It’s Sunday night and I’m beat. We were up until 3am playing a cracking game of A Study In Emerald wherein MOUTH failed to disclose via his actions in game which faction he was on due to rather erratic play. I was in the lead after destroying a couple royals but the Loyalists could have pulled out a win if they crushed my partner in restoration who was down to a single agent on the board. Mouth, shockingly, played a card to push the Loyalist War Track up to 10, ending the game, at which time he revealed himself to be a Loyalist. This after murdering another Loyalist player’s agents with the Vampire (Matt’s). Madness.
ASIE is a fantastic game, every time I play I get better at it and it gets more fun!
I spent some cash at the con, needless to say. Notable stuff I picked up: Decision at Elst, a Squad Leader starter kit campaign, SECRETS by Eric Lang, Ethnos, 1914 Quartermaster General and I went ahead and spent the 30$ to get the board game geek exclusive Blood Rage miniature (Hili).
I got to see CMON’s Rising Sun played, and saw someone walking around with a copy (they won it in a charity auction) so I think Rising Sun may be closer to shipping than we have info on from Kickstarter. I also got to see Massive Darkness played, which, while I kickstarted it, I’m not totally sold on the co-operative gameplay yet. Nice minis though right?
One odd game we got to play was Mr. MeeSeeks (from Rick and Morty) which is pretty great if you can play with girls and are drunk. It is not an all-guys game WHATSOEVER. I saw, but did not get to play Anatomy Park, also from Rick and Morty.
RPG’s were fun but a bit scarce this year. I played in an excellent game of Mythras based on the 80’s sci fi world Luther Arkwright. I’m going to pick up that book and see if it will work well for a BPRD style game. We played as Luther, Rose, another sex-addict character from the graphic novel, the Avengers (emma peel, johnathan steed) and Dr. Who (8th) in a sort of murder mystery, find the bomb game with dueling psychics and science! It was great fun.
My Mythras game was set in 1648 during the battle of Roicroi and the characters were Walloon deserters from a defeated tercio who fled into the town only to find it very strange indeed. Everything ended with a double hendersen and I feel I did a good job for only two hours of play.
The following day I ran Sailors on the Starless Sea, a DCC funnel adventure) for a big and rotating group of people who got exceedingly drunk during the affair. It was a lot of fun for me to try to manage the chaos, but it became too loud with the yelling for anyone to hear, so we didn’t get the adventure done on account of gin and the like. Someday I will finish running that all the way through: it is a pivotal module for DCC fans.
My favorite new game of the Con is probably Ethnos, but I really like Quartermaster General 1914 as well. We played about half a game of that and it clicked for all the players (too late at night though!). We’ll see which of those get more play. Ethnos with 6 players is really difficult to manage as a euro.
My favorite non-gaming thing was the Museum. I hope they do that every year. We get a mini one every Gary Con, but this was gencon big and had a ton of really cool stuff.
One thing my brother said on the way home was that Gencon is an anomaly from normal life because everyone is NICE. Packed in to a dealer hall, destroyed bathrooms and feeding areas you’d thing there would be dickheads and fights and yelling (remember, a LOT of people are drunk and high at gencon, like any other convention) but I never saw a single thing that wasn’t nice. That is really saying something, especially sitting in the Trump era where people seem to be going out of their way sometimes to be total cunts.
Pics are forthcoming. Now back to the grind.
I want an huge fan of Ethnos. It was ok. It seems like it is more randomly controlled than strategically controlled.
1914 was my favorite new game of the con. It has a very steep learning curve at the beginning, then it seems like it will just fly by. I need to give it another go.
The STudy in Emerald game was fun, and had that insane twist, but was kind-of a letdown because one team member was a tired letdown that made huge sleepy mistakes that made my team lose. It was tight at the end, we thought we had it because the sleepy person played mostly like he was on the other team: utter failure.
The Spies game was fun, but it needs some playthrough on account of it being too chaotic with The Who’s who. It’s a more difficult, more thinking sort-of party game than secret hitler and others of that type.
I missed not violating this year. I will next year.
I didn’t get to see the demo of Rising Sun, or enough of it to know anything. I wanted to demo Massive Darkness. I will have my chance once Dan and Amy get it.
My hall time could have been extended by two hours that wasn’t Sunday, so I could demo games and spend time at booths.
Too much drunkenness and light party games. I will need more board games and RPGs. I was light on events, only four or five, that was good.
For me Ethnos is a better version of Small World. Small world is a good 2 player, but not a good multiplayer game.
Dude the hall was too packed to get any demos, to buy any of the big games (like Starfinder or TI4 or Kingdom Death not that we have interest in those) … it was TOO PACKED.