musings of a phoenix

We got home from Origins Game Fair today. As usual, we focused on games we don't already know, which means we expect some winners and some losers. This year, most of our pre-convention information about these games came from Board Game Geek (and, in one case, a fan among my readers). We also attended a couple non-games.

Origins has a ton of games, and you really want to preregister for them instead of taking your chances at the con. Dani winnowed the huge list down to a smaller number of candidates, and then we sorted those into four buckets: A (really want to play), B (looks good), C (would play), and X (nope!). I'm going to list the bucket we put each game into, so I can start tracking prediction versus reality. We had to do a second round of scheduling after we got locked out of some of our initial picks, so not all games have buckets.

Theoretically most games at Origins are taught. Some require experience (we didn't sign up for any of those). Some games were additionally listed as "learn to play", suggesting more active teaching and guidance. Some, but not all, of those are run by the publishers. We had one outstanding learn-to-play non-publisher experience.

Wednesday

• Keep the Heroes Out!: Cooperative game where the players are dungeon monsters trying to keep the invaders (heroes, adventurers) from getting their hard-earned treasure. Each monster has different abilities. It sounded like a fun concept and some of the mechanics were interesting, but a lot depends on random chance and it was hard to strategize. It's icon-heavy; there was a player cheat sheet (good), but it was not entirely accurate (bad). Thumbs down. (Bucket: A.)

• Pandemic: The Cure (it looks like we were playing with the Experimental Meds expansion): This is an abstraction of Pandemic, using six zones instead of a world map and role-specific dice to constrain your actions. On your turn you roll your dice, which tell you which actions (including role-specific ones) are available to you this turn. You can re-roll, but if the biohazard face comes up that moves the group along the infection track (and you can't re-roll that die). Diseases are asymmetric dice, with the number telling you which zone it affects. Curing diseases involves players collecting dice of the same color, replacing the cards in the original game. It's a quick game and we enjoyed it. We want to get it. (Bucket: C.)

Thursday

• Metro: The board made me think of Tsuro when I saw it. Players are trying to build train tracks connecting starting positions with a station. The edge of the board alternates starting positions and stations and there's a station in the center of the board. You're trying to make your tracks as long as possible and there's a bonus for connecting to the center station. On your turn you place a tile into the 8x8 grid; each tile has two track connections on each edge, and it's designed so that there's always a valid placement. It's a quick game; our teaching game was about 40 minutes. We both liked this a lot and want to get it. (Second-round pick.)

• Weather Meeple: A lightweight game about manipulating the weather. You're trying to use your weather cards (which can produce sun, rain, lightning, clouds, or snow) to "build" the weather systems for four "goal" forecasts. It's sort of an engine-building game (your cards and what they produce), with new card draws affecting which of your cards can produce this round, which you can mitigate with an action... cute, ok. I'd play again if a friend brought it over and wanted to, but otherwise, meh. (Second-round pick.)

• Dwellings of Eldervale: No. Just...no. Ok, I understand why it appeals to some; it's sort of worker-placement, sort of area-control, definitely monster-fighting, cards you can buy to gain abilities, sixteen different "factions" to choose from each with its own special abilities, variable dynamic board with special spaces... I should have taken stronger note of the game-runner asking us, at the beginning, to just go with it and if we aren't having fun don't let it show. The game has a lot of stuff, so you need a large table, and the con's options for that are bad, and the game components were already visually challenging even before that... Thumbs down. (Bucket: A.)

• High Frontier: Dani really likes the idea of Phil Eklund's games, which tend to be about biology and evolution and get very, very detailed. I noted the BGG complexity rating of 4.35 (out of 5) and suggested that maybe we split up for that session. He reported that the game has a lot of potential and he'd like to figure it out, but if he's going to burn social capital on getting a group together to figure out a long complex game, it's not going to be this one.

• Learn to play: Nassau: Rum & Pirates is a good game. It didn't need a second level, adding a seafaring phase after each city phase. 'Nuff said. (Bucket: A.)

