Kris Hall: My First Gen Con

This past Saturday, Ted Cheatham, Travis Reynolds, and I had a one-day visit to Gen Con. This was my first visit to the con, and I was suitably impressed by the biggest gaming convention in the USA.  If one day is far too short to sample the wonders of Origins, then the time-frustration factor was doubled at Gen Con.

I spent more time at the Fantasy Flight area than anywhere else because FFG had at least five demo and playtest games that I was interested in trying.  But before we get to FFG, let me talk about a couple of other things of interest.

Ted Cheatham took me along on a lunch meeting with Kevin Bender, the president of a new game start-up company called Wonderscapers.  Because the company is still in the process of sampling and refining designs, there are no big announcements now, but I hope to have an interview with Mr. Bender early next year when the company is ready to release its first games.

Tomb.  I stopped by the Alderac Entertainment booth, and played a few demo turns of Tomb, a new dungeon-crawl game designed by John Zinser.  The Tomb box is so stuffed full of heavy cardboard game boards and thick pieces that it feels like a headstone is inside.  I doubt that anyone will complain about the quality of the components of Tomb.

While dungeon-crawls are not really my kind of game, I have played Descent, and I have some idea of what gamers expect.  Tomb seems to set itself apart from Descent in three ways:

1) Players in Tomb run entire parties of adventurers.  There is no co-operation; everyone is trying to grab the maximum amount of treasure for themselves.
2) The game is more big-picture than Descent, at least as far as combat is concerned.  There are no spaces in the rooms for characters to stand on; there is no line-of-sight determination for ranged attacks.  The combat system assumes that every character in your party can fight the monsters, and a handful of dice determine the results.
3) Players start the game by getting a number of cards and then stocking the dungeon themselves.

I liked the sound of this last idea.  There are three kinds of dungeon cards in the game: treasure (which includes weapons and magical gizmos that your party might find useful), traps, and monsters.  At the beginning of the game, players take turns putting dungeon cards face down into the rooms of the dungeon.  This means you already know some of the secrets of the dungeon, and you can plan a strategy based on what you know.  You could put all of your best treasure cards into one room and hope to beat the other parties to it, or put all your worst monsters into one room, and carefully avoid it.

Ted Cheatham acquired a copy of Tomb for the Appalachian Gamers, so maybe I will have a more detailed review of the game someday soon.  But my initial impression of Tomb is favorable.  Quality components, a relatively simple rulebook, and some twists on the dungeon-crawl genre.  I look forward to playing it.

Fantasy Flight Games

Fantasy Flight really didn’t make much of an effort at Origins, but they apparently were saving up their wonders for Gen Con.  FFG had demo games available for their soon-to-be-released titles, playtest games in development, and a box for Starcraft Brood Wars that promises an expansion to the Starcraft game.  I wish I had time to play all of the demo games, but I will only be able to report in depth on two of them.

So what did FFG have that was so interesting?  A copy of Conan, from Nexus Games, that FFG will be distributing in the USA.  A playtest version of the Fire and Ice Adventure Game, a new boardgame set in George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones universe.  A demo copy of Ventura, a game of combat in Renaissance Italy.  A demo game of Constantinopolis, a soon-to-be-released cube-churning Euro-game.  And of course Battlestar Galactica, the semi-co-operative game based on the hit TV show.

Constantinopolis.  Designed by Giancarlo Fioretti.  The mechanisms of this game will be familiar to anyone who has played Puerto Rico, Caylus, or Pillars of the Earth.  Players are medieval merchants who are trying to produce and trade their way into accumulating the most victory points.  Every turn players produce goods (wooden cubes); buy buildings that increase production, give special abilities, or score victory points; and ship cubes on their merchant vessels to earn money and victory points.  The game is colorful and pretty, and the game mechanisms seem to work well together.

Then why was I so under whelmed?  Maybe because every aspect of the game was so familiar.  Constantinopolis borrows and integrates mechanisms from other cube-churning games, but doesn’t really do anything new.  If I didn’t already own Puerto Rico, Caylus, or Pillars of the Earth then maybe I would consider buying Constantinopolis.  But I do own those games, and Constaninopolis doesn’t offer much in the way of innovation to set the game apart from its brethren.

