GenCon
August 11, 2022 | ≈ 4772 words | gencon
Thoughts on GenCon
Ok so I went to gencon. Besides the fact that I had an amazing time getting to know the local friend I road tripped with and their entire family, this is going to be a chronological account of the board games I experienced and my thoughts on each experience as I remember them for the 2 people who are going to read this. Starting with:
Townsfolk Tussle. Back to the town of Eureka Falls. This was the game we decided to play to wind down after a grueling 16 hour trip we split 3 ways. I played this at 2 player with the road tripping friend and it set the precedent that people get fucking tired at 12am. No longer can people hold a smile and be joyful with mirth when people want to fucking sleep. Townsfolk Tussle is one of my favorite games of all time but not even my enjoyment of the game can save a tired man from wanting nothing else but calling it and going to bed at 1:30am.
Wednesday afternoon we start with Leaders of Euphoria, a throwaway game. I think this set the tone of how most games were going to play out (pun not intended). Most games that the group chose were games that they enjoyed in previous years because of their other friends who buoyed the experience and propelled it into utter chaos and entertainment. This second loud group stayed separately this year and it was immediately apparent how boisterous and rambunctious that group was when I eventually met them, as they are the kind of people who enjoy being the loudest people in a crowd screaming about how much fun they’re having. Without this group of people, and sitting in the midst of sleep-deprived and introverted gamers, my tendency to mirror the energy of the other people I’m playing with overwrote the obviously necessary chaotic energy this game required, and the session ended with 3 short 5 minute games. Oh and the actual game? It’s just Mafia but everyone can have a gun. The first round was someone randomly trying to eliminate me first and me deciding to eliminate myself and everyone getting upset and wanting to start over. Sorry I guess.
Next would be 5 player Spirit Island. What a fucking game man. I rarely get to play this one but as soon as we cut this game short I bought a copy because this shit is what I need in board games. Just the way your character progresses and gets more and more powerful until you’re single handedly ending the game is an incredible experience. We’d end up playing Spirit Island again later that day and I have to say, Shifting Memory of Ages is my favorite spirit by far. Spirits never forget.
Next was Captain Sonar. Again, trying to rekindle the experience of chaos and frenzy that clearly was not going to happen but in this case it was entirely my fault. I was more willing to halt the game to have everyone understand the rules and instead of leaving people out to dry and letting them collapse under the stress. Including every single person in a game does not automatically make the game fun it turns out. And even though Captain Sonar is legitimately one of my favorite games, having people tell me they never want to play the game again doesn’t really feel that good, however valid that opinion is.
Wednesday done. Onto the first day of GenCon.
First was a quick demo of Tabriz, which is a game created by the designer of Cascadia, a nothing game I did not particularly enjoy. Tabriz following directly in Cascadia’s footsteps is another nothing game about breezily waltzing to materials around the board and spending them to make points.
After slowly walking through Tabriz, we walked around the show floor for a few hours wherein I got a chance to talk to THE CREATOR OF DUELYST himself, Eric M. Lang. I found out he was the sole designer of the game, and he was aware of the remake. What a fucking guy. Got him to sign my badge but he did not make it out to me which I forgot to ask. So instead I decided I didn’t want to go back and get him to write anything more so I manually signed it “To my Duelyst fan:” No shame.
New things I noticed were that Ahoy from Leder Games was available to buy which was the newest game from the Root guys, and there was a prototype of Point City that was sitting there at the Flatout Games booth, unavailable to play or demo. Neither was Skyrise, another prototype from another booth Roxley games that was unavailable to play or demo. Very cool. Skyrise being a reimagining of Metroplys, a strange chess-like game and Point City being a tableau building alternative to Point Salad. Not that I know anything about how the games play since I was unable to even try to attempt to play them. I literally asked the person if I could just demo a round of Point City and play some cards and they said “Oh yeah I can demo it” and they just proceeded to explain the idea of the game. Thanks Flatout Games demoer, you were extremely useful.
