Last RinCon fundraiser of the year

Over the weekend, I went to the third and last RinCon Fundraiser of 2018. The convention itself will be at the end of the month but every fundraiser is literally a micro convention. I never get tired of saying how amazing it is that I basically get three or four conventions a year ten minutes from our house.

I was there for about half the time. Found two guys who is famed with last time, grabbed a fourth and we were set for the next several hours. We ended up playing Favor of the Pharaoh, TransEuropa, TransAmerica, For Sale, Azul, Century: Spice Road and HUE. And this was my first time trying play Favor of the Pharaoh, Azul and Century: Spice Road, all games I’ve been wanting to try. (For the record, I think Favor is a superior successor to To Court the King and I really like To Court the King)

Highlights: 

I’ve been wanting to revisit the TransAmerica family, which I’ve been playing off and on since 2003. And it did not disappoint. It’s been some years since I last played and I am actually more impressed with the design now. The rules are famously simple but that simplicity still creates brutal decisions and high tension. And the board design is amazing, to support drawing any combination of cards and reliably make them a pain.

I have been very interested in trying Azul. We are a house that loves Qwirkle and Ingenious and Azul seems right up our alley. Now I’ve played it and it is very high on my buy list. And these days, that’s not an easy list to get on.

My first impression of Century: Spice Road is that it’s the love child of Splendor and Sid Sackson’s Bazaar. (Second impression: Love child of _Dominion_ and Bazaar) I don’t view it as a Splendor killer but a splendid game of its own. It’s not on my buy list but definitely on my play again list.

I went into the fund raiser with high expectations and they were exceeded. I got in a lot of solid gaming, games that might be shorter and have ‘simple’ rule sets but games that also had really interesting decisions. After five years of going to their events, RinCon keeps on delivering.

Reflections after a Carcassonne tournament

While I have played Carcassonne for many years, I recently played in what I'm pretty sure was my first Carcassonne tournament. (Not sure what it says about me that I can't remember all the tournaments I've played in. And, compared to some of my friends, I'm not a tournament player) It was also the first time in ages I played basic, no expansion, vanilla Carcassonne. 

Some thoughts 

1) Brevity. With four players and just the basic set, everyone gets fifteen to sixteen turns, depending on their seating. That makes for a pretty quick game, which is handy for a tournament where time is a definite limiter.

2) Small Foot Print. With only 72 tiles, including the starting tile, you have a fairly small board. I would even go so far as to say claustrophobic. Again, handy for tournament purposes.

3) Luck. Since each player only drones at most 16 tiles, lock can be a Euge facture. If you are looking for the perfect tile, the odds are against you. Luck will play a big part in who wins. That isn't so handy.

4) Cloisters. By the time I started playing Carcassonne, back in the mist of time, the first two expansions were already out and I usually played with those. With a bigger tile mix and more ways to score points, cloisters didn't seem that extraordinary. However, with just the original set, cloisters suddenly become strikingly powerful. Drawing a cloister in vanilla Carcassonne can be big.

(Yeah, I know that that's just a subsection of point number three, walk. However, it was still striking) 

I don't know if Carcassonne is suitable for high stakes tournament. However, it was fun for a light, casual tournament. After all of these years, even the vanilla version holds up well.

Convention fundraiser lets me try out Scythe

The highlight of the July Rincon fundraiser for me was getting to learn and play Scythe. At one point, while I was there, there were at least three tables playing Scythe and very likely a fourth table.

One of the amazing things about the Tucson gaming scene is Rincon. Not only is it a nice local con, it has fundraisers through out the year, giving me some micro conventions to enjoy as well. Seriously, it's a really amazing community.

While I got warmed with a quick game of HUE (which actually manages to impress me more and more with each play), I spent most of my relatively short time there with Scythe.

Scythe is shaping up to be one of the big games of 2016. It's set in a sort-of steampunk 1920 Europe. When I say sort of steampunk, I mean that it reminds me a lot more of the steam powered agricultural equipment of the late nineteenth century. The players play different powers in this Europe, building up their political and economic power.

Scythe is a 4X game, which means eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXtermimate. Which means move out, build up, get stuff and fight. The actual mechanics of the game is action selection. Every player has a dashboard of actions, basically the same but tweaked for their national faction.

To be honest, I'm willing to bet most folks reading this know more about Scythe and have played it more than I have. Since I knew I wasn't going to buy it, it was off my radar.

The first thing that impressed me about Scythe was the design of the player boards. They are slotted for the wooden pieces, making it easy to know what goes where. And when you reassign them, new costs or powers get revealed. Simple but so clever as far as making house keeping quick and easy.

The other thing that quickly struck me is that Scythe has very intuitive mechanics for anyone who has played Euros. I told Carrie afterwards that Scythe is Le Havre on steroids and with fighting. Which isn't a perfect comparison but it gave her an idea of how it works and that she'd be able to pick it up quickly.

