Ted Alspach: What I Learned at My Very First Gathering of Friends

I hadn’t planned on writing any follow-ups to my three-part BGN series that dealt with what I was expecting, what research I did, and which games I would bring to My Very First Gathering of Friends, but I figured that while many things were still fresh in my mind, I would go ahead and write it up. And that many things were indeed quite different than I had expected.

But before I get to all that, I did want to talk a bit about the games that I played that were new.

First of all, pretty much all the prototypes I played I can’t talk about in any detail. (See last week’s Board 2 Pieces to learn what that’s like.) I had brought the new Martin Wallace’s Totally Renamed Train Game (formerly and briefly known as Age of Steam 3rd Edition) with me and taught that to several groups (maybe a dozen throughout the week) and played in two or three games myself. And it’s really, um, something I can’t talk about, unfortunately. It is different enough from Railroad Tycoon and AoS 2nd Edition to be its own game; as the game currently stands, no one will confuse it with either of its predecessors, and I’m glad to hear (via the rumor mill) that it will indeed have a different name. It was nice to contribute to the Gathering by teaching folks a game that had only been whispered about briefly on BGG forums. Well, it’s hard to call the rantings of rabid AoS fans whispers, I guess, and equally hard to describe the pages and pages of forum posts as anything but brief. Either way, many people had a chance to experience it in its current state.

I played several other prototypes. (My game-playing record says 11 on BGG, though I had trouble keeping track.) Of these, two were pretty darn good, with another one rising up to be, erm, “fantastic.” The one I speak of is a Friedemann Friese party game prototype that pretty much everyone absolutely loved. It was indeed my favorite new game of the Gathering. I wish I could say more about it ‘cause it really rocked. While I can’t say what it was like, I can say that it isn’t like anything Friedemann has come up with before, just Friggin’ Fun. (Ooooh, there’s a name for it right there!) Another prototype in the Party Game genre was from Nate Beeler, which wasn’t quite as polished as Friedemann’s, but was also quite entertaining. I hope some lucky publishers pick up each of the games soon so I can get a final copy of them by Essen.

Of the new games I can talk about, I played Notre Dame several times—I had played once before at BGG.CON in 2006 on a very rough prototype—playing games of 2, 3, 4, and 5 players. All were fun, but the sweet spot seems to be 3. At least six copies of it were floating around throughout the week, and there were a few times when all the boxes were being used. At the end of the week, the cards were a little, um, gummy. Yuck. Still, six lucky people (none of them as lucky as me—I’ll get to that in a minute) picked up those copies from the Prize Table on Saturday. To me, Notre Dame feels somewhere in between Puerto Rico, Princes of Florence, El Grande and Caylus. It’s decidedly Euro, with limited numbers of actions you can take each turn, always at least one less than what you actually need, making for deliciously difficult decisions. The card drafting that determines what your available actions will be provides limited interaction, and there is a faint notion that you’re playing a solo game, but of course you’re not. Three of us finished a game in 36 minutes, which is pretty amazing for a “heavy” Euro. I have a slight concern that there might be a few strategies that are better than others. For instance, the “playing poorly” strategy prevented me from winning several times, while the “score lots of VPs” strategy allowed me to beat William Attia once. Once. I believe, of the bunch of games I played with William during the week (including my own prototypes!), that was the only one I won.

Speaking of Mr. Attia, I learned his new Caylus Magna Carta directly from him as he proceeded to beat me in a two-player game by only 2 points. I don’t have much more to tell here except that it’s Caylus without the favors and with cards. There’s cubes and workers and the Provost (mwa ha ha), though the Provost is a little nicer in Caylus Magna Carta than its big board-based brother.

I also played Zooloretto, the animal-based board game based on Coloretto. Now, Coloretto isn’t a bad game by any means, but I did not care even a little for Zooloretto. Some weird vendor tiles and coin tiles get in the way of your goal of collecting sets of animal tiles. And certain combinations of Animal tiles result in baby animals. And you have to put them in pens, one animal per pen. And you can use an action (you have one per turn unless you go last, in which case you have as many as you’d like) to do things like steal other players’ animals or to swap pens of your own animals. The scoring is a little odd too, with different scores for partial vendor-present pens and more points for filling up a pen and then points going away for animals in your barn and it was so boring I’m falling asleep just writing about it. Oh, and the box is HUGE. I was expecting real animals for a box that big, but instead there’s just lots of empty space in it. I know I’m in the minority here, as it seems everyone else really seemed to like this game, but the two phrases I kept thinking of as I was playing it were “totally unnecessary” and “what time is it?”

