Fraser McHarg: BorderCon 2009

In most states in Australia last weekend was a long weekend with Monday being the Queen’s Birthday public holiday.  I believe it is not actually the Queen’s real birthday, but we will gladly take the holiday in lieu.

Realistically we should have been packing for the Big Trip (TM), but decided ages ago that we should get the children to stay at Melissa’s parents and take a break for a long weekend of gaming with fellow gamers from Albury, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and probably other places too.

We are pretty sure that this was the first weekend that we have had away from the girls, but given that we actually started going out at a gaming convention, it seems apt :-)

I took a notebook, but then left it in our room for pretty much the whole convention, so here’s what I remember.

Friday night.
We arrived after a 3 hour cruise drive, checked in and said hello and then went out for dinner.  We came back and broke out Powerboats. this along with Small World seemed to be a hit of the convention.  We had the only copy there and it seemed to be played an awful lot.  I like the game, but was surprised at how popular it was.  One group decided that because there were “only” 18 dice supplied and they had six players that they were restricted to a maximum speed of 3 dice!  Wimps!

Saturday
The first cab off the rank after breakfast was Die Macher.  It was the Valley Games edition and I must say after trying to discern the difference between what we called Pro Nukes, Pro Warehouses and something else I am very glad that I have the Moskito edition.  I like nice art, but in games the art needs to be functional and promote the game play not detract from it.  With three newbies it clocked in around the four hour mark.  I must make the effort to play this more often.

Snow Tails was a very requested game, so I taught a four player session and got around the track without damage, but secured last position.  This game really needs to be played with at least four players for maximum fun.

Next up was a five player Chicago Express.  I am still trying to get my head around what I should really be doing in this game.  Sometimes I think I have it and do well, and other times I do really badly.

I then played Zack & Pack.  One person described it as three dimensional Ubongo.  The Kosmos box is somewhat large for the contents, but it is a good, fun, quick game.  You roll up a number of five different boxes that you have to stack in a truck.  The boxes are length one to five.  You then have to pick a truck which you have the best chance of stacking and/or packing your goods into.  The trucks may have 1 to 4 levels available for stacking and vastly different footprints.  You have to quickly choose a truck from in front of someone else or get stuck with a random truck from the pile.  You get penalised for empty space left in your truck and double penalties for any boxes left outside of your truck.

After dinner we played a five player game of Agricola.  I never seemed to have enough wood, or didn’t concentrate on getting enough wood and ended up some decent grain and vegetables, five people and a fair few boar in the forest but nothing else at all.

Sunday
Continuing the tradition from Saturday of starting the morning with a long game I played my first ever 18xx game.  I joined a game of 1825 Unit 1.  I liked it.  I will have to make an effort to break out my copy of 1830.

The next one I remember is Make ‘n’ Break Compact.  Much like Zack & Pack the box is a tad too large for the contents, but the components are definitely a compact version of the great original Make ‘n’ Break.  We had this demoed to us about two years ago by a Ravensburger representative at the Australian Toy and Game Fair.  Melissa realised that the they have changed the ‘timer’ die rules.  It is now that the timer player rolls until they reach 15 (the die has a number of blank faces that count as zero), the original rule was you rolled aiming for 7.  If you exceeded 7 you started again.  I wonder which version of timer rules the German edition was released with?

This was followed by two plays of Roll Through the Ages.  Definitely a fun dice game.  Lots of nice bits, but very pricey in Australia at over AUS$60.  If it was a cheaper I would definitely buy a copy straight away.  After playing it I remembered reading some articles talking about increasing the number of developments from 5 to 7.  I had no idea what they were talking about at the time, but the consensus of our players was that would be a good idea.  The game really seemed to just start to get going and then it was finished by somebody building their fifth development.  I should probably just retire from playing this game with my unbeaten record intact ;-)

The last game before dinner was Cutthroat Caverns probably with an expansion or two thrown in.  I have only played this twice and both times were at the same physical table 18 months apart.  The party obviously didn’t like me, with a number of critical misses and other things thrown at me meant that I ended up dead by the fifth or sixth monster.  I should have remembered to drink the iron skin potion that I stole off Melissa before what turned out to by my final encounter :-)

After dinner we played Brass.  I came in third by one point, but considering I don’t think my income exceeded three pounds for the entire game I thought that was quite good.  The lack of income meant that I had to pass on my last five actions which was not so good.

Monday.
I had time for one game after breakfast before we headed back to Melbourne.  Surprisingly there were still a couple of people who hadn’t played Powerboats, so we played that again.  Local readers will be interested to know it popped up in the latest email from MilSims, so it is actually available in Australia now (or maybe it has been for a while and I just didn’t know about it).

Melissa and I have both been fighting off some dreaded lurgy for the last week or so and thus neither of us was feeling up to late late night gaming, but we still had a lot of fun, caught up with lots of friends and played lots of games.

Thanks in particular to Neil, Patty and other locals for putting on a good show.

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