Scott Tepper: BGG.CON aka Game Prom, Part 1

Inauspiciously is how I would describe the way my trip to BGG.con started on Thursday. Due to horrible traffic on the expressway, and my mixing up the time of my flight, I arrived at O’Hare airport 35 minutes before my flight took off. Unfortunately, the airlines will not let you check your bags if you attempt to check in less than 40 minutes before your flight departs. The agent at the ticket counter informed me that all the later flights were full, and the only way to guarantee a seat was if I paid $1000 to book a new flight. I literally put my head down on the ticket counter and used all my willpower not to sob. 

Lifting my head off the counter, I mustered up the best puppy dog/doe-eyed child look that I could, and pleaded with the agent to please help me find a way to get to Dallas that night. She took pity on me and went to speak with her supervisor. After 10 minutes of keyboard punching, they found a way to not only get me on a later flight, but they gave me the possibility of flying standby on an earlier flight. Ecstatic, I shouted out loud that “Michelle at American Airlines is a Goddess�, much to the amusement of Michelle’s co-workers.

As I was number 54 in the list of 75 people on standby for the next flight, there was no chance that I’d actually get on it, and so I had to wait for another 3 hours to fly out on the flight that I was guaranteed on. But I was finally on my way!

After arriving at the DFW airport, I quickly headed over to the baggage claim area. Game-playing minutes were ticking away and I had already squandered 3 hours by missing my original flight. I was surprised to see one of my bags already off the baggage belt, waiting for me. Then I remembered that the ticket agent told me that my bags would go on the earlier standby flight in case I was able to get on the plane.

The bag that was waiting for me was the one with 15 Essen and obscure games that I had promised to bring for the BGG.con library. Unfortunately, the suitcase that had all my clothes was nowhere to be found. I did find a bag that looked identical to mine, which was odd since mine is a rather unusual brown bag. I quickly surmised that a passenger accidentally took my bag instead of their own.

The workers at the lost baggage desk were less than enthusiastic about helping me track down my bag. They didn’t really want to listen to my theory of switched bags and instead directed me to keep looking for it around the area, and call the American Airlines hotline.

I called the hotline, and that agent was much more helpful. I explained the situation, and sure enough, the owner of the bag now sitting in the claim area had arrived an hour and a half earlier. The agent called the bag owner, who told her, “I absolutely did not take the wrong suitcase. Here let me check………….Oh no!�. By now it was after 11:00pm.

I had to wait another 30 minutes for the bag owner(thief) to come back to the airport to exchange bags. At this point I wasn’t about to wait for a shuttle so I took a cab to the hotel. Thus I finally arrived at BGG.con a little after midnight. WOOT!

BGG.con is a slight misnomer in my opinion. A con brings to mind teeming crowds, lines, outrageous fees, and disorder. Bgg.con had none of these things. Derk and Scott(Aldie) did a phenomenal job of organizing a fantastic, fun-filled, game weekend.

When you arrive at the con, the first thing you encounter is the reception table. There, a friendly woman gives your name tag that has your avatar pre-printed in the corner. This is a very nice touch for someone like me who has a hard time with names, but an easier time remembering graphics.

With your nametag you receive 3 additional things. First, you reach into a large box to draw a raffle ticket. The color of the raffle ticket indicates which of 2 tables you are immediately entitled to draw a prize from. The ticket will also be used for future prize drawings Friday night. Apparently there was a prize drawing Thursday evening as well that I missed due to my airport adventures. In addition, you are given a separate raffle ticket that will be used for a prize drawing Saturday evening.

The 3rd thing that you are given is a library card with your name on it. More on that in a bit.

Passing through the doorway on your right, you enter 3 interconnected rooms of various sizes, all with a multitude of tables and chairs. I was told that the con was offered larger ballrooms for the event, but those ceilings were much higher, and thus the lighting would be much worse. The lighting in these rooms we ended up with was perfect for game playing.

Upon entering the first room, you can’t help but notice large, cutout, silhouettes of pieces from different games such as a shrimp from Reef Enounter, or a tile from Blokus, decorating the walls. Suspended from the ceiling by fishing line were huge replicas of cards from different games. It looked as if we were at a high school gym that was decorated for prom with the theme, “Board Games From Around The World�.

On one of the walls of the first game room were strips from Ted Alspach’s Board 2 Pieces strip, presumably allowing us to see them before they were posted online. There was also a schedule of events as well as an area set aside for people to post their ratings on games that they played during the con.
If, instead of turning right at the reception desk, you turn left, you’ll go down a short hallway that opens up into a very long rectangular room that stretches far to your left This room had many tables that were set up for game playing as well. Along one of the long walls, there are windowed rooms. One of them was set up as a store for Twilight Games Inc, who was selling games. Along the other wall of the room, a few vendors, such as Z-Man games, were set up at tables to demo and sell their games.