• Foundations of Rome: Loved this. Players are building three types of buildings (residential, commercial, civic) on a shared grid. You each have a supply of buildings of different sizes and shapes. In order to build, you first have to acquire deeds to the land you'll need. Deeds come out for purchase in random order, so while your goal might be that big bank that requires four spaces in a square, you might have to start with a couple one-space houses or bakeries or whatever and then replace them as you get the land you need. (You can always replace to grow, but you can't subdivide.) Most buildings score based on what they're adjacent to, so there's a lot of player interaction. Our game took about an hour.

  The game is physically beautiful. You get a tray of three-dimensional, decorated little buildings, with clear indications on their tops about how they score. Based on the images at Board Game Geek, there's a whole fandom around painting those miniatures. The game is very expensive (over $300). I don't think it would be nearly as satisfying to play without the nice components, but we're not shelling out for that, either. This game might be one we look for at conventions. (Bucket: A.)

Friday

We got almost none of our first-round picks for Friday, so we ended up assembling this from still-available parts.

• Learn to play: Liftoff 2.0, run by the designer: Competitive space-program development starting in the 1950s. Players develop technologies (like orbital satellites, first-stage rockets, and capsules) and do research to improve their safety. You schedule future launches and do your best to develop what you'll need to a level of safety you're willing to go with, and then you roll the dice for each stage of the launch to see how you did. You gain prestige points from successful launches and from being the first to do things like put a man in orbit. Prestige begets better funding. Failures and random events can set you back, and you might decide to scrub a scheduled launch if your research didn't pan out enough (or you ran out of money to fund it). This is a remake of an older game I've never played. I'm interested in seeing the finished game (we played with a prototype and I gave some feedback on some vision issues).

• Town Builder: Coevorden: Tableau-building card game. Each card can be used as either a specific (proto-)building or a specific resource. To build a building, you buy its card and then accumulate the resources that will be needed to construct it. When you have all the resources, your building is built and you can use any special abilities it gives you. Buildings are worth victory points (harder buildings are worth more), and there are also some random goals like "have three civic buildings". It's a fairly quick game, maybe 45 minutes (box says 30-60). We chose it in part because of the publisher, First Fish -- we like another of their games. We bought this at the convention.

• Corps of Discovery: Lewis and Clark and Monsters. This is a cooperative deduction game with periodic specific goals. Players are exploring a map, turning over tiles to reveal things like water, food, forts, and threats. You are told some "rules" for placement like "water and food will always be adjacent", which lets the group reason about the not-yet-revealed spots. You need to collect certain resources at certain times, have food and water and a campfire at the end of the day, and gather things to improvise weapons for when the monsters find you. We both liked it a lot and want to get it. I do hope there's enough map variability, given that there are those constraints, to keep it interesting. (I mean, I used to accidentally memorize the eye chart at my vision exams before they introduced more variability. I didn't want to...) (Bucket: A.)

• We also attended two seminars, one on 19th-century science fiction and one allegedly on military logistics in ancient and medieval times.

Saturday

• Kingsburg: Each player has a province that you're trying to improve. The game plays through five years of four seasons; spring, summer, and fall are for production and building, and in the winter the monsters come out. By winter you need to have enough strength from the buildings you built or the mercenaries you hired. On your (non-winter) turn you roll three dice and can spend them to claim positions from 1 through 18 -- standard worker-placement rules, first come first served. You could use just one of your dice to get that wood on 4 that you really need, or you can combine them to get higher-value items. You need an exact match, so depending on how you rolled, you might not get what you were trying for. You can see what other players rolled, so you can reason about what they might take from you or what you can safely leave for later. We both liked this. (Bucket: B.)