I played three of my own prototypes with a few different sets of people. All of the prototypes were excellent; not a stinker in the group. One of them, Rapscallion, has you building a poker hand via rounds of blind bidding. Initially you use special bidding cards to bid for playing cards, then you use one of your playing cards to bid for a new bidding card, then you repeat a few times. After a few rounds, points are tallied and there’s a single winner and a whole bunch of losers, just like in real life. Another surprisingly solid entry from yours truly was Props, another card game where you manage a troupe of jugglers out to earn fame and cash from a pack of meandering tourists, all while avoiding evil rival entertainers like magicians and mimes. Finally, the challenging and slightly <cough> abstract game called The Temple of Feng Shui was played, where you are responsible for building an aesthetically pleasing temple while harnessing Chi. The game uses big wooden cubes that are about 1’ across each (which are of course just small versions of the blocks used by actual high priests of Feng Shui). I expect we’ll see a few game publishers retiring on the profits of these games in the near future. Or maybe they’ll just throw their new money around by paying for all the sodas at next year’s Gathering (thanks, Jay!!!).

Okay, so what did I actually learn by attending My Very First Gathering of Friends?

• The attendees are some of the nicest people I’ve yet to meet in boardgamedom. It’s not like Essen attendees are mostly mean, or that more than half of the BGG.CON attendees are clinically insane, or even that GenCon attendees are always drunk, but the Gathering folks take that whole “Friends” thing pretty seriously. It was actually a little sickening, people were so nice. But a good sickening that I liked.
• Playing in tournaments at the Gathering is pretty awesome, if not nerve-wracking. While I didn’t win a single game of Loopin’ Louie (but I had a bunch of second places), or a single game of Ra or Can’t Stop, I did beat Richard Borg in the first round of Liar’s Dice (for the curious, that’s significant since it’s his game) before losing in the second round.
• But there was really only one tournament that I cared about: Tichu. Early in the week I played a game with Matthew Monin, one of the Evil Overlords—I mean Admins, “Octavian"—on BGG, who just happens to be the best Tichu partner ever, and we definitely seemed to play well together, so we signed up as a team to take on the 23 other teams in the tournament. In our first three games, we generated healthy leads only to see our opponents Grand Tichu their way back into contention before we finally finished them off with scores that were much closer than they should have been. In the Semifinals, we were up against Frank DiLorenzo and Terry Egan, two pretty amazing Tichu players. Frank’s multilevel deal with Satan that allows him to get good cards was on the fritz, as Satan had finally realized that it was actually Frank’s soul that he had made the deal for. Matthew and I pulled ahead with 955 to 745 going into the final round, when Terry called Grand Tichu. Terry made his Grand (that’s 200 points right there), and then it was suddenly all about the points. In the final scoring, each team received 50 points, enough for us to squeak by with a 1005 to 995 victory and a shot at being the Gathering Tichu Champions. The final wasn’t nearly as dramatic, but at that point it didn’t matter, as we won!!! Not only were we the main attraction in the following day’s ticker tape parade and given a key to the City of Columbus, but both Matthew and I had early picks at the prize table.
• Lots of the attendees read BoardgameNews.com! For some strange reason, I kept thinking that a lot of these people wouldn’t be doing that. But they did, and they were all very nice to the columnists and the site’s top cartoonist.
• William Attia has a positronic brain. Anyone who has played a game with him has also arrived at that conclusion.
• Sleep is really not nearly as important as you’d think. Most nights (mornings) I didn’t get to bed until around 7:00am, with one morning keeping me up past 8:00am. The casino-like no-natural-light atmosphere in the gaming area along with bazillions of games and bazillions of gamers wanting to play those games kept me going for 20+ hours at a time. I believe I eeked out at least one extra day as a result.
• Pitt Crandlemire is really good at Smarty Party. It appears that designing the game, writing and researching the cards in the game, and playtesting it again and again does improve your ability at Smarty Party. In a followup game, I thought it would be possible to crush Pitt by using the Jr. Expansion (designed to be played by kids), but Pitt used his Smarty Skills to crush me along with everyone else who was playing.
• Ward Batty could sell tickets to the third round of games of Time’s Up’s when he’s playing. Just be sure to take the Elvis card out of the deck before they deal the cards.
• I would have been really annoyed at all those crazy werewolf players, with all their special roles and logic and lies and cries of dismay when they lynched yet another villager, if not for the equally annoying fact that I was one of them. I played 22 games of Ultimate Werewolf, moderating about 10 or so games. I learned that you don’t lynch Bill on the first day (even though you really should, just in case), that Frank DiLorenzo kills more villagers when he’s a villager than when he’s a werewolf, that Dave Arnott’s triple-X themed werewolf game will probably give me the creeps (and not in the way it should) for years to come, that Christine Simundson is never a werewolf except when she is one, and that Heli Barton is the Best. Moderator. Ever. (There’s something spookily right about hearing Heli’s soothing, heavily-German-accented voice when your eyes are closed each night.) By the way, I am just a plain villager.
• Finally, I learned that Alan does just an amazing job putting the event together. Everything ran smoothly and was organized, and Alan went out of his way to make sure everyone, including (and especially) those of us who were attending Our Very First Gathering of Friends, were having a great time.