After walking around for 6 hours I had a friend convince me to sit down and play Valiant Wars. It’s conceptually Quacks of Quedlinburg but replace the bag with cards. Except it’s legitimately entertaining and objectively better than Quacks. Bought it on the spot. Turns out flipping cards and pushing your luck is fun. Also it streamlines the entire experience of Wonderland’s War, a massive 2 hour game (4 hour game apparently when I’m not involved) with minis and area control and upgrades, into a 15 minute compulsive card-flipping heads-up affair. As a side note, the designer was showcasing their new game at their booth but I had no interest because it wasn’t a push your luck game. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Next we played the very hyped party game Green Team Wins, the goal of the game being to match your answer with the most people to get points. The game comes with hundreds of prompts and players are tasked with trying to be as mainstream as possible to write the most common answer. Very fun game, fun playing with people who write weird fucking answers. Or trying to get people to all write the same inside joke.
The last event of day 1 of Gencon was helping my friend run their 12 player prototype of their fantasy football style draft simulator attached to a very streamlined euro-style action selection game. I had played the game twice and I am consistently surprised how old-school-euro their designs are and this game is no different. Tracks on tracks with auctions and bidding across a shared board and a shared pool of resources, it’s all good stuff. Sadly it’ll be a while until I get to play it again. Oh and this is where I met the second group, the family friends of the people I was staying with at the airbnb. They spent the game yelling at each other trash talking, generally raising all sails. Good times.
Day 2 started with a good game, but a terrible lesson. I learned that I cannot fucking stand learning by playing. The game being a roll and write in the universe of Mecatol Rex, ie. Twilight Inscription. I spent the first 6 rounds of this game not making a single decision and the demoer not letting me make my own choice in a fucking roll and write which defeats the entire purpose of a roll and write and other people at my table legitimately spending the majority of the time making assumptions about the rules. I legitimately looked like I was being forced into licking dirt, but at the same time why did I pay money for this. Oh did I mention I had to pay money for most things I did at Gencon? Yeah you have to buy tickets for every event you go to, and most of them have someone teaching you a game you had to pay for. So I had the designer of a game drip feed rules to me and my group for 60 minutes while I didn’t get to make a single decision. Sublime. The game was alright though, first roll and write with special powers that I can think of. The lesson here is I’m a misanthrope who just wants to read the rules without the impedance of a demoer.
Next was a game I knew nothing about going into it, and the only thing my friend told me about it was that it was cyberpunk so they wanted to play it. Cool. As someone who barely pays attention to “theme” (the setting), cyberpunk meant absolutely nothing to me. Well, In Too Deep was my pleasant surprise of the con. It turned out to be an amazingly evocative positioning puzzle with interesting tempo considerations, but you have to progress to the hardest objectives to even get to experience the satisfaction of pulling off the toughest puzzles with immense payoff. And it also makes sense to say that you were literally in too deep if you care about the theme at all. Setting up prerequisites for the perfect hit while controlling 3 of the main units and planning exactly the precise number of actions to complete the hardest tier of objectives is a board game moment I won’t forget for a while. Oh and the demoer actually taught the game this time around. It’s good to have someone who knows the rules for once.
After these 2 demos it was time to move onto the free play room which was the “Hot Games” room. The benefit being less people than the games library and no need to check out the game.
First game up was Turing Machine. Mastermind meets boolean logic. Multiplayer Wordle. I enjoyed this iteration of Mastermind as it completely removes the need for a player being the validator for the solution. I set up the game to be easy which made the winner random and the chance of guessing the solution high so people can learn the rules and understand the flow, however, the group I played with felt the game was not interesting at all, since it was too easy to randomly guess the solution. It’s crazy how different people can have such wrong opinions.
Second bad game today (I considered Twilight Inscription an actually good game) was Cat in the Box. Immediately after the first trick we realized how powerful trump was in the game, and the meta from then on was unshakeable. Break trump, then run the entire suit for unassailable points. If any player makes a stupid mistake, punish them mercilessly as you steal the trick for all it’s worth until all of trump is removed. A trick taking game where on the surface there are plenty of decisions of what color to apply to a number, but as soon the game is simply observed, all decisions evaporate. Schrödinger’s decision or something idk.
