Hazy memories of Vegas Showdown

 It has been a long time since I’ve played Vegas Showdown. That said, I remember it fondly and it is probably my favorite Las Vegas themed game. (In case you are curious, Cheapass’s Vegas (also known as James Ernest Writes Off Another Trip to Vegas) is my least favorite)

It was part of what I was told was initial games that Wizards of the Coast put out under the Avalon Hill imprint after they got the legal rights to the name. Which was a really weird thing to experience. Avalon Hill was an august institution that has helped shape the United States’ hobby gamer culture. Having games that weren’t high concept war games under Avalon Hill felt strange, particularly for people like myself who were too young to have actually experienced the Avalon Hill of old and just had the stories grognards told us.

Which in retrospect is actually pretty hilarious. Avalon Hill actually published a much wider variety of games, including reprinting Sid Sackson’s games from 3M. In fact, Monsters Menace America was a revision of Monsters Ravage America, the last game old Avalon Hill put out. More than that, the company had been sold almost eight years before Vegas Showdown and had plenty of products come out in that time.

So much of my understanding of how Vegas Showdown came into the world turned out to be complete balderdash and in fact gamer folklore. Vegas Showdown would have been perfectly at home with the older Avalon Hill’s catalog.

Still, Vegas Showdown represents an early point in my boars gaming life. A time when I realized that that GenCon wasn’t just for RPGs. (A lesson that would completely fill a walk-in closet with board games)

Vegas Showdown is about elements of a casino getting auctioned off and then putting them together in your own board to create your own personal casino. And it’s been well more than ten years since I last played so I’m blurry on some details. 

But what I do remember is that the satisfaction when you ended the game with a casino that filled your board and brought in both money and people. When you managed to bid for the right pieces and make them work.

And, since then, I have played a lot of games that are engine builders. And, yeah, when you make the engine purr like a kitten, it is serious happy. But Vegas Showdown was an early experience like that.

And I suspect it holds up. A casino is a small enough and concrete enough idea to be easy to immersed in.

When I signed up to playtest Casinopolis, I wondered if it would be an experience like Vegas Showdown. Of course it is completely different name but it was nice to have those memories come back.