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Comments:

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This is probably one of the best articles I’ve read on the Gathering this year.  Thanks for taking the time to write it.  I enjoyed reading it. And, any information on Smarty Party Expansions?  Man, our group really needs new cards! Posted by Kevin Wood on Apr 13, 2007 at 11:08 AM | #

I’m so jealous.  Although I don’t really know how people outside the industry find the time.  My kids are in school so using a week of vacation for something that only I could go to, seems selfish, although on second thought, maybe it would okay to leave the wifey home and play all night.  :) Posted by Jonathan Greisz on Apr 13, 2007 at 11:43 AM | #

I concur with Kevin--great report! To be honest, I didn’t get a whole lot out of your pre-Gathering articles, so I’m glad you followed it up with this one. A couple of questions, though:  do you think you could make “The Temple of Feng Shui” available as a print-and-play? Also, how did you REALLY beat Mr. Attia?  Did you distract him by constantly inundating him with ideas for a Caylus Dice game? Interstingly enough, it seems that 3 of the games talked about in Gathering reports include a card game version of a board game, a board game version of a card game (Zooloretto) and a dice game version of a board and card game (Settlers). Maybe designers could include 3 versions of every game in the box from now on. Let the players decide: “So, do you want to play with dice, cards, or little wooden cubes on a board and no randomizers?” Posted by Jeff Allers on Apr 13, 2007 at 01:32 PM | #

Was the Friedemann game the cultist one? (He gave me permission to blab about his protos as much as possible.) It plays like Zendo on acid. It is basically a big pentagram, a bunch of pawns, and lots of rule cards. The rule cards list many ways of scoring points. The high priest chooses one negative, and 3 positive cards, then the players take turns moving pawns around. Points are handed out after each move. Go three rounds, then nominate a new high priest. The evil bit is the rule cards themselves. While there are very staid ones like matching colors and numbers of pawns and the like, there are rules for singing, touching pawns together, touching the tabletop. And...it actually works. I our game I saw: 1. People doing random almost superstitious behavior while moving pawns. Stuff that reminded me of o/c-ish anti-hex rituals I’ve seen a couple of folks do. 2. Larry Whalen had to reach across the table to make his moves. And he’s old. He kept knocking over pawns making his move, then touching the table as he righted his pawns. During round three, more people were intentionally knocking over pawns. And of course one of the positive scoring cards was touching the table. Drove them crazy. The game feels lighter and far wackier than Zendo. Not as good as his trick taking game, however. I want that one first.  2. Posted by Frank Branham on Apr 13, 2007 at 01:59 PM | #

The Settler’s Dice Game is one I didn’t even want to mention, as I disliked it so much. I think Rick said it best when he said he quit 2/3’s of the way through. It might be a fun distraction when you’re sitting in an airport waiting for a plane or something, but otherwise I won’t be playing it again any time soon. And William must have been off his game. It was a three player game of Notre Dame, and I had already played one game of it with him, so I had an idea of his strategy, and was able to use it against him in the drafting stage. And I got lucky. =) Posted by Ted Alspach on Apr 13, 2007 at 02:00 PM | #

Yep, it was the Zendo-on-acid cultist one. It seemed accessible to non gamers but still engaged the strategy section of my brain, as I desperately tried to figure out what the rules were. I didn’t get a chance to play the trick-taking game, but I heard good things about it. Posted by Ted Alspach on Apr 13, 2007 at 02:06 PM | #

So was the lucky part winning the Tichu tournament?  And if so, what game did you pick?  I also thought this was one of the best articles written about the Gathering.  I’m encouraged by your comments on Martin’s game, I was worried that there would be far too much overlap between AoS and RRT.  Hopefully someone will bring a version of it to BGG.con, so I can try it out.  Right now, I’m more preoccupied with checking the mail everyday for your new AoS map (ironically my first play of Aos was your Steamboat map, and I think it’s excellent for that purpose), and waiting on Notre Dame, the Brazilian Modern Art, and new Steam Bros AoS maps to arrive from Boards and Bits. Posted by Sean Brown on Apr 13, 2007 at 02:37 PM | #

The Tichu tournament was one of the highlights for me last year as well. I was Matthew’s Tichu partner last year (eliminated in the semis, due to a critical error on my part) and was looking forward to being so again this year, being much improved, having played over two hundred face-to-face games in the past year. <sniff> But alas, I couldn’t make it back this year, and probably for the next couple as well, as I’m in the process of moving to China for a couple years. </sniff> Posted by Curt Carpenter on Apr 13, 2007 at 03:24 PM | #

The game I picked (I was about #10 or so) was Destruct 3, a dexterity game from Uncle Skunkle. Really nice wood box, wood components. I haven’t played it yet, but I think it’ll be quite fun. Posted by Ted Alspach on Apr 13, 2007 at 05:20 PM | #

Nice writeup, Ted, I’ve been lazy and haven’t done a writeup at all this year except for a few random brief thoughts on some mailing list somewhere.  Since you and Matthew won the Tichu tournament I don’t feel as bad losing to you in the first round. Esp. since I beat you all at Martin Wallace’s Newly Named Train Game Not To Be Confused With Age Of Steam.  Muhahahaha! Oh, and I’ll play Time’s Up with you again anytime though hopefully people will pick some less ancient pop culture icons and I will eventually stop confusing my Greek and Egyptian historical figures! Posted by Anye Mercy on Apr 20, 2007 at 12:49 PM | #

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