Another Lovely Day at GenCon

August 21, 2013

Halfway through the convention and things continue to ramp up in the awesome department. Here is another list of reasons why GenCon was so super-great from start to finish. 1. Playing more Dominion: This time I played the Guilds expansion with Adrian. I thought the gold coin concept was an interesting addition, allowing you to stock up money for future turns. Is it just me though or are the newer cards way more powerful than the original set of cards? Like develop, which gives you 2 cards you can put on top of your deck, or the soothsayer, which gives your opponents a curse and gives you a gold every time you play it. What? 2. Demoing FORGE WAR for a group of people who were actually into it: I was starting to get a little discouraged running the second table with these demos, and then I got the best table ever. All four of them were really into it and doing very well with their various decisions. One guy in particular did better with the simple game than I have ever done on any of my playthroughs. Truly exciting and astonishing. Hopefully they'll remember what a great time we had when the Kickstarter starts up. 3. Rocking Olimar in a 2v2 Smash Bros. Brawl tournament: Oh my, the Smash tournament. Adrian and I signed up for this on a whim, thinking it might be pretty fun...as long as we didn't just get knocked out in the first match. That might be a little embarrassing. But the event description said double elimination, so we'd have at least two chances to prove our worth. We practiced for a couple nights leading up to the tournament, and he typically handily beat me in the 1v1 games we played using Lucas. We went in to have fun, and I think we accomplished that goal and then some. 2 matches in we were still undefeated, throwing our opponents for a loop every time we pulled out Rainbow Bridge for our stage selection. After 2 matches riding high, though, we discovered that the tournament, contrary to the description, was in fact single elimination and we were already in the semi-finals. Well then. Next we faced some truly impressive players and suffered our first and only defeat. It was a respectable defeat, though. We gave them a run for their money and had a great time. Especially the second game of the second match, where Adrian accidentally killed my last stock (team attack was on) and then managed to pull out a win getting three kills on our opponents with his last life. Bravo! 4. Returning to the glorious Rio Grande room for a full game of Tzolk'in: Though the point swing of the technology monument was too great to come back from, I still had a great time playing Tzolk'in, taking a completely different strategy than the first time I played and doing fairly well. The free drinks didn't hurt either. 5. Learning the rules to Nothing Personal and then promptly leaving: After Tzolk'in, I only had a limited amount of time before my next demo, but Adrian wanted to actually try out Nothing Personal. So he grabbed 3 random guys and started to play, learning as they went. I sat out but still had a good time learning the rules whilst eating a paltry dinner. It looks like a pretty great game. 6. Demoing FORGE WAR for more awesome people: What can I say? My last demo in the playtest hall went super-well once again. My table was into it and I couldn't have been happier. Some guy at the other table also came up with a bunch of great ideas, as well. One of them was multi-sided workers, with each side a different color corresponding to the different players, so you don't have to pick up one color worker and set down another, just flip him to a different side. I thought this was genius and will definitely implement it unless it would add a lot of extra cost. I don't see why it would, though, because you would end up with having to have on hand a lot fewer worker bits to begin with. I was a little skeptical of the Playtest Hall to begin with, but I was very pleased with my overall experience. 7. Going to the Secret Cabal's fan event for good conversation, drunken friends and free games: After the playtest, I sought out Adrian at a Secret Cabal fan event, where he was finishing off his second beer after not eating anything the entire day. I'm not a very social person, but I had a pretty good time talking to people about board games and Kickstarter projects. In particular, I talked with a guy (Mike?) working on the game Space Junk, which sounded really interesting. The Secret Cabal also had a raffle to give away some free games, and Adrian was actually the first name drawn, which was hilarious because he screamed like a little girl when it happened. Despite having the option of a signed copy of Space Cadets, he grabbed a pre-opened copy of Seasons, because that's how much he liked it. My name was eventually drawn as well, but by that time the pickings were slim. I grabbed a copy of Colossal Cave, which was...very, very not awesome. 8. Driving back home with an inebriated Adrian in the passenger's seat: Adrian is normally a pretty chatty guy, but put some beer in him and you get a whole new level. We had a really great conversation on the way back to Lafayette and I couldn't be happier that he decided to fly out and join me for the GenCon adventure. And thus ended the third day of our tale. Sunday was, of course, somewhat shortened, but it deserves its own post. Did anyone show up to play the full version of Forge War that I had planned to demo? Stay tuned!

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