The neatest thing about this large room was on one of the short ends. Walking through a doorway, you emerge into a large square room lined with tables around the entire circumference. Every table was completely filled with games in alphabetical order from A at one end of the room to Z at the other end. There was a separate table for small and card games.  In the middle of the room, like a little island, was a table for recent Essen releases.
There had to be hundreds and hundreds of games there. It was awe-inspiring!

I checked the games I had brought into the library, and discovered how nice, efficient and organized the library folk were. All BGG.con attendees were allowed to check out one game at a time. When you returned a game, you were allowed to check out another. Games that were brought by con attendees were marked with a star-shaped sticker.  Those that were new Essen releases were marked with a house-shaped sticker.  I noticed several very rare games, like black Vienna, in the library. What a fantastic way for people to get a chance to play games they had never seen before!

Thursday night, well, actually, it was now technically 1:00am Friday morning, after exploring all the rooms and saying hello to friends, I was too exhausted to play anything, even though there were many people still playing games. So I headed back to my room to get a little sleep.

Viking Fury

Friday morning, I felt refreshed and was ready to start playing something new when I entered one of the game rooms at 9:00am. Already several of the tables were filled with people striving to get in as much gaming as possible. I quickly spied Michael Pennisi and found out that he was going to start a game of Viking Fury with Martin Boersema. I had never played it, so I was happy to join in. Moments later, we were joined by Jason Little, and we settled in to learn the game.

None of us had played the game before, so Michael read the rules out loud for all of us. Doing this with some games would be akin to pushing an ice pick into my skull, but luckily, the rules were organized pretty well, and after about 25 minutes, we were ready to start the game.

If you haven’t played it, Viking Fury is a combination of: pick up and deliver/area control/complete mission game. The game fits very well into the theme of Vikings sailing the seas and pillaging cities. Instead of a traditional board, the game is played on a printed cloth. An interesting thing about the board is that it’s printed in reverse. It took us a couple of minutes to realize that the segmented parts of the map map were actually the waterways of Europe and that the land masses were all printed in a solid neutral color usually attributed to water.

The gameplay turned out to be relatively simple. On your turn, you have 7 action points. Loading your ship at one of the main ports with either seamen or goods takes an action point per crew member or good, as does moving from one area on the map(either a port, or a different sea region) to an adjacent area. Draw a rune card, which allows you to break different rules, costs an action point as well. Depending on the quadrant of the board you are on, you are limited to a certain maximum number of movement actions(although you can bend this rule by throwing crew members, or good overboard). The maximum number of sea movement actions can also be modified by a numbered disk that can be rotated when you play a Rune card.

When your Viking ship(presumably loaded with crew and goods) arrives at a port, you can do one of 3 things: You can try to plunder it if it has a treasure token, try to establish a settlement, or set up trade by dropping off a good marker. The first two choices involve rolling one or more dice that may result in the loss of crew. Trading with a city previously allows you to reduce the number you need to roll to settle by one. While you can only do one port action with a particular port on your turn, you can sometimes plan it so that you are able to do multiple port actions at multiple ports on the same turn.

If you succeed at plundering a city, you immediately receive victory points equal to the face down marker on the city. If you succeed in settling the city, you simply place one of your crew markers there. If you decide to drop off a good token, you receive victory points equal to the value of the city (a number printed on the board next to the city), plus a possible bonus that rotates through the goods depending on the play of some rune cards.
At the end of your turn, you can either leave your ship where it’s at, or move it to the Wintering hex, which basically returns you to one of the starting ports at the beginning of your next turn. If you decided to do this, you lose all goods and crewmembers save one.

During the game, as certain cities, or groups of cities are plundered and settled, Saga cards are awarded to the player who completed(not necessarily did all of) its’ last requirement. Ie., 3 particular cities must be plundered, or 2 certain cities must be settled, etc…

The game ends either 3 rounds after the last 3 Saga cards have been revealed, or as soon as the last Saga card has been awarded. Then, additional victory points are awarded for having the most and second most of different regional Saga cards, completing the requirements for some Saga cards, having plundered the most cities, as well as bonus points for having settled in different areas of the board.

So what did I think of the game? It played in about an hour and a half and seemed to be just the right amount of time. The game does award strategy as you have several things to do on your turn yet only have the action points to do a handful. You feel the theme throughout the game as you decide whether to plunder a city or to trade and settle in it. The only quibbles I have with the game are with the gameboard, and the Rune cards.

