Monday, July 31, 2017

My Tiny Epic Experiences at RinCon's July fundraiser

Two or three times a year, RinCon has fundraisers. Which basically means that, in addition to having a friendly local gaming convention in Tucson, we get a couple micro conventions. It's pretty awesome.

I hadn't been able to make the April or June fundraiser so I made sure that I went to the July one.

The guy in front of me in the registration line didn't come with a group either so I introduced myself and I ended up gaming with him for the rest of the morning and the afternoon. Luckily, he turned out to be a great guy. (Thanks, Craig)

He had both Tiny Epic Galaxy and Tiny Epic Quest. I had been very eager to try out Galaxies and I was willing to give Quest a try. Those two games ended up being the highlight of the fundraiser for me. Other folks sat down with us and played. I basically got my chair and everything else fell into place.

I got to play Tiny Epic Galaxies both with and without the expansion. I backed both and I'm glad I did. It is a slick design and the tiny part barely impacts function. I can understand why it is the best regarded of the Tiny Epic series.

In between Tiny Epic experiences, we got in a couple games of HUE. Every time I go to one of these events, I take the Pack O Games with me and I always seem to at least get HUE on the table.

At this point, I have played HUE with five or six different groups. And it keeps on getting better every time. The first time, I thought it was okay. Now, I think it's really good. This was the first group that really started using the poison cards and they worked better than I expected.

I didn't back Tiny Epic Quest since adventure games haven't been my style. (Although I have been coming to like them more, partially because the difference between them and RPGs has been shrinking for me) It was described to me as Zelda as a board game.

And boy, was it ever. I'm not much of a video game player but I could see enough at parallels with the Nintendo franchise that Tiny Epic Quest totally felt like Zelda to me. You travel across the map to explore temples and learn magic and fight goblins. Minimal for an adventure game but that minimalism actually created a lot of tension. So much to do with so little.

While I was leaving, I somehow got in a quick game of Cunning Folk which I did a _terrible_ job teaching. But I'd like to think the other players at least pretended to have fun.

It wasn't the start of RinCon for 2017 but it was the start for me and a jolly fun start it was.

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