Valerie Putman:  Prose on Cons—Atlanta Game Fest

I’m in Atlanta this weekend for Ward Batty’s Atlanta Game Fest.  It started Friday morning and the gaming will continue until dinner Sunday night.  This is an open gaming weekend with the feel of an invitational (all open gaming, no or few scheduled events, you either know most everyone already or you have a slew of new friends by the time the weekend is over).  Ward holds three of these each year and when it doesn’t conflict with graduation, the May event is a great way for me to kick off my summer vacation.  Since I went to graduate school in Georgia (woof, woof, woof), I have a lot of friends (and hubby’s family) that I get to visit when I go to gaming events in the South.

Ward changed hotels this year and for the first time we’re downtown.  While that can mean more places to eat, it also means $15/day parking (at the hotel).  The rooms are quite small, but $79 a night (split with a roommate) is quite reasonable for downtown.  Our gaming space is a ballroom on the top floor of the hotel.  This means lots of sunshine and great views of Atlanta. 

Most of the attendees are locals, but even some of them stay at the hotel in order to avoid Atlanta traffic and extend their gaming time. There are also a few out-of-towners like myself.  Rick Thornquist is here--all the way from Vancouver!  Cynthia, from Meeplepeople.com is here showing off some new meeple colors available from her website.  She has a jar full of them for a guess-the-number contest.  I have a bit ofan advantage, I think since I have the 1000 meeples I ordered from her last time in vases around the house.  (I’ve already told her I want 1000 more now that she has purple, white, orange, brown, and gray meeples available!)

While I won’t mention all the games I played, I will describe one special experience.  I’d heard about a variant of team Union Pacific that an Atlanta group plays, and one of them (Leon Hendee) offered to play.  While it certainly could be altered to suit the tastes of your game group, we played with score cards randomized in 4 quarters of the deck (preventing the super short game), unlimited UP shares, and of course the rule that you had to ditch a share to draw a UP.  Then six of us formed three two-player teams (sitting across from your partner) and team mates combined all shares played .  I think that I would recommend one change; we played with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place UP payouts.  Next time I might try 1st, 3rd, and 5th.  Any way you play it, UP is one of my all time favorites.

Well, I still have games to play and…
I’d rather be gaming,
Valerie Putman

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