My learning game got me trounced. I didn't focus on popularity track enough, which helped tank my score. And I had a blast. It was so much fun and I hope to play again.

Scythe is a really smart design. It has a lot of things going on, game mechanic wise, but all of the gears fit together really well. It's full of tough, interesting choices built on a tight economy. The fact that it has a playing time of two hours is less is just icing on the cake.

I'm not planning on buying Scythe any time soon. Between a two-year-old and three cats, we won't be playing it. But our son will get older and we can lock the cats in the bedroom. In a few years, I can see myself either picking it up or getting a game that Scythe ends up inspiring.

Getting a chance to play Scythe was really amazing. It's looking to be one of the highlights of the year for me. I hope I got to play it again :)

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169786/scythe

A fundraiser lets me go to a tiny little convention

One of the really nice things about the Tucson gaming scene is Rincon, the little gaming convention in the middle of the desert. While it's hard for me to gaming conventions back in the Midwest, Rincon not only gives me a local convention but a couple of fundraisers every year, effectively giving me a couple more mini-conventions.

I have been to a lot of conventions over the years, from giant ones like Gencon to tiny local cons. Rincon's one day fundraisers, taking up about three meeting rooms at the hotel, isn't even the smallest one I've been to.

I feel like every time I go to a Rincon event, fundraiser or the actual full con, I keep on having a better and better time. If it isn't well organized, they hide it well. Everyone is friendly and even the fundraisers have good game libraries. 

I didn't have any problems finding games to spend the entire afternoon playing. When one group that I was playing with had to leave, I was able to find another to sit down with. Highlights included finally getting to play both Forbidden Desert and TAJ. The low light was Konexi.

While I honestly think that Forbidden Island has a definite place in my collection as a really easy cooperative to teach with plenty of eye candy, Forbidden Desert definitely takes the mechanics up a notch as well as the narrative. It definitely is not a simplified version of Pandemic, which I think is a reasonable description of Forbidden Island. Incidentally, we all died of thirst pretty quickly, which brought back memories of Outdoor Survival.

TAJ is one of the more complex and gamer-oriented games in the first series of Pack O Games. I haven't played GEM so I don't know if it is the most complex. It is a game of hitting goals and price manipulation as you try to get your favored rugs to be worth the most.

While I did enjoy it and I am glad to have gotten in the three player game, since I think two player game would not have done it justice, I was left wondering if actually had too many moving parts, mechanically speaking, for its short playing time. On the other hand, I would cheerfully play it again a few more times before deciding that.

Konexi is a dexterity game and a word game. It definitely has a nice toy factor with the large and stackable plastic letters that you to use. However, I felt like you were really limited in your choices. I also thought that including letters like Q and X made it harder to make words.

Rincon in its various forms continues to not disappoint. 

Planning on playing Cities when telecommuting to a convention

Every year, a group of my friends get together in Ohio in order to play games. A little, private micro-convention we call Nitro Billy. However, since we moved to Arizona, going to that gathering of friends has really been impossible.

However, last year, I was able to pay them a visit through the power of Skype. Ever since we moved across the country and away from almost all of our friends and family, both Skype and FaceTime have been really wonderful ways to keep in touch. Seriously, I don't know how my parents did it back in the day when long-distance calls were expensive and the only other option from writing letters snail mail.

Truth to tell, there are a lot of boardgames that you can play via Skype. Last year, while I was visiting the gathering via Skype, I got in a really good game of Pentago and several rounds of Galloping Pigs. If I really wanted to, I probably could have supplied them with a long list of good games.

However, this year I decided to suggest just one game that I felt would be very easy to play via Skype, even in a crowded room full of people playing lots of different games. Instead of trying to push the bar, I try to set the bar at something that would be the absolute easiest to play.

Sometimes, you need to seek out the challenge. Other times, you have to avoid the challenge in order to make sure that everyone has the best time possible.

So I told them that we should play Cities, a game that I've already mentioned in this blog. Cities is literally multiplayer solitaire, with everyone placing the same tiles on their board in order to build their own city in place their own set of meeples as tourists in the city. 

We don't even have to see each other's boards. In fact, as long as everyone has their own set of tiles and meeples, you could play this game via conference call. :D

And I know the group has at least one set of Cities because I gave it to them. And I, of course, have my own set.

As I said, there are a lot of games that you could potentially play. Really, any game without hidden information and board isn't too big to fit on the camera could work. And if someone wanted to set up a scrabble tile holder for the cards and set them in front of the camera (which we have done), card games can work too.

But, as I've already said, I think it's best if we go with something that is easy and doesn't create additional complications.

And, yeah, we could do something like online games with headsets or the like but it's isn't the same as actually using real cardboard tiles and real wooden meeples.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38657/cities