Matt Carlson:  Gen Con 2009 in 40,000 words or less

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here is an overview of Gen Con in under 40,000 words.  My photo journal of the cool, the not so cool, the new (to me), and the crazy that I saw at the convention.  I was able to attend for only two days this year and being a bit sleep deprived I sometimes grabbed a photo or two intending to return and follow up but subsequently forgot.  However, I had a great time looking at games, meeting people, and even got in a game or three!  Before I begin, I simply have to shout out a thank you to a mystery person who found my digital camera Thursday and turned it in to the lost and found.  I was a bit worried about losing it since it still had photos in it of my three week old son!  I was able to pick it up early Saturday morning at the lost and found booth – a testament to the kind folks in this great hobby of ours.

Even before I made it to the Dealer hall, Dominion was making its presence known!  This banner directed people to the Rio Grande gaming room where many RGG titles were available to play for free.  There even were snacks delivered to the room throughout the day!  In my opinion, the best deal at the entire convention.  Thanks again, Jay!



10am on Thursday, the doors open, and the crowd rushes in!  Exhibitors near the main entrances were calling to each other “brace yourselves!” as they held firmly to their game demonstration podiums.



The press was allowed to sneak in early (whoopee!) so I headed right over to the Fantasy Flight booth to take some photos, since I knew their games would e crowded the rest of the week.  Here’s a shot of the upcoming Penny Arcade two player card game.  Play as Gabe or Tycho and throw attacks at each other.  Item cards stick around while hijinks cards are sort of instant effects.  Meanwhile any card can be used to defend (all cards have a defense value in addition to their regular use.  The game looks to be a fast playing (non-collectible) game with a strong sense of Penny Arcades irreverent and (im)mature humor.

The Kingsburg expansion is high on my list of future purchases.  It is really 5 expansions in one.  Everyone has new development cards (with two new rows), players are dealt two extra rows which they can use to overlay any of their existing rows, soldier tokens eliminate the king’s die roll giving players more strategic options (use your low tokens during the game to score the value of your one remaining token at the end of the game), Governor cards give each player a special ability, and the last expansion option is an event deck.  Players can mix and match the expansions to play with one or all of the expansions at once.



Middle-earth Quest was on display and getting heavy play as it was released at this year’s GenCon.  It is set in the time between Bilbo leaving the shire and Frodo following after.  It plays up to three “good” players vs one player in the role of Sauron.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get time to come back and learn the details of how the game plays out...

Two new Battlelore expansions were announced.  Shown here is the creatures expansion which contains the first two promo figures along with a new hydra figure that loses heads as it takes damage.  The other expansion announced contains three different dragons.  I didn’t get a chance to take a photo (it was under glass) but the next Descent campaign was also announced, Sea of Blood.  Fans of the game will be able to take their parties on a series of adventures focusing on water and sea battles.  The players will even get to have their own ship and equip and upgrade it as the game wears on.  The large game board has open sea on one side and a series of islands on the other.

Rich War of the Ring fans may want to get a hold of the collectors edition coming out “someday”.  A huge gameboard is included and all the minis will come already hand painted.  Only about 1000 will be made and they’ll retail around $350-$400.

Winner of the best dressed award at GenCon (as determined by me), the folks at Geek Chic show off their selection of handcrafted furniture designed specifically for gaming.  Not finished with your game?  Simply put the slats on top of the table to hide the game in progress underneath and have your formal dinner with no one the wiser.  Of course, handcrafted solid wood furniture doesn’t come cheap.  Tables start at around $1000, and this high end one here goes up past $10,000.  Pretty and shiny, but well out of my price range.  One side note, these snappy dressers aren’t front office folks.  Most of them are actually the folks in the shop who do the handcrafting of the furniture.  Come to next year’s convention and meet the folks who will make your table!



Tom and Andy, the folks at Terror Bull Games, make their first GenCon appearance with the game War on Terror.  It has been out for awhile, but if you’re unfamiliar with it, it is highly diplomatic (it even comes with a secret message pad).  Players vie for control of areas of the global map using various means, and can even fund terrorist to do their dirty work.  Unfortunately, once terrorists are used on the board, they can also be used against you.  A player can turn officially evil, gaining access to more powerful cards, but then all the other players gain rewards when they attack the evil player.  The game ends in four ways: liberation of the world (by a single player), universal peace (by unanimous agreement of all players), liberation by the terrorists, or “extreme liberation” through the use of nuclear forces.



