Tag: john company

SDHistCon: Giant John Company, Shakespeare’s First Folio, Hell-Raisers in Kanawha County

SDHistCon: Giant John Company, Shakespeare’s First Folio, Hell-Raisers in Kanawha County

I think about the conventions I go to every year, and half of them are in the historical gaming sphere. Am I a wargamer? Some people would say I am not because I haven’t actually played a hex and counter game — like ever. But I love learning about history, I love learning about people’s design projects, and I love playing all types of games. And I’ve been lucky to have met and gamed with some of the coolest and interesting people in the hobby! 

Earlier this month, I attended SDHistCon in San Diego, held in the SES Portuguese Hall in the Point Loma neighborhood. There is a good selection of hotels and food areas within walking distance from the convention, and it’s really close to the San Diego Airport. I arrived from Phoenix on Thursday late afternoon, checked into my hotel, and went over to the pre-convention meetup at Eppig Brewing. 

The turnout at the Eppig Brewing pre-convention event on Thursday night.

I love this meetup as it gives people a chance to meet in person or catch up with old friends before all the gaming gets underway on Friday. This year, SDHistCon continued through Monday, Veterans Day, instead of ending on Sunday like previous years. I enjoyed having that extra day to game before driving back to Phoenix!

SDHistCon founder and game designer Harold Buchanan.

Friday

The first game on Friday was Queen of Spies, a prototype from Liz Davidson and David Thompson. Queen of Spies is a bag-pull game, inspired by female spies and their networks during the world wars. Alice is the leader, and the other women belong to different cells, and they move through the town to fulfill objectives, train up, research technology and deal with officials when one of them gets caught. Our mission for our game was to gather pigeons and train them to become spies. Players decide which spies enter which locations to take an action, but those decisions require time, which is in short supply. And if strangers meet at once location, an alert token gets placed into the bag, making them more susceptible to getting caught.

I really enjoyed the tension created by the limited number of time cubes. When you decide to place a spy at a location, a certain number of cubes get placed there as well, and they come off one at a time during turns. When different locations use different amounts of times, it delays that space’s activation, creating an interesting puzzle about where to place your resources. Can’t wait to see this printed!

Always a great time hanging out with David Thompson and Liz Davidson!

Next up was Gibberers. This game was bonkers — and so incredibly innovative! Taylor Shuss brought this gen of a Japanese game from Gen Con where players create a new language with a specific number of words, and they must use those new words to get other players to guess new words on a card. You always start with words for Yes, No, I and Understand. We then created new words for 14 more words. Some of the useful words we created were living, hot, thing, person, etc. 

Gibberer was one of my favorite games this weekend. It’s the type of game that you’ll be talking about for a long time!

You then speak and try to communicate in this new made-up language that probably sounds like gibberish to someone walking by. And having yes and no to pair with new words helped communicate if the object is something that it’s not. And as you progress with each new round, you add words to your new dictionary. Readers, let me tell you that we were talking in this language throughout the rest of the con! What a lovely experience. Zeby lopa-lopa! (translation: I understand.) 

I then attended a seminar called: Games as History: Academic Preservation of Board Games that featured three professors (2 from Stanford and 1 from UC Irvine) who digitally archive board games. Liz hosted the talk, and I learned about the challenges of collecting archival material for game preservation, which aren’t necessarily about the board game itself. The panelists also discussed the changing mindset about how libraries can indeed rent out board games like any other resource material they have on hand, but that sometimes they don’t have the hobby knowledge and/or space for them, and they don’t know where to start. Yay for libraries!

The panel included (from left) Aaron Trammel of UC Irvine, Henry Lowood of Stanford and Kathleen Smith of Stanford. Liz moderated the panel.

I then got a chance to play a prototype of Shakespeare’s First Folio. I love me some Shakespeare and this trick-taking, resource gathering card game fits the bill. Players start with a hand of cards (cards are divided into three suits: histories, tragedies and comedies), which are used to win tricks during the first phase of the game. If you win the trick, you collect that card into your score pile for later. For the rest who didn’t win the trick, you collect the resources printed on your card, either paper, type, ink or money. 

