Ava Jarvis: There and Back Again: A Gathering of Friends Report, Part 1

One day...

One day you’re reading your email, and you see it: an invitation to The Gathering of Friends.  This is both expected and unexpected.  Still, it always amazes you that anyone thinks you are worth inviting along to anything. 

You begin to suspect that you are not doing enough for the gaming community.  You feel guilty about this lack of diligence, but opportunity has knocked, and you say yes.

Plus, work is getting tense and you figure that by the time April rolls around, you will be ready for 10 days of gaming.

You turn out to be right.

G - 2 days.

Months later, April rolls around.  You do your taxes promptly for a change.

One of the items you buy before traveling to the unknown lands of Ohio is a Tilley hat.

You become inordinately fond of your Indiana Jones-style hat (although you won’t get to play Tikal in the coming days).

Thursday.

You’ll ferry, fly, and emerald cab it, all 12 hours of it, to Columbus.  The in-flight movies are a little bit worthless, so you get in a lot of reading time with a simple book on Mah-Jongg and the latest issue of Counter magazine (which you have only recently started reading, ever since you went to BGG.CON and something clicked in your brain).

And then you are in Columbus, the evening before The Gathering kicks off on Friday. You are kindly picked up by Valerie because your flight got in at almost 11pm and the courtesy shuttle from the hotel happens to stop at 11pm.

You get an unfortunate room your first night, which makes you wonder whether fate intended for you to come at all.

Friday.

You walk downstairs in the morning, and suddenly meet Alan Moon. At first you don’t know who you’ve just shaken hands with, but fortunately a few of your morning brain cells kick in. Somehow you expected him to look more like Alan Moore, but now you know what the essence of Alan Moon is. This is a relief (even though you do love the works of Alan Moore).

The group in its near 300-strength is not all here yet, but there are enough early birds for quite a few games. You meet great people, just an inkling of what is to come when the much larger influx on Sunday and Monday arrive.

As for the aforementioned unfortunate room, Alan makes everything right and you end up in a nicer room. Said nicer room also has a small multi-purpose office machine in it, sitting menacingly on the dresser. You almost regret not bringing your laptop, but then again, you really don’t regret not bringing your laptop.

Now you can concentrate on gaming.  (Thank you, Alan!)

It becomes apparent that the question of locating food is a problem, since the only non-hotel food in the area appears to be a Mexican restaurant (decent, but not really in your top preferences as far as food is concerned).

At some point that evening a huge sign with the Gathering of Friends logo is hung above the prize table. Jacob Davenport (of Gnostica fame) volunteers to stand on shaky chairs on a shaky table and use the little chains for name tags to hang up the sign from the ceiling supports. When he finishes, the result is quite nice.

Your first day turns out to be one of your most productive days.

Unfortunately, you lose your notebook.

Oh well.  You were never that great at taking notes anyways.

Your most memorable plays of the day include Kreta, Antike (you’ll meet Peter Eggert later), a light bluffing prototype by Jacob and Kory Heath, Caylus, Beowulf, Shear Panic, and more that you won’t remember---except for the enjoyment. That you will remember clearly.

You shy away from teaching Shear Panic because you’ve always been shy on the teaching-in-person front, especially with Real Gamers in the room.

You are up late enough to know that Rick and Christine were held up by terrible flight delays, but you don’t feel as though you could hold out until 3am---an attitude that will change dramatically over the next few days.

Saturday.

You wake up and realize that the Gathering has barely started and you have several days of gaming ahead of you. You are quite happy and take time preparing before heading downstairs for a hotel restaurant breakfast. Their breakfasts turn out to be quite decent, and you get to chat with Mary and Rajendra, whom you just met the day before.

You find out that Christine is tres cute, and Rick has amazing hair and is very definitely Canadian.

The day disappears in a blur of gaming: Elasund, Zendo, Hacienda, more.... as well as the second Kory Heath prototype you play at the Gathering, a non-perfect-information abstract that is surprisingly fun, and which just about everyone ends up liking over the next several days.