Battlestar Galactica.  Designed by Corey Konieczka.  I expected BG to be similar to Shadows Over Camelot, another semi-co-operative game with a spot-the-traitor mechanism.  But I was hoping that BG would have enough tweaks and innovations to make it seem fresh and worthwhile to gamers who already own Shadows.  I was not disappointed.  The BG designer wisely decided that the spot-the-traitor mechanism was most interesting part of semi-co-operative games, and he developed that aspect of the game while downplaying the kind of detailed quests that are the focus of Shadows.

Like other semi-co-operative games, there are many ways to lose BG.  The human players have four resources they must husband: population, morale, food, and fuel.  If any of these resources drops to zero, the humans lose.  If the enemy Cylons damage enough areas of the ship, the humans lose.  If the Cylon boarding party marker moves down to the end of the boarding track they will vent all the air of the Battlestar into space.  Surprise, surprise: the humans lose.  The humans can win if they make enough hyperspace jumps (or whatever interstellar travel is called—I haven’t watched the TV show) and reach their goal planet.

At the beginning of the game, each player assumes the role of one of the characters from the show.  Each character has his or her own special abilities and special weaknesses.  In my demo game, I played Laura Roslin who has her own special political deck of cards she can draw from.  This political deck contained cards that let me throw suspected traitors into the brig, or release imprisoned characters if I desired.

After choosing characters, players are given a loyalty card that determines if they are a human or a Cylon mole (some characters get dealt an extra card which gives them a greater chance of becoming a Cylon).  The new and interesting development with this mechanism is that halfway through the game, more loyalty cards are given to the players, and they may discover that they are a sleeper Cylon agent, and not a human after all.  Before the game is over, at least two players will discover that they are Cylons.

Another smart mechanism is that a sympathizer card is given out at the halfway point.  This card makes one player join the side that is losing.  In our game, the humans seemed to be doing pretty well, and the sympathizer player became an openly-hostile Cylon.  One nasty ability (from the human point of view) is that the sympathizer player can give his loyalty cards to another player, and turn him into a traitor (if the sympathizer was dealt a Cylon card in the first place), or give another player a human loyalty card just to make other players suspect that someone has been converted to mole status.

What are the actual turns like?  At the beginning of his turn, a player will draw skill cards from the various color-coded skill decks.  These cards contain both a number (used for dealing with crises), and an action or special ability. 

The player may then take an action.  Moving to various rooms on the Battlestar will allow players to perform various actions like fighting the Cylons, or making an emergency hyperspace jump.  Playing one of their skill cards also counts as an action.

Finally, a player must draw a card from the Crisis deck.  These cards sometimes simply state a problem that will occur, but usually they offer the players a way to deal with the crisis by playing their skill cards.  All players are given an opportunity to add skill cards face-down into a crisis pile.  Then the cards are shuffled, turned face up, and evaluated.  If the total of the numbers on the skill cards is equal or greater than the number on the crisis card, then the crisis has been averted. 

Making this more complicated is the rule that only skill cards of certain colors can help solve the crisis.  Cylon moles can secretly add the wrong color skill cards, and the numbers on these cards are subtracted from the total.

After the humans deal with the crisis, they must look for a Cylon symbol on the card that makes the Cylon fleet active.  Various kinds of Cylon ships can circle the Battlestar and either attack or attempt to land boarding parties. 

Finally, players also check the card for a symbol that can advance the Battlestar down a track toward another hyper-jump.  If the Battlestar has made sufficient progress down the track, players can risk a pre-mature jump, but that might cost the humans some population points.

I didn’t get to play a full game of Battlestar Galactica, but I played enough to be intrigued.  In our game, the Cylon sympathizer gave a card to Admiral Adama, and we humans quickly suspected that he had become a traitor.  I was about to throw the Admiral’s butt into the brig when one of players had to leave, and we aborted rest of the game.

I think Battlestar Galactica gives the Cylon moles more to do than the traitor in Shadows Over Camelot, and I believe the designer’s emphasis on the spot-the-traitor mechanisms in the game was a smart design choice.  I hope I get to play a full game soon.

That’s it.  I was only there one day.  In and out of Gamer’s Paradise.  Maybe one year, I’ll smarten up and spend more than one day at a con.

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