Terracotta Army was my flop. Drier than the Sahara desert with the group I played with and the part of the game that I thought would be interesting which was the spatial control puzzle turned out to be a dirt simple choice almost every time because of how easy it was to determine what gave the most points. no tension on my end and it completely let me down on the “old-school-euro” front. Board and Dice has not impressed me yet with a game. One good experience and four bad experiences so far.
Attempted to play a goofy physical game in the same vein of throw throw burrito called Hand to Hand Wombat. Failed to launch because the person didn’t teach the game to me nor another person who said they didn’t understand any of the rules, then hated the experience and stopped. Again, it was only proposed because of how much fun other people were having playing the game, which is a very normal thing to do for normal people who play games for fun. It was not great to put it in front of some people and hope they get the same experience when very different people are playing it. Especially one who is very aware that another person desperately wants to stop playing. All things considered, this is definitely a game I’d love to play, but the immediate words out of someone after stopping the game were “I want to go home.” Feels fucking great. 1-5.
Next was Wormholes, a gateway network building game that for whatever reason had an amount of hype surrounding it. After reading the rules I thought I read the rules wrong because there was barely anything to the game. A featherweight set collection game delivered via a route building and hex movement vehicle. Move 3 spaces and put down teleporters. The game took longer to teach and set up than it did to play, which didn’t give me enough time to dislike the game. I guess that’s a plus? 1 for 6 on games played today.
That ends the day. 1 game remotely good that I didn’t even get to finish, 6 games that I never have to play again. But back at the airbnb, we got a chance to play Vengeance: Roll and Fight, an actual good game.
Vengeance: Roll and Fight is literally Hotline Miami: The Board Game. It effortlessly captures the puzzle of the 1 hit 1 kill aspect of the original game while including real time dice rolling for actions and a genuinely thoughtful progression system with the unique unlockable abilities. I didn’t know I wanted to play turn-based Hotline Miami but I’m very very glad I did. 2-6 for the final tally on Friday.
The absolute steamrolling through rules and board games slowed down after Friday as people wanted to continue to waste time walking the show floor and eating food. The first game on the menu was Genotype: A Mendelian Genetics Game. I’m positive this game has been out for like a year and I barely had any interest in playing the demo, but the theme appealed to one of the people in the group so we stopped to play it. Worker placement with light dice drafting. After making 6 decisions in 1 hour we stopped to let the nice man demoing to go see the convention with their wife and family. I wouldn’t have minded playing out the game to be honest. Also this is where the group learned that I do not look like I’m enjoying the game when I am learning and playing the game.
When I’m playing a game for the first time, apparently I absolutely look like I am bored and want to be anywhere else. Which is fair, that’s probably true sometimes, but in the case of this game, the demoer was actively looking for body language and facial expressions that reflected understanding or enjoyment from the people learning and playing which is a good thing for a board game host to be doing especially if someone looks like they’re having a bad time or needs clarification, but they obviously noticed how fucking miserable I probably looked. I basically knew what my next 4 turns were, and my face when figuring that out is exaggeratedly pained. I mean it’s probably on purpose at this point lol. So multiple times throughout the teach the demoer would ask me if everyone understood what was going on, and then waited for me to respond, then look directly at me. And I would notice this. And I would refuse to respond. Then at some point after the third time doing this and them looking directly at me, I said “Yeah I know what my first 5 moves are and now I’m thinking through what you’re probably going to do on your turns so I don’t take too much time on my turns.” I normally don’t have to say that out loud, but it communicates my feelings pretty clearly I think.
So after this experience it was made clear that I should try to look like I’m having fun by smiling when I’m learning a game. I’ll keep this in mind.