Fort Circle Games said the artwork in the middle of this card is pretty final.

The second phase of the game starts with players trading resources (one of each) to publish a play from the market, or paying money to hire workers who give you special abilities. You can also take a gamble to draw chits from the bag, which could potentially net you more resources, or take a rolled dice from the market that also has resources on it. At the end of the game, the cards in your personal pile are scored if you have sets of the same number, or if you have straights of the same suit. I love the artwork for this game, and I can’t wait to play it in Washington, D.C., in 2025 at Fort Circle’s Circle DC convention, which will be held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in March.

The cards I had at the end of the game. I could not for the life of me make a run!

One of the restaurants we eat at frequently at the con is Ketch. It’s close and nearby, and the menu is large enough for all kinds of eaters. Unless it’s a busy Saturday night, you can usually just walk into here to get a meal.

Dan Bullock, Kathryn, Sebastian Bae and I at dinner at Ketch.

The last game of the night was Rock Hard: 1977. This game is a worker-placement euro, but was very surprised how well the theme was incorporated into its design. Gameplay just oozed rock ‘n’ roll! Players are up-and-coming musicians who have to work their regular job to pay for recording demos, create records or hire PR. And those jobs are either day, night or after-hours!

The hustle of an up-and-coming musician! It’s a rock hard life!

As your chops, reputation and song list grows, which are tracked on these very cool dials on the player boards, you’ll be able to perform at bigger and bigger venues, gaining more money and potentially more chops or reputation. And yes, you can crank that dial to 11! If you want to make a second action during a phase, you can spend “candy” to do so, but if you use too much “candy,” your craving might get too high and you’ll end up in recovery. You might end up with a skiing problem. As the game progresses, you’ll be able to skip your regular job because gigs are paying enough, paving the way to become a full-fledged rock star. Rock on, party people! 

I loved the dials and the character boards for this game. The money felt pretty authentic, too, with those nice design touches.

Saturday

I started the day with Pax Pamir, which has become a staple at every single convention I’ve gone to. It’s always so nice to slide into a game you’ve played before countless of times!

Love getting Pax Pamir on table! It’s such a beautiful game to look at.

It was a tense 4P game, which ended in a three-way tie, with yours truly a few points away from the rest of the pack. I should’ve switched my alliances! 

Dan and I played with Brooks Barber (second from left) and Artur Carvalho.

I then got to meet this lovely gentleman in person. Pete Skaar always leaves a nice comment on my blog posts. We got a chance to talk about games and his family in the San Diego area. Thanks, Pete, for always reading along! 

It was nice finally meeting you in person, Pete!

I then played a prototype from Taylor Shuss called Love Potion Factory. Players are placing meeples into a factory to collect resources and trade them in for potions and victory points. If you’re the first player to come into a space, you get one resource of that type. The second person then gets 2 resources, etc. As the main board fills up, there’s a danger that the meeples will come together because they’re magnetic, which then ends your turn and clears off the board. It starts to get a little stressful placing your meeples, and there were a few times I jumped because the meeples snapped together. Super duper fun! 

When meeples get too close in the Love Potion Factory, it shuts down the factory and all the meeples go home.

I then taught a quick game of Bonsai, a tile laying game where each player is cultivating their own bonsai tree. I really enjoy the choices for this game (essentially gather resources or lay down resources), and the game creates such a gorgeous table presence when over. Each game randomly chooses three sets of objectives, where you can claim one or push your luck to claim a higher-valued one, skipping the lower-valued one permanently. If you want to learn more about the game, I did a review of Bonsai on The Five By Episode 148

My bonsai tree may look wonky but I got achieved some high-value objective cards!