It’s been out for awhile but I don’t think I’ve stopped to check it out.  Redneck Life, the winner is the player who has the most teeth at the end of the game.



A shot of Deadlands (by Twilight Creations), unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to come back and actually learn the game!

That’s a whole lot of undead!  Twilight Creations had bags for all your zombie needs.

All these baggies and card sleeves - It’s enough to make a card-carrying game-bagger cry.  I’m hoping to ship a copy of Dominion off to a friend in the south pacific islands, so I stopped by the Mayday Games booth to pick up some of their industrial-strength card sleeves (I figure in a Dominion vs the Tropics grudge match, the game can use all the help it can get.) They have a great web site selling basic and premium card sleeves to fit nearly any size card you’ll find in a game.  I particularly like their downloadable guide that explains the size and number of every sleeve you’ll need for most of the popular BGG games.  As Dale Yu mentioned on Wednesday, they have an upcoming game called Space Junkyard.  I didn’t have time to look it over, but I did score some free convention swag in the form of a bag of sheep meeples.  Whee!



A stack of Z-Man Games early copies of Pandemic’s newest expansion, On the Brink.  All 119 copies at the convention sold out in the first 2 1/2 hours.

A close-up of the expansion being played.  It comes with several new ways to play (that can be mixed and matched) including new role cards, rules for 5 players, and even a variation where one player plays as the diseases.  Yes, the Petri dishes are included, whoo-hoo!



Tales of Arabian Nights was also being played.  The board and setup look quite fun.  Some of my local game group have played it with very positive results.  Not a deep competitive game, but more of a fun experiential game.

Z-Man’s Endeavor is yet another game that I photographed, thought looked interesting, and then totally forgot to return to get a demo.  So I leave you with just the photo.

Take that, Crokinole players!  BilliBoards was out in force at the convention promoting the classic game of Carroms.  Shoot the discs into the corner pockets, gaining 1 point at the end of the game for each of your opponent’s leftover discs.  Score 3 points if you were able to sink (and protect it by subsequently sinking another of your own discs) the red queen disc.  You haven’t really experienced this game until you see the video feed of two intense Indian carom players facing off from each other complete with a judge sitting between them and full color commentary.  (I assume the judge is there to detect fouls, you can’t you’re your chair or even move off of your chair when setting up your shots.)

As I mentioned, the Rio Grande room had a pile of games to play for free.  I stopped in several times and got a play in of Ra: The Dice Game, Sherwood Forest, and Maori.  This is a photo of the dice version of Ra.  I played with two nice young women and was bumped out of first by a single point.  The game plays somewhat like Yahtzee but scores like Ra.  Roll the dice to collect sets of symbols which allow you to score areas on the board.  If a die rolls a sun symbol you can’t reroll it.  Sun symbols accumulate until an age/epoch ends.  Score all the areas but the monuments at the end of every age.  At the end of the third age, even the monuments score and a winner is declared.  I liked the game.  It doesn’t stand out to me as a unique game in terms of mechanics, but there are so many different ways to score points, nearly every roll provides players with decisions on how to proceed.  There is a luck factor present, but not so much that it completely overwhelms the scoring.  I think its largest disadvantage is the somewhat complicated scoring.  It is straightforward to anyone who’s played the original Ra, but since this seems to be more of a lighter weight game I suspect it will take new players a few games to figure out how the scoring works.