Oh I forgot to talk about my experience playing Magic with random people. It sucked. The variant was cool though, you start with a super bad deck, then when you win you get some more cards to add to your bad deck, and if you win you do that 1 last time and compete with other people who have been doing the same thing. It’s kind of like arena mode in Hearthstone or gauntlet mode in DUELYST MY FAVORITE VIDEO GAME. My deck doesn’t matter it was bad, but my first match was against a person who couldn’t play a card for the first 5 rounds and got really upset, then forgot to keep track of health because they were trying to figure out how to not lose, and got really flustered when responding to anything I was saying and was shaking when holding their cards and eventually gave up because they felt like there was nothing they could do. It was genuinely upsetting and I realized that Magic is the only game I play where the organ in my body that tells me to check in on another human being to make sure they’re enjoying the game does not turn on when playing competitive Magic.
Game 2 and 3 were much better though! Player 2 was a very polite man from the midwest and we had a nice time hitting each other once every third turn until I won because I was the first player to play a creature able to attack. Fun fun fun fun fun. Game 3 I realized it was the last match and I realized by this point I don’t like playing Magic with random people. I’d rather just spend time with people I know. I also realized that the organizers just leave the pack at the table and let the players play the game and self-mediate and let them leave without calling anyone over. So I did the obvious thing and let the other guy take the pack and ask if they just wanted to play for fun. And surprisingly they did! We tried to make the best deck we could out of our three (their 4) packs and played a game. I was an idiot and decided that having half my deck be lands was still a good idea and stuck to it. I lost without playing a creature. It was a passable experience.
So after Genotype, we walked over to the Hot Games room and I prayed there was a copy of a game I actually wanted to play available, and I actually got insanely luck and sat down next to a group finishing a game of The Guild of Merchant Explorers, a game I’ve been wanting to play since it came out. I read the rules in about 5 minutes, then quickly taught the game to the group and within 3 actions everyone wanted to buy a copy. You flip a terrain card and put a cube next to something you already have that matches the card’s terrain. And you do that the entire game but the twist is everyone gets a permanent special action each round of the game that wildly specializes your gameplan of putting cubes on the board. It was pretty good, pretty fast, and pretty easy to play. It’s a roll and write that I actually like playing, and that’s saying a lot. Not many roll and writes take the risk of giving people asymmetric actions which is stupid but this one does it and a very satisfying and clever way.
After playing twice, we head to what was clearly the worst game I probably have ever attempted to play which was also the first megagame I attempted to play. Uberspace, it was a tragedy in real time as players struggled to understand what even the point of the game was, and clear direction was drip fed to specifc players and completely descimated anyone who actually understood the rules of the game and conditions since they were removed by the GMs because they fucking thought it was too convuluted to acheive. I have been trying to forget the experience quickly as I spent the majority of the time trying to learn the rules and an equal amount of time trying not to just say the game completely sucked fucking donkey dick.
After that travesty, we went back to the airbnb and played Good Puppers, probably my favorite tableau building game from 2021. It’s a good engine building game with a cool end game objective system, but the best part is that it plays lightning fast and you waste no time waiting for other people thinking about how to maximize whether playing 1 card to play 2 cards is better than playing 2 cards to play 2 cards for 5 minutes. Unfortunately half the people playing hated the game since they played the whole game building up to one thing they misunderstood, and even when I said they can still score the objective the way they planned it, they rage quit the game and just told me they didn’t want to score. Very cool.
After that great experience it was time for another 12am game where everyone is tired except me. We played The Spill, a very Pandemic-adjacent coop game. I like playing coop games but I don’t like playing coop games with tired people because people need to talk and discuss but people don’t want to use their brains anymore. I don’t know why we kept trying to play games this late but whatever I guess. We lost pretty badly but it seemed like everyone liked it? Idk, Pandemic was never a game I was interested in.
Last day, and I was determined to make it a good one. Or at least a memorable one.