It occurs to you that the playing of prototypes might be a distinct feature of the Gathering, since prototypes were not as on strength at BGG.CON as here. But this comes with a responsibility as well. And that is probably why prototypes thrive at the Gathering and not as much elsewhere.

You will swear to play more prototypes.

You meet Jay Greer through a game of Command & Colors: Ancients.  Unbeknownst to you at the time, this is your first experience teaching at the Gathering, made easier since both of you know the C&C system, but you have a fairly good memory as far as rules are concerned. Through Jay you learn about the Giant Eagle super-super-market, where you fail your first task: get Mary some Diet Dr. Pepper.

You are up until 2am.

Sunday.

You wake up late and get downstairs at about 11pm, too fogged to play anything at the moment.  You watch Mesopotamia and lunch with a group at the hotel restaurant.

Afterwards you realize you need to find an alternate solution to YAMATH (Yet Another Meal At The Hotel).

Your most memorable game today is Power Grid, played with the unofficial (but FF-approved) Atolla Modulis expansion.  Though hand-made, it’s hand-made by Paul Jeffries, which makes a wonderful difference, complete with little boxes for houses and resources. It’s enjoyable enough, although the game setup is a little bit fuzzy, but a rose is a rose is a rose (or Power Grid, for that matter). You are doing fine in the game, for all that you tend to be off by one where arithmetic is concerned, until you forget a cardinal rule: do not lead near the end of the game.  Despite this, the game is still quite fun.

By the way, Friedeman Friese is here and walks by (he rather liked the look of the expansion and helped us kind-of simpletons realize that we needed to put some costs on connections between tiles...).  For the next few days, it amuses you to look around and see if you can spot Friedeman Friese. You are terrible with names and faces but at least you won’t forget either where he is concerned. You will remember best watching him play Launch Across, which is Connect 4 with dexterity and little bouncing balls you catapult into the chutes.

Somewhere, sometime around here you end up playing Tsuro, a wonderfully quick and mean game that plays up to eight (and does that fairly well). It’s ideal filler but currently out of print (to be coming back in the fall or later). For the rest of the Gathering, Tsuro wanders around from table to table, with no one claiming to own it.

You will want to get in a game of Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, but that table is consistently full to the five-player limit every time you glance in its direction, and as in many games, your timing is always rather awful.

Daniel, Fabio, and you get into Daniel’s car and seek out the Giant Eagle for sustenance (of a sort, if you consider fruit, trail mix, and various non-perishables to be real food). But you do make a second, successful go at getting Mary some Diet Dr. Pepper.

You find out that there are some sign-up sheets on the table, for various tournaments. It all looks very intimidating. Could you really beat skilled gamers at Ra when your ability to count anything (cards, numbers, little beads for any blind bidding game you can name...) is always slightly off-kilter? Ditto for Ticket to Ride:Marklin.  And while you always liked Gang of Four, you are not sure about Tichu at all.  And back to back games of Caylus? The game is excellent, but a huge brain drain all the same; it would be like playing back to back games of Power Grid all day long, mashing your brain into whimpering pulp.

And what is Loopin’ Louie anyways?

You sign up for Wildlife Adventure, because you have liked it ever since Daniel taught it to you at BGG.CON, and you think you might get a little bit into the tournament, and in any case you are quite likely to have fun.

You stay up until 1am, turning in “early” only because of the Wildlife Adventure tournament at 10:30am. It’s beginning to dawn on you that many games are being played late at night, rather than early in the morning. It’s tempting, and you fall easily for temptation sometimes.  You will suffer for your lack of pacing, but then again, sleep and conventions are supposedly mutually exclusive (I think Mik said this somewhere once).

To be continued.

Movin’ right along
In search of good times and good news.
With good friends you can’t lose---
This could become a habit!

Opportunity just knocked,
Let’s reach out and grab it,
Together we’ll nab it,
We’ll hitch-hike, bus, or yellow cab it!

Movin’ right along,
Foot-loose and fancy-free
Ready for the Gathering---
But is it ready for me?

   -- “Movin’ Right Along”, by Kenny Ascher and Paul Williams

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