I got there right as it started and, apart from when the board game cleared out for supper, I had no problems finding games and moving from table to table to play with a wide variety of folks.
Highlights:
I played Reiner Knizia’s Money twice back in 2009, back to back games on the same night. At the time, I was really impressed with it but we just had too many games to try and it never made it back on the table. So I took it along because I had an itch to try and see if it was as good as I remembered.
Money is actually better than I remembered. Simple rules with complex decisions and a tight economy. It’s not quite an auction game or a drafting game but it has elements of both. And you definitely do your best to track the cards as they go from person to person. We had a second game immediately after the first.
I got to try a game I’d never heard of called Island of Eldorado, where you build a map, gather resources, build infrastructure and occasionally get in a fight. The end goal is to build four shrines and find a chalice. I won by the sheer luck of finding the chalice as soon as I entered the separate cave map. Very well produced. I’d play it again.
And I finally got to play Alien Frontiers, even if it wasn’t my own copy which is still gathering dust. That was a lot of fun. At least in the base game, the economy of points was much tighter than I had expected. I can see why Alien Frontiers has gotten all the the love it has. Definitely want to play more.
And I was able to sit in for someone who had to leave in a game of Clank, which was enough for me to learn how to play. While I am never going to stop thinking that the game’s name means it should be about robots, I did think it did a really good job blending dungeon crawling with deck building.
I also got in plays of Burke’s Gambit, Jorvik, my first two-player game of Circle the Wagons and HUE, which seems like a filler I will play at every event. It was really good as a tiny little con experience.