8am was the meeting time for the virtual buy/sell/trade no ship market for Gencon. 8am was not the time that the person holding my copy of Blood Rage arrived. I came with the local friend and his car, now known as Jason, who was doing the majority of his buys and sells at this time, and within 15 minutes was finished finding everyone and selling everything. I got my copy of Roll for the Galaxy in 5 minutes, and apparently would wait for the next hour for this person to show up with my game that I had not yet paid for. Jason had to go to pick up his wife and child for the con, and we decided to meet back up later while I waited for the guy to show up with the game I haven’t paid for yet. It is important that I had not paid for the game yet, because I could decide not to buy the game, or more importantly, I could haggle with them on the spot if they ever did show up. Which I did. I waited until 9:15 for the guy to show up and they were rushing and sweating and had forgotten shit and in the midst of all their exasperation was me telling them I want the game I was supposed to pay $50 for, for $40 or I’m not taking it. Which is what happened. $40 for Blood Rage is not bad at all lol.
So the nice thing about Jason having a car was that we could hold the games in there and not have to lug them around the con. But Jason has now left to do more important things besides wait for me to get my copy of Blood Rage and put it in his car. But immediately after I got my $40 copy of Blood Rage I got a very cool idea which I should have realized earlier. I made my way to the Marvel United + Marvel Zombies + Eric M. Lang booth and had my copy of Blood Rage in my hand. I locked eyes with Eric Lang. He looked at me. I looked at him. He looked excited to see me again and probably saw my badge that said “To my Duelyst fan”. I didn’t care. I asked him if he could sign my copy of Blood Rage since I only had a badge to sign on last time and he very nicely obliged and told me his favorite faction was Vetruvian. The obelisks represented the thing that made his game different from other card games because of how crucial positioning them and around them was. I couldn’t stop smiling.
Then after I finsihed beaming, I meandered through the show floor looking at nothing until I got to the Arcane Wonder booth where I saw a guy setting up what looked like the unreleased expansion to Furnace, Furnace: Interbellum. I was extremely interested because getting a chance to play unreleased games was kinda cool and a lot of the value of going to a convention like this. So I asked the guy hey man is this available to play and the guy was like “Yes sir, if you give me about 15 minutes to learn the rules I’d happily do that. This game has just arrived and no one has learned the game yet.” And then I asked if it was ok to just read through the rules and they said “Yes, there’s another copy of the rules if you would like to read through them. Dope. So I read the rules in about 5 minutes and while I’m reading the demoer is trying to sell me on the game and telling me how much he likes the base game. The expansion is neat, adds some cool stuff to the base game that I liked a lot. So I tell the guy hey thanks man it adds some cool stuff to the base game that I like a lot, and the demoer goes “Oh if you’re done reading the rules would you like to teach it to me?” So I end up teaching the demoer how the expansion works and all the new stuff and when I’m leaving I see that the demoer is reading the rulebook for the original game. Very cool.
After the short period of Sunday time in the convention center, we made our way back to the airbnb very early to “play games”. The first game we play is the one I chose which was The Guild of Merchant Explorers. Third time playing and still good. Then everyone decides to play a kids game with the toddler which was probably fun but like I’m not that kid’s family so I watched them all have fun. I played Air, Land, and Sea: Spies, Lies, and Supplies which I thoroughly enjoyed. 2-player 18-card battle-line game that is genuinely a modern classic.
Then after I was done that and the fun group was done Yummy Yummy Monster Tummy, dinner was had and wine was drunk and we all played a 6 player game of Wicked and Wise, a partner trick taking game which became the Jason and Wife show. The people in this group were very familiar with trick taking games in general which made some of Jason’s wife’s moves extremely entertaining as table-talk was completely legal and bluffing and joking and basically just asking what card to play turned what was a strange take on trick taking into a goofy party game. Everyone had a good time and I hope that experience is what people take with them from this Gencon. Sitting on the carpet playing cards and dogpiling on the first person to play a card no one likes. 10/10, fun times with non-gamer wife.
I’d like to finish with that but unfortunately we tried to play another coop at 12am called Dead Men Tell No Tales and unsurprisingly people wanted to sleep and coop and I can’t believe we tried doing this 4 nights in a row.
In total I played 31 games (including demos) in 7 days, and 20 of them were unique. There’s not much I would go back and change about the games played specifically, but next time I’ll focus more on actually creating enjoyable experiences or something. Starting with not driving 16 hours to get to the convention. Thank you for reading.