On Saturday I played Sherwood Forest with three other strangers.  I came in just before they started but everyone was playing for the first time so I was able to pick up the gist of things.  The heart of the game consists of worker placement to get more workers, enhancement items, or try to waylay travelers.  To attack a traveler, a player puts one or more workers in a tree next to the road.  When a traveler comes by, if the player has enough power to attack, they can defeat the traveler to claim the reward (points, gold, and sometimes more workers).  Most, but not all, travelers are far too powerful for an individual to tackle, so players may cooperate by adding workers (if asked) onto a tree when it is first occupied.  Upon a successful attack, all players gain the same number of points, and then money and workers are divided as equally as possible with leftovers determined by the “active” (first) player in the tree.  Travelers follow a set path, so the first group who is able to attack a traveler must do so.  Since many of the traveler cards are hidden information (you can spend actions to peek at them), it is sometimes possible to mess up other players’ plans by sending in a very weak traveler forcing a strong contingent to attack the far weaker target for far less reward.

In our game, I had a poor first turn and then colluded with the leading player in later turns to catch up.  However, in the late game I was unable to cooperate with the other two players so was forced to again cooperate with the leading player in order to secure a second place win.  We played the basic game and I found it OK, but not great.  The advanced game brings in travelers that deliver penalties if you do not defeat them (you can usually just let them walk by if you’re not strong enough) as well as a fairly complex negotiation system of contracts and dependencies.  (You can negotiate to use cards in certain situations and then either be required to use them or still have the option to use them, depending on the agreement.) While I think the advanced game would be slightly more fun, I felt the whole of the game was just a bit too slow paced for me for this style of negotiation game.  I prefer my heavy negotiation games to move along at a fairly fast clip since so much of the game will depend on how people cooperate (or not) rather than a single player’s skill.

Small Box Games were sharing a booth with a few other companies.  They look intriguing and I love their packaging style.  You may have read some of Eric’s articles on their games in the past year or so.

Also in the same booth were folks selling the game Caledea.  This is a sort of abstract wargame that takes place on one or two 9x9 square maps.  Each map is grouped into nine 3x3 regions with each region containing every possible pair of terrain types.  Since a player’s country (one of a dozen or so) favors two types of terrain, every 3x3 grid will contain exactly one double-matching home territory.  Players use dice to represent armies.  A single die is a basic unit which can be upgraded to calvary (a stripe) and then on to a general (a plus sign).  Players start with 2 to 4 units, and can then gain more units as they capture more homeland terrain (one for each 3x3 section of grid).  There are no provisions for replacing defeated armies, so attrition can take its toll.

Players also have a set number of actions each turn and a limited gold supply each turn (based on captured territories).  Actions can include movement, upgrading, attacking, as well as a few special properties depending on the country.  Attacks are resolved based off of unit experience, matching territory, and defensive structures.  For every advantage, a player gets an additional die to roll in combat.  Both sides roll dice and the highest value wins.  The loser eliminates its participating unit and the attack is continued until no units are left. There are nine different countries (or races)and each has unique advantages and disadvantages, beyond their terrain preferences.  Some start with fewer units but can upgrade cheaply while others have more starting units but high upgrade costs.  Countries also vary in the number of actions they have available each turn and have one of three types of special powers.  On the whole, I found it interesting.  I typically don’t care for abstract games but this seemed to have enough going on for it that it would keep the game interesting.  I’d probably prefer to play shorter games on a single board to avoid the long game lengths that might occur on a double board with more players.  The rules and combat are simple enough to quickly teach new players, making it a decent option to expose to less experienced gamers.

All this soda and not a drop to sell!  This poor guy was selling a special Pirate Root Beer energy drink.  Only not really.  He couldn’t get permission to actually sell soda at the convention (don’t want to edge out the concession folks) so he was giving away free samples and trying to stir up interest.  It has caffeine like a Mountain Dew, but tastes like root beer with a hint of orange.  It was OK, but all my friends tell me they don’t want to see me on caffeine (gee, I wonder why?) The price seemed fairly steep as well, but I suppose it might be fun for a unique gaming session.



Asmodee Games always has some of the most beautiful games around.  Here’s a copy of Ghost Stories with the White Moon Expansion at the show.  The game is played like the base game (a cooperative game where you run around and try to beat down ghosts as they appear) and the expansion adds in townsfolk tiles into the middle of the board.  Ghosts around the edges appear and try to eliminate the townsfolk while players attempt to meet requirements to save them.  Each townsfolk has different requirements to be met and they have appropriate rewards or penalties that occur if they are saved or defeated respectively.  With its slightly limited availability, I haven’t yet gotten a chance to play the basic game for myself but everything I’ve seen make me very interested in both the base game and the expansion.