Next up was a pretty-finished prototype of Hell-Raisers of Kanawha County from Milda Mathilda and Luke Evison, coming next from Wehrlegig Games. This game is set during the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike, a confrontation between striking coal miners and coal operators in Kanawha County, West Virginia: The strike lasted from April 18, 1912, through July 1913.

In Hell-Raisers of Kanawha County, two people are playing as the companies and one person is playing the side of the miners.

Games like this are exactly why I attend historic gaming conventions — to learn about these moments in history that affected a group of people and/or culture and how this event influenced present day. The strike was one of the most violent conflicts in American labor union history, and this game captured the tension between the miners and coal companies. The game also featured prominent labor figures such as Mary “Mother” Jones.

Drew Wehrle (second from right) and Joe Schmidt (right) teaching me and JP the game, with Amanda and Nathaniel looking on.

I then attended a seminar called How Professional and Hobby Wargames Connect. I learned a little bit about the unclassified processes of real life wargamers who work with the military and how they have turned some of that work into published games into the hobby industry. Liz also ran this panel, and I enjoyed attending these very academic seminars. Thanks, SDHistCon, for having these on the schedule! 

Liz running the panel that includes Akar Bharadvaj (from left), Maurice Suckling and Sebastian.

I then played a quick demo of another game from Taylor Shuss, this time about parking requirement laws when creating a shopping area. You’re drafting various tetromino shapes and objectives to place on your board. The first half of the game features various businesses with a whole bunch of parking spaces. Then in the second phase of the game, you’re adding different businesses on top of those parking squares while trying to fulfill a second set of objectives. 

This prototype deals with parking lots and shopping centers.

On Saturday night, I got invited to participate in the celeb game of giant John Company. This game was ginormous, including plastic ships, a substantial elephant, and our family members enclosed in these Victorian-looking photo frames. In John Company, players assume the roles of ambitious families attempting to use the British East India Company for personal gain. According to the Board Game Geek description, the wrestles many of the key themes of imperialism and globalization in the 19th and 19th centuries and how those developments were felt domestically.

Look at all the cool people I got to hang out with during our game! This was before the yelling started.

The game featured 16 players, split into four people per family. The Hastings family included venerable war game designers Mark Herman, Ananda Gupta, Sebastian Bae … and me. LOL Ananda suggested using the strategy of putting a bunch of writers out there on the board, which helped for a bit, but it did no good under the bad leadership of a chairman who seemed to just completely mismanage the funds.

The Hastings family: Mark Herman, Ananda Gupta, Sebastian and me.

The game included a lot of wheeling and dealing, and some forceful yelling to get the chairman to do our bidding. (The yelling mostly came from Sebastian.) What an awesome experience to play with all these cool people! Cole Wehrle did a great job of making his game ginormous!

Love all the work put into this giant game, including the Lego cannons!

Sunday

I started my morning attending a public SDHistCon board meeting. I wanted to hear about the state of the convention as board members discussed how to make it grow and be more accessible to all types of historical gamers. SDHistCon does online conventions a year, as well as SDHistCon East held in Newport, Rhode Island, at the U.S. Naval War College Museum. 

The SDHistCon board had a public board meeting to talk about the organization

I then attended an announcement of the Zenobia award winner. The Zenobia Award is both a competition and a mentoring program in which game designers from underrepresented groups develop and submit historical tabletop game prototypes. This year’s winner was The Porters, designed by Lucas Cockburn, Neco Cockburn and Alex Goss. The game tells the story of Black porters on the Canadian railways who were working to organize unions. The grand prize for the award is $1,000 and a travel grant to a game convention of their choice.

Akar and Liz talked about the Zenobia finalists and announced this year’s winner.

I then taught a game of Arcs to Trevor and Treg. Arcs is quickly becoming one of my favorite games of the year, and I’ve been teaching this game every week for the past few weeks to different groups of people.

Arcs is just gorgeous! I’ve been teaching this game every week for the past month.

It’s a sci-fi strategy game where you seize initiative using multi-use cards and declare ambitions, while destroying opponent ships and capturing their workers. I love the gameplay mechanisms and the look of the board and components. 

