mbarr

Last week was the Origins game con. The folks running it seemed pretty disorganized this year and I was tempted to bail after the train wreck of registering for games, but we'd gotten a non-refundable hotel room so we pressed on. In the end we played some good games, played one game that sounded good but is definitely not for us (better to find out this way), and met up with someone I met online to play a game we hadn't been able to get into (which was a highlight, both the game and the person). There's an open gaming area and some people bring wagons full of their own games, it turns out.

I like role-playing games more than Dani does and I wanted to play some, so one day we split up for half a day and he played crunchy games that are more his style. That worked out. (I'm glad the schedules aligned, especially with all the registration snarls.)

Games

• Four Years to Mars (run by the designer, who worked for NASA): players are competing to complete contracts (aided by research specializations) to advance on eight technology tracks. Action cards allow players to interfere with each other. It was an enjoyable game that I needed a magnifying glass for (for the cards).

• Sanctuary: this had been one of our top goals and registration thwarted us, but I ended up in a Discord conversation with another attendee (comiserating about registration) who offered to bring the game and play with us. He'd only played once (new acquisition for him) so we all figured it out together, but we all had a good time and making a friend in that vast sea of attendees was nice. As for the game: it's similar to Ark Nova but different enough that we bought a copy. Players are building animal sanctuaries using tiles that have animals, buildings, or special projects. Many tiles have placement requirements, so you have to think about where on your map to place things as they come out. Some of Ark Nova's chokepoints are smoothed over, but I wouldn't say it's a substantially simpler game, just different.

• Wizard Miners: light card game with individual decks and lots of player interactions, but a tendency to dogpile on whoever's leading at the moment.

• Viticulture World: "World" is an expansion on the base Viticulture game, which we've never played. This is a worker-placement game where you are planting vineyards, harvesting grapes, and making wine in order to fulfill customer orders for victory points. The expansion adds some complexity and more stuff to keep track of; I suspect the base game is stronger by itself.

• RuneQuest: I hadn't realized RuneQuest is still a thing; I last played in the 1980s. Chaosium was there and running a few one-shots, so I played one and had a lot of fun. Combat is still pretty lethal. The magic system felt more coherent (and everybody still has some magic, unlike D&D). I played a hunter with a "shadowcat" sidekick and that was fun. Another player ran a priestess who (once per whatever-period-of-time-before-you-get-rune-magic-back) could summon an earth elemental, which was very effective in a boss fight. The characters were pre-gens and I don't know what "level" equivalent they were; we had some real skills so we could succeed in the adventure, but it felt like we were low-to-mid. I bought the (new) RQ "starter set" (convention discount).

• RPG Games on Demand: they run several sessions of this throughout the convention. Each game master comes prepared with two games, one of which will be run (players' choice), which mitigates the problem of a GM being stuck with too few players because the game didn't appeal. Players, in random order, choose a game from the offerings; I was more than halfway back in line and my first couple choices were full, but I ended up in a game of Last Train to Bremen. You're playing the members of a somewhat dysfunctional band that made a deal with the devil for fame and fortune -- and are now trying to outrun the devil 'cause the price has come due. There's a lot of improv, gradual revelation of secrets, and making stuff up out of whole cloth in pursuit of the story -- we had a running reference to "the Motel Express incident", for example, and kept building on it. This is not a game I would have sought out; there's more inter-player backstabbing and conflict than I'm used to. But we had a group that was quite capable of separating characters from players, so we players had a lot of fun while our characters were sometimes screwing each other. Never played a tabletop game with a safeword before. The core mechanic of the game is Liar's Dice. Weird but fun. It made me think very vaguely of Dogs in the Vineyard.

• Last Spike: lightweight train game with track-building and investment shares, under an hour. We both enjoyed it and sometimes you really don't have time for Railways of the World or its ilk, so this fills a niche.

• Free Ride (USA map): another fun train game with dynamic contracts where players can definitely interfere with each other, either accidentally or intentionally. The game rewards diversity of cities you visit, so that pushes you to build more rail or pay for access to other players' tracks.

• Inventions: Evolution of Ideas: I'm just going to note that BoardGameGeek gives it a complexity rating of 4.59 out of 5 and that feels right, and when the person running it thought the timeslot was three hours instead of four, neither of us felt moved to correct him.