In Heroes of the World (also Asmodee), players recruit famous figures from history to assist them as they try to take over the world.  It is a mix of area control with some combat.  As the game drags on, more and more heroes are played giving players more power and flexibility, coming to a crescendo of an endgame.

The other new game by Asmodee I was checking out was Magnifico.  My best description might be a sort of Risk-like game set in the time of Leonardo DaVinci.  Players take over different areas of the board to claim territory and increase income.  Income is used to buy more troops, combat vehicles (tanks and air support that are unaligned so they can be captured if left on the field of battle), fortifications, and technological improvements.  Technological improvements are quite important.  Each turn players bid for the right to purchase a technology card.  The first and second highest bidder (blind bid) may select a card of their choice.  Later, they can pay the (somewhat hefty) research cost to make that technology available.  Some of the cards I saw improve the attack ability of tanks, improve fortifications’ defense, and things of that ilk.  While it isn’t all that different from a large number of Risk-like conquer the world games out there, the setting and technology cards are enough to make me interested.  Who doesn’t want to wage war in a classic DaVinci circular tank?

Makers of the popular Duck! Duck! Go! at last years GenCon (a game in which players maneuver their rubber duckies around a hexagonal sink grid), Ape Games was back again and showing off an upcoming title that sticks with the rubber ducky theme.  Duck! Duck! Safari is actually five different boardgames that use a double-sided game board, six animal duckies, some cards, and a set of numbered tiles.  The five games include a race game, one based on high/low tile management, a go fish/concentration hybrid game, a tile laying game where players lay out tiles and then remove them, and a sort of advanced rummy game.  The games range in target age from 6+ to 8+ years and should be out by the BoardGameGeek convention in November.



Mind Flex at Mattel was getting some constant use.  Note the small blue ball in the background just off the top of the tube in the foreground.  The goal here (see Dale Yu’s review earlier this week) is to concentrate to make the ball go up in the air and relax your mind to make it float lower.  You then use a knob on the machine to move a fan around a circular track.  The Bernoulli Effect makes the ball stay within the air stream and follow the fan in a circle.  Thus you can move the ball in a circle with the knob and up and down with your mind.  Use the two in combination to maneuver through an obstacle course.  At $70+ it is a bit pricy, but the science teacher in me still thinks it’s a great deal.  I can see using it in the classroom several times during the year.  At the least, maybe your gaming group should all chip in to get a copy so you can show it off to newcomers...

Conflict of Heroes made a big splash last year as a solid wargame with very accessible rules that still encompassed most details required to simulate important historical battles.  In particular, the cardboard tokens and game boards were top notch, creating a nice overall feel to the game.  Academy Games was back this year showing off the next game in the series, Storms of Steel.  The game plays exactly the same, with the exception of a small rules change to make the game flow more easily.  (Players can now both have an activated unit at the same time.) The new game has new unit types and the obligatory new scenarios, but I was pleased the most with the addition of terrain tiles.  As you can see in the photo (check out the three tiles forming a river) there are various multi-hexagon terrain tiles that can be overlaid onto maps to mark changes in elevation (cliffs, etc...) or to change the terrain around.  This opens up many more combat possibilities than would be possible with simply a default set of map boards.  Academy Games didn’t change a winning combination beyond an expansion into new units and battles and a few tweaks to improve the system further.

Winning Moves Games has reduced its heavier-game line and is focusing in on its more family-friendly fare.  In addition to its large stock of classic games (like Rubik’s Cubes and classic Pit), it was showing off two new titles.  Cirkis, shown above, is a tile laying game.  Players have a set of somewhat strange shapes and take turns laying tiles in an attempt to fill in a circle or star.  Filling in a shape gains a player five points, but the player who covers the majority of that shape will score 10 points.  Tactical play is also involved since new tiles must always touch (in some way) the previously laid tile.  Thus, leading the area of play from a congested area into one more favorable to you may be a valid play.  It plays fairly quickly, and I saw a three player learning game last about twenty to thirty minutes.