Had a great time playing with Trevor Bendor and Treg Julander, even if I did lose because people kept taking my resources, costing me majorities!

I then got a chance to play LetterLine Junction from Ido Magal, a roll-and-write railway game where you’re creating words with the limited number of letters you have in order to complete your path. If you love word puzzles, this was a fun challenge, as we did not get good letters! At the start of the game, you roll the dice to determine your letter pool, and as you collect more iron from the map, you can roll for more letters or buy shares in various columns or rows, from which letters in those columns will boost your share price. You also have to collect wood from the board in order to cross mountains, while making sure revenue is higher than your debt. 

In LetterLine Junction, you use a small pool of letters to spell words and make a route between cities. We probably should not have used Q’s!

I always bring a couple of non-historic games to events like these because it amuses me a little bit to get a bunch of wargamers playing offbeat games. I mean, last year’s My Favorite Things was a big hit! After dinner, we played Wandering Towers, which, I think, is always a fun time. You move towers to fill your potions, and you move your wizards into the keep. But that darn keep won’t stop moving, and now you’re accidentally stuck inside a tower that someone moved over you. Sometimes people forget where their wizardis, which often leads to “Hmm, I thought my dude was in this tower.” It’s hilarious fun — and it’s a short game!

Did I park my wizard here? Who can remember in Wandering Towers!

The last game of the night was Phantom Ink. This game is AMAZING! It’s a clever party large-group game that manages to keep everyone engaged throughout the game. Players split off into two groups of mediums who try to guess an object that one person on their team, the designated spirits, knows. The mediums choose two cards from their hands that have random questions and give them to their spirit, and the spirit chooses one to answer — one letter at a time.

Can you guess the clues? Yeah, sometimes we couldn’t either, and it was hilarious.

The mediums at any time can say “Silencio!” if they can guess the answer. Or if they don’t want too much of their word revealed as it may give the other team a clue, even though they don’t know what the question is. It’s really entertaining when a round goes off the rails, but it rarely completely comes undone. One team usually ends up getting the word before the end of the game. I also did a review on it on The Five By Episode 150.

Phantom Ink was a big hit to close out Sunday night!

Monday

Monday was the last day of SDHistCon. Some friends had already flown out this morning, but I got a chance to play a few games before I drove back to Phoenix. I played Nathan Fullerton’s prototype of The Most Insignificant Office, a card game about who will become vice president to George Washington. The different suits represent different men, and players are playing one card into their scoring pile and, depending on the round, a card or two or three into the middle, which then will be shuffled. Players then vote for or against the cards to be tabulated into votes for a specific person, and if it gets approved, that person moves up on the track. Hopefully the cards you put into your pile match the person in second place behind George Washington at the end of the game. Because if George isn’t No. 1, then everyone loses. 

Back during George Washington’s time, the person with the second-most votes became VP.

The last game of the convention I played was Bread by Xoe Allred. It’s the end of the world, and you need bread to survive. Players play through a deck of cards where they can gather or build in their bunker, but you need bread in order to quell unrest. I love the artwork on this, and working together is harder than it looks! 

We are all looking for bread to survive the apocalypse.

And that ended my four-day convention in San Diego. It had been an exhausting few weeks leading up to this convection, so I was glad to step away and unplug for a few days with good company.

Taylor, Liz, Andrew Bucholtz and I before Taylor and Liz left town.

The convention is always so inviting, and I love meeting new people and learning about their game designs. By the time this post goes to print, I have already attended Rincon in Tucson (more on that coming soon), but the next historic gaming convention I’ll be going to will be Circle DC in March. Hope to see you there one day. And let me know which of these games you’re interested in! 

The main gaming area at SDHistCon has tons of seating!
Consimworld 2018: Big Push, Flashpoint: South China Sea, Cataclysm, Mr. President

Consimworld 2018: Big Push, Flashpoint: South China Sea, Cataclysm, Mr. President

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!