenskeep then sits at the end of a circle of towers. Players get dealt a hand of cards, and using those cards, you can either run your meeple toward the Ravenskeep a certain number of steps, or move towers to stack on top of other ones, potentially trapping meeples that were originally at the top-most level of the tower. It’s up to you to remember where your meeples are because once they’re covered, they cannot be uncovered until you or someone else decides to move levels of the tower that will reveal you.
These meeples can leap tall towers in a single bound! Unfortunately, those towers keep wandering!
There’s nothing more satisfying than trapping meeples in the middle of a tower level. And once a meeple completes their way to the Ravenskeep, the Ravenskeep tower itself moves. The moving target makes for a fun race and its gorgeous table presence is an added bonus!
The last game of the weekend was Windmill Valley, where players take on the roles of tulip farmers and entrepreneurs to build and enhance windmills, look for tulip bulbs in foreign trade or among vendors, and plant them in your garden for VPs. This game also has a cool action mechanism board, in which your two wheels rotate based on the dyke’s water level, which then determines which one of the two actions you can do. I love timing out your movements, and the game somewhat forces you to move along your wheel faster than others so you can gain better end-of-season bonuses. It’s such a crunchy euro, one that I hope to play again soon!
Tiptoeing through the tulips and windmills in Windmill Valley.
I had a great two days in Tucson gaming with old and new friends. Which of these games have you played? For funsies, I’m sharing a photo that my husband took. He told me to stand in front of this giant saguaro cactus. I think it just wanted to give me a hug! 🌵
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!