The cloth “board� was kind of dreary and might be a little more appealing to the eyes if it was printed in more colors. Dropping off goods tokens on cities as you were supposed to do made it difficult to see the values of the cities because the goods tokens eclipsed the number of the city printed on the board. Jason made the clever suggestion that clear colored disks for the goods markers would eliminate this problem.

I’m usually not a huge fan of games with dice because I seem to have a skill for rolling low numbers when larger ones are needed to accomplish tasks, but in Viking Fury, the dice aspect isn’t too damaging. There is a degree of chance, but you can affect it, and usually, the greater the risk in conquering or settling in a city, the greater the reward.

The Rune cards add a little too much chaos to the game for my liking. They are integrated into the game in a nice way, but they seem to vary in their usefulness, and add a “take that� feel to the game that I suppose is appropriate to a Viking-themed game. The problem with them is that some are stronger than others, and others may not be useful during some parts of the game. Some Rune cards could undo work you had done on one side of the board, and it is entirely possible that you could have no recourse because your ship is now on the opposite side of the board.

In our game, we learned one by one that you needed to stock up on Rune cards as much as possible, which lead to more luck and chaos than I traditionally enjoy. But overall, I liked Viking Fury, and would play it again.

Space Dealer

The second new game I played was Space Dealer. This game has received a lot of positive buzz, and I think it is well deserved.

Space Dealer is basically a pick-up-and-deliver game. Each of the players has a planet that starts with a mine that generates one type of good. The players start with a few other cards in hand that will let them build additional mines that permit the creation of different goods, as well as a Depot that allows you to store goods you’ve created.

The playing board serves a dual purpose as a victory point track, as well as showing the spatial relationship between the players’ planets and neutral planets. Each player begins the game with a spaceship, that can hold a maximum of 8 goods, that starts at the player’s home planet.

The innovative(?) mechanism of the game is a whole bunch of 30-second sand timers. Each player receives 2 of them. When the game begins(and you can choose to use the CD included with the game to time the 30-minute game limit and add a little flavor to the game with it’s space music and countdown warnings), you turn over a sand timer and place it on a card that is attached to your planet’s power source. When the sand runs out, the card produces whatever it was designed to produce: one or more goods.  If playing with the advanced rules, the card could possibly do non-resource generation tasks as well.

You can also use the timer on your planet to increase your technology level. When your technology level increases, you gain the ability to draw cards from one of two face down stacks. These decks have more advanced devise cards like more powerful mines, or powerstations that allow you to power more devices. Unfortunately, you can’t just draw a card and put it into action. You must first “build� the new device by putting a timer on it. After the timer runs out, it can now be attached to your planet, provided of course, that your powerstation(s) is large enough to give it power. Each new device card takes up one or two slots in the functioning powerstation.

Once goods are produced, you can load them on your ship. If you put a timer on your ship, and you wait 30 seconds, you can move your ship to an adjacent planet. When your ship arrives at another player’s planet, you can drop off a set of particular goods that match required goods that are printed on one or more of the player’s device cards. This will give you one or more victory points that you will record on the score track. In addition, this may give your opponent a small number of victory points as well.

I soon discovered that the device cards are cleverly balanced. Some that are very powerful for you might have small or no opportunity for other players to score points for drop off their goods on your planet, and you quickly learn that getting victory points for having other players doing the work of generating goods and depositing them on your planet is not something to take lightly. This is something to definitely consider when choosing which devices you should build.

Each device’s requirement for providing victory points can only be fulfilled once by one player, so sometimes during the game, you have more than one player racing to the same planet, hoping to reach it first to fulfill a particularly profitable exchange.

Overall, I can’t imagine packing more excitement and energy into a 30-minute game. Each game that I’ve seen played starts out slowly, and almost relaxed, as you turn over both of your timers at the same time and have 30 seconds to decide what you want to do next. But quickly, the timers become asynchronized and you only have about 15 seconds to decide what your best move is now.

A nifty thing about this game is that you can play a simple game by pulling out some of the device cards, or ramp the game up by adding the cards back in. These cards increase the range of things you can do by either giving you a second ship, or a 3rd timer, or even a cube that allows to sabotage (deactivate) another player’s device or timer.

Something else that this game allows is expansion. With multiple sets (and I was lucky enough to listen to Rick Thornquist in Essen when he said this was a great game.  After purchasing one copy, I ran back and bought a second one), you can combine the games to allow 8 players to play simultaneously. While I never saw a full 8-player game in action at BGG.con, I did teach a group of 6 to play, and it worked just as well as a game of 4.

Well, it looks like I’m going to miss my deadline if I continue to tell you about all the rest of the fun I had at BGG.con, so stay tuned for the next episode when I tell you about the raffles and some of the other new games I played such as Factory Fun, Monstermaler, Taluva, and Notre Dame.

© 2006 Scott Tepper

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