Gen Con 2009 Day 3
Friday, August 14th
Our day started, once again in the Rio Grande room, where we found an open spot for the game Witches Brew. For a fairly simple game, the rules are written in such a way as to confuse all of us. Now granted, it was the morning, and we didn't actually bother to read all the rules, but that's a nit pick. Eventually since we looked like a bunch of beached salmon, one of the workers came over and clarified the game for us in about 3 minutes. I am sure glad we saved time from reading a 3 page rule book when all we had to do is try and infer rules for 30 minutes from the margin reference and our own gaming instinct. The game is decent. Not real deep, but enough to have some replay value.
Next up, a full play of base Dominion to teach Curt and Kevin. It was a chapel game, and I was the one who outdrew Nate, so quickly ran away with this one. Nothing exciting here.
Again, to the exhibit hall for another 60 minutes of wandering before finally finding a demo to play. I have to say that the exhibit room is disappointing this year for me as it is much harder to actually find game demos that are open. It takes lots of time for very little payout. Nate settled into a Zman game of some sort, Curt and Kevin did another one, so I went to check out the gimmick on a flashy looking game called War on Terror. The Scottish guy who gave me the pitch kept me interested, and I realized that they also made "Crunch", which I had seen a Board Games with Scott episode on. So I bought it.
When they finished up, the plan was to head to room 212 for a panel with Knizia, and other big name designers and/or publishers. I had a brief glimmer of hope of glomming onto Wades True Dungeon group before missing out on it for any number of possible reasons that you would expect for trying to arrange it 20 minutes before it started. So I caught the back half of they panel where I got to hear 5 people ask the same question that was answered the same way each time. It all went a bit like this:
"Mr. Cool Guy, How do I get you or somebody to make my game successful"?
Answer: "You have to be tenacious, you have to be lucky, and you have to actually do the legwork yourself instead of expecting somebody to hand you their hard earned cash just because you want it".
Nate and Kevin went for lunch, while Curt and I headed back to the Rio room for a game of Dominion: Intrigue with a couple of pickup players who were new to the game mostly. It went real slow due to the stupid swindler, and we were still playing when Nate and Kevin returned. One of the random guys, "Bob", won this and then came with the 4 of us over to a game of Sherwood Forest. This is a worker placement game with a pseudo-coop mechanism that is forced down our throat. This is what made the game unique, and also what made me not like it. Bah... another fail.
Nate wanted to go do the Battletech simulator, so he and Kevin roamed off to do that while Curt and I tried another stab at the exhibit room. This time we lucked into a demo of "Bombay" at the Asmodee booth before having to wander too much. The game is another traveling salesman variant that is fairly easy to figure out, and mostly just uninteresting to me. Not a terrible game, but nothing too spectacular.
We agreed to meet back in the Rio room at 5:00 pm, and it was now 5:30, so we headed over to find Nate and Curt in a game of Bonnie & Clyde. I don't know much about the game, so ask Nate. Curt and I reserved another spot at Royal Palace to sit and wait. When they came over, this was Kevin's first game of Royal Palace to our 2nd. We should have smoked him.... yeah. Not really, he crushed us. I still like the game. Curt managed to solicit a facebook invite from Booth Babe Beth. What a schmoozer....
On the spur of the moment we decided to get into a 4 hour LARP session that started at 8pm. I was interested in trying this as I have never done a LARP despite having a rich RPG background. So we picked a random one that accepted general tickets called Year Zero: The Dawn of the Super Hero (or something like that). It was a setting similar to Hero's where most of the players are in the discovery phase for a series of unique super powers. It seemed very imaginative with rich characters, and the GM was a good orator. The session had 2 problems for me: One, We had 7 players for a 20 player game. Two, Somewhat related, there was about 30 minutes of content all jam packed into a 4 hour session block. My character quickly ran dry of any sort of motivation or direction, and so I became bored for the middle 2 hours of the session. I like the idea of LARP, but short of a couple brief spells, I didn't really enjoy my experience today.
That was it for downtown, so we took a quick tour of the airport then headed back to our hotel for some food. I read through the rules on Crunch and tried it with Curt. It didn't really get me going, but I neutered a key rule I think, and its also probably not a good 2 player game. Oh well, it was only 15 bucks.
Summary of New Games:
Witches Brew - Try
Sherwood Forest - Deny
Bombay - Try
LARP (Year Zero) - Try (for LARP in general)
Crunch - Try
I guess game of the day was once again Royal Palace. The rest of them I was lukewarm on.