Patrick Brennan: My CanCon Experience

I had the pleasure of attending Canberra’s premier annual gaming convention, CanCon, last weekend. It’s largely a miniatures / wargaming event, but Don Bone and his crew reserved a corner of the 150-table sized hall for Euro’s so I took the opportunity to wander down from Sydney with two friends of mine, Lindsay Scholle and Rick Doig, with the intention of meeting up with new gamers and trying out some games we hadn’t got round to yet. 

Wandering around the hall, maybe 50% was miniatures – the effort that goes into the landscapes and presentation for these always impresses me. Of the rest, the majority were Advanced Squad Leader, Bloodbowl and Memoir ’44, but I glimpsed A House Divided, and there were a few obscure titles I didn’t recognise (which generally takes some doing).

Milsims, one of the larger Australian online retailers, was present and that was our first stop. They’d seemingly trucked all their stock up from Melbourne and were offering 20% off their online prices – hmmm, taking into account no shipping costs, these prices were now starting to look pretty comparable to those we get when ordering direct from Adam Spielt and the like. So the purse strings opened. We managed to pick up a bunch of stuff that may have been borderline purchases before - PowerGrid expansion maps, Age Of Steam expansion maps, Il Principe, Oceania, Architekton and the like. I’m kind of regretting not picking up The First World War and Manifest Destiny as well, but you have to stop somewhere, especially given I didn’t know I was going to be buying anything at the start of the day.

It was time for some gaming. The Euro corner had a neat system in place - 30 large Perspex containers, each containing 10 or so games. There was an index of all the games, listing which box they were in, how long to play, numbers of players and more. Each game had a sticker on its back saying which box it belonged to. We targeted a bunch of games we didn’t have in our group that were on our ‘wonder’ list – as in wondering if we should buy them - and set about systematically going through them.

I’d been corresponding with Don Bone for a while but we’d never actually met. After introductions, he kindly taught us his latest, Freya’s Folly, which we’d sycophantically picked out first. It’s a nicely constructed game. It takes the Silberzwerg theme of dwarves mining gems to fulfil contracts, but replaces the simultaneous “out-guess the others� approach with a turn-based action-point game. Players have two actions each turn to move dwarves down in the mine to collect gems, pick up contracts, trade gems and the like. Turns move fast. You can be foiled by other players getting to the gems you want first, but the ability to trade gems is forgiving. Effectively, you’re just trying to move and score more efficiently than the other players. It wouldn’t be a high rotation game for me, but I liked it.

Next up was Shear Panic which has received lots of good press about the cuteness of those sheep. This game hit all my wrong buttons however. It was analysis paralysis followed by pure downtime – so much chaos in between turns that no preparation could be done for your next turn. We were all glad to hit lunch afterwards.

We turned to Havoc: The Hundred Years War. It features the sequential battling of Condottiere but uses Poker hands to determine each battle winner. This is square in the genre of ‘when to play, when to pull out, cards are lost regardless’. If you like that genre, this does it nicely.

Last game for the day was Flandern 1302 and we were pretty disappointed. It featured area majority, simultaneous action revelation, convolutions that made some areas more valuable than others and diminishing action selection similar to Kreta. I guess it worked fine, and the game ticked along, but unfortunately it couldn’t make us care. No story arc or tension, just placement over and over again.

You’ve got to look on the bright side though – I just saved a whole bunch of money reducing my ‘wonder’ list. All in all, I really enjoyed the day. There was a nice friendly buzz around the hall. There wasn’t anything outrageously new to play, just a chance to play different games with different people and share the gaming love. Glancing around the tables, most games played were old and new favourites – Euphrat & Tigris, Caylus, St Petersburg, Ra, Ticket To Ride, Durch Die Wuste and the like – and it would be hard not to enjoy a day playing this kind of quality.

A final thought … having a 110 speed limit for the complete stretch between Sydney and Canberra is a thing of beauty compared to years past. Under 3 hours door to door. It certainly makes it a more attractive option to get down there again next year.

© 2006 Patrick Brennan

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Wow, Cancon. It must be ten years since we went up for one. And with Arcanacon the same weekend, we never will. Are you going to the games expo in Albury on the Queen’s Birthday weekend? We’ve been trying to work out how to manage babysitting - it looks like we will be paying for my parents to have a lovely long weekend in sunny Albury (and mind their grandchildren, while we play games). We liked the road as far as the Canberra turnoff, but after that it does get pretty ordinary. Fortunately for us, the Melbourne -> Albury stretch is three lane, divided road all the way. An easy 3 hours’ drive. Posted by Melissa Rogerson on Feb 8, 2006 at 05:23 AM | #

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