• Tales of the Arthurian Knights: you're knights of the round table, setting out to fulfill quests (that take you to specific locations) and having encounters along the way (individually). Encounters are usually resolved by rolling against one of a dozen or so skills, which you can advance over the course of the game. It's a choose-your-own-adventure game but multi-player. Aside from reading from the big tome for your fellow players and the occasional case of one player choosing a target location for another, there wasn't much interaction. I found the tome a little hard to manage. We didn't have time to finish our game and I'm not sure what winning looks like.

• Railways of the World: not new to us (we own it and play with friends), but wow were we both outclassed. We're casual players; the Train Gamers' Association (which runs most of the train games at Origins) is full of people who can sit down at a map (which they already know in detail including where the best routes are for track), look at the starting random distribution of goods to be delivered, and plot their first several turns and do the cost-benefit analyses. It's...different.

• Forges of Ravenshire: dice-drafting worker-placement economic game. There's an interesting mechanic where, on your turn, you place a die (doing its board effect) and take a (different) die, also doing its board effect, but the color of the die affects what you can do on your own board. You have specific artifacts you're trying to build, for which you need to accumulate the right resources. This description sounds like lots of other worker-placement games but it felt well-done. We did not have time for a complete game. (The previous game at the table had run long and we were getting kicked out precisely at our end time.)

• Out of Thyme (prototype, to be renamed, run by the designer): your team is exploring Pluto, trying to locate and collect artifacts (the story is about time travel), and the game itself is timed: you have (in the first game) 90 minutes, but things you do and things that happen to you can cost you minutes off that clock. So it's a real-time time-flavored game, which is cute. Each player has a different role with some special abilities, and there are events every round that affect everyone. I had fun and our group had a good discussion with the designer about some details. One thing a couple of us pushed back on is that, currently, the time is managed by a web site or app, and you can't just use a kitchen timer or the like because you need to be able to easily subtract two minutes or whatever. But app/web-based games are a turnoff -- not just the Shabbat issue, but also that these things don't tend to stick around forever and if I buy a game I expect to be able to keep playing it. I'm not sure what the designer could do instead, but it was clear this wasn't the first time he'd heard this feedback.

Unpub

There is an area in the gaming hall called Unpub, for game designers to playtest their designs and get feedback. We played two games there, both of which I enjoyed (maybe more than Dani). Both are looking for publishers, not going the Kickstarter route. I think there's kind of an unofficial NDA with Unpub (photography is banned) lest it interfere with publication attempts, so I won't describe the games, but we played Cafe Hoppers and Nova Raiders, both under an hour.

Hotel

This year we stayed at the Sonesta, which is connected to the convention center by a skywalk. (On most mornings we just walked across the street, but it was nice to not have to cross that street at night.) The room was unusual -- very high ceilings, a chandelier (!), and I think because we were in a corner, an actual hallway from the door to the main room. The room was also not made for short people: I had to propel myself into bed (the mattress was too high for me to just sit on), the adjustable shower head was too high for me to reach, and one peg for holding a towel was also too high. Wow. There was also an oddity that there was a comfortable chair for sitting and reading, but no nearby light -- not an issue with a phone or tablet, but when I wanted to read actual paper on Shabbat I had to move heavy furniture.

The decor signals higher-end, security is good, and the people at the front desk were helpful and attentive to customers as you'd expect from a good hotel. Incongruously, there was a mound of used linens on the floor between the elevator and our room on our arrival day, which on day two acquired a pizza box on top. That was all cleared away on our last day there. Weird. We were also never visited by housekeeping, though we did not have a "do not disturb" sign. I guess if housekeeping had come to our floor earlier they might have done something about the mound. I don't know what to make of all this.

2027

There was a lot of disorganization and poor communication this year; I gather there have been some shenanigans with the organization that runs the convention and they might be thrashing. This left me feeling iffy about next year -- and then they posted the dates, and next year Shavuot is right in the middle of Origins, which is a problem. We don't know what we're going to do yet -- maybe Dani goes alone, maybe we skip a year, maybe we find some other game conventions to go to, or maybe we go and I take a day off since I see there's a Chabad a mile from the convention center. We don't need to decide now.