• Learn to play: Canals of Windcrest: Sequel to Mistwind, which we like. Despite it being marked "learn to play", there was a large, fast info dump at the beginning and it looked like there wouldn't be a lot more, and there are a lot of moving parts, and I was not feeling good about it, so (after confirming it wouldn't mess up the table) I bailed. Dani played and reported that it's a good game but, yes, lots of moving parts that he only started to understand after playing. (Bucket: A.)

• Unpub: There is an area set aside for game designers to test-drive works in progress. For players, you can just show up, look around for something that looks interesting and has the "needs players" flag up, and go join. While Dani was playing Canals I wandered in there and joined a game called Toll the Dead. (This turned out to be thematically coincidental; see next entry.) This is a cooperative game with limited communication (made me think of Crew in that regard). The dead and also the destroyer are working their way up through the nine circles of hell trying to escape; the players have to stop them. Your tools: bellringers who do damage to enemies in the same space (maybe more) and then move, and variable special abilities. You roll dice and then allocate them semi-secretly; everyone can see if you're bringing in a new ringer and where, but most other actions are secret. (There's more to it, but I don't want to do anything that might impede the designer. For example, Origins has a no-photography rule in this room.) I enjoyed the game a lot and after we played the designer asked for feedback (general and some specific questions) and we had a good conversation. She's hoping to pitch it to a publisher, not Kickstart it, so there's no URL to follow right now but I did get a card so I can check back later.

• Inferno: A "soul management" game, the publisher says. Each turn has two places, below and above. Below, you are trying to guide souls to the correct circles of Hell, gaining infamy (victory) points when you deliver them. Above, you are placing workers in various buildings in Florence to get corresponding game effects. What you did in Hell restricts what you can do in Florence. Hell gets restocked when players use the Florence action to accuse someone of sin, which gets you benefits in Hell. There are scoring tracks (one for each circle) and you only get to score a track at all if (a) you have one of your markers there and (b) you managed to place a different marker there, the means for which were a little unclear to me. It felt like a very complicated game; BGG says 3.57 but I would have put it at 4+. I don't mind that I played but I'm not looking for another game of it. (Bucket: A.)

• Learn to play: Terraforming Mars: Ok, it's like this. I've been around games of Terraforming Mars. I've been around one struggling teaching session of Terraforming Mars that persuaded me to be elsewhere in a hurry. It looks super-complicated and super-fiddly. This session, though, was a delight. The person running it (just a regular gamer, not from the publisher) was excellent and enthusiastic. I now understand why some of my readers like this game.

  Players are each playing a corporation who are collectively trying to make Mars habitable. There are joint goals, like increasing the oxygen level and temperature, and you get victory points when you contribute to those goals. You also have other ways to get points. At its core everything depends on two things: what resources you have (and can generate), and what cards you choose to buy and later play. Card-management is probably pretty strategic once you know what you're doing; in this game I was playing more tactically, becuase how would I know if this card I can buy on turn 2 might be useful five turns from now when the temperature is high enough to allow me to play it? Stuff like that. Cards can give you resources, better resource generation, ways to earn points (I had "Pets", which collects points when people build cities), discounts on standard actions (like placing a forest tile), and lots more. Each round there's a card draft where you can choose cards to keep (for a fee). Playing them also costs money. Your corporation gives you some special advantages, which you should factor in, but sometimes the best cards just don't show up (or show up at the right time).

  Our session, with teaching and coaching and some discussion after, ran a little over three hours. With experience, it's probably a two-hour game, or maybe even shorter. (Bucket: B.)

Sunday

We were signed up for two two-hour games on Sunday (both in bucket A). The first one was a no-show, and we decided that the second one wasn't compelling enough to wait for and headed home instead. Playing games most of the day for several days is already pretty tiring (more for me than for Dani I think), and we didn't do a great job this time of padding the schedule with non-game (or non-game-in-the-room-with-the-enervating-fluorescent-lights) activities. One solution there -- at the cost of making the jigsaw puzzle more complicated -- might be splitting up here and there like we did this time. For example, I like RPGs more than Dani does, and I haven't played any at conventions.