Their other new title is Take a Chance which is a set collecting and risk-taking game that also involve dice.  On your turn you can try to accumulate cards or roll a die to try to earn more cash.  The larger your sets of cards the better your payout, but if you focus on only one color, the odds of getting a payout are smaller as well.  I didn’t get to play a game but a full game should finish in well under an hour.

One of the more unique items I saw at the convention, the D-Total by GameScience.  Here’s a die either for a collector or a minimalist.  This 24-sided die has markings on its faces so that it can be used as a d2 (meaning a 2-sided die), d3, d4, d5, d6, d7, d8, d10, d12, d20, d24, d30, d40, d50, d60, d70, d80, and a d100.  Sure, about half of those options will often require you to roll the die twice, but it still gets the job done.  It is a rather large die (smaller than a fist, about the size of a plum) and will set you back around $27.

Wizards of the Coast took over production of Heroscape and while production seemed to slow down at first, the recent expansions have figures that look very nice.  This year, WotC announced they will be producing a new “Master Set” with a Dungeons and Dragons theme.  This set will come out in the spring of ’10.  Judging from the display, it will probably on the smaller side for master sets, along the lines of the Marvel Heroscape.



The D&D Heroscape figures and terrain on display showed several “adventurer” types in a battle with a fairly decent sized dragon.  Not so sure these are the final models though, as they look like they might be reused from D&D miniatures.  There should be 10 new figures and 50 pieces of terrain in the new set.  There are a lot of ways to go with this game, and I’m interested to see what they do.  (Will they make the game more RPG-esque and release more than one stat card for each figure so a given figure could “level up” through a series of scenarios?, add in figure items for quest rewards to make it Descent-like? etc…)

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And that’s all I have to say about the convention!  Well, not really.  This is my photo journal.  I’m also writing about the convention over at GamingWithChildren.  There’s a lot of duplication but also some unique stuff over there.  Thursday I covered GenCon and Role Playing Games and Friday I wrote about Family-friendly boardgaming.  Early next week I’ll hit the more gamer-y games as well as a catch-all article describing everything else (such as collectible games, video games, and anything I found particularly weird or cool.)

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the convention and look forward to the time when I can take my two boys along to make it even more of a family experience.  Hope to see some of you there next year!

© 2009 Matt J. Carlson

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Comments:

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Nice report.  At least your camera worked! D Posted by Dale Yu on Aug 22, 2009 at 08:57 AM | #

I’m not seeing any photos.  Am I missing something? Posted by Rob Cannon on Aug 22, 2009 at 10:08 AM | #

Awesome article.  You could have gone another 40,000 words and I would have them all.  However, the game I was most interested in reading about was Endeavor unfortunately. Posted by Jacob Lee on Aug 22, 2009 at 11:27 AM | #

Sorry, Jacob!  I went by Z-man early Thursday to do my photographing intending to come by again when there were people in the booth to talk about things, but when I passed by later I was thinking I had all I needed to know about Arabian Nights and the Pandemic Expansion… Endeavor completely slipped my mind!  <sigh> Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Aug 22, 2009 at 11:46 AM | #

No photos for me either. Posted by Larry Levy on Aug 22, 2009 at 01:29 PM | #

How odd.  I’d ask if you can click on them to see the larger versions… try cutting and pasting this: http://www.boardgamenews.com/mcarlson/GenCon2009/09GenCon%20005%20(Small).jpg Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Aug 22, 2009 at 05:33 PM | #

By comparison with the $27 die, Mind Flex sounds like a real bargain at $80! Who knows? Maybe the market for pricey dice is far larger than I imagine… Are folks still not seeing the photos? Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Aug 23, 2009 at 08:34 AM | #

I can see the picture at the link.  The pictures are not showing up in IE8, but they do work in Firefox.  I looked via the IE8 debugger and I couldn’t see any reason why they were not appearing. Posted by Rob Cannon on Aug 23, 2009 at 10:29 AM | #

Photo-wise the only issues I can see are possibly that some of the names had spaces in them… the web site editor was VERY picky with how I posted them… initially I wasn’t seeing even my own photos.  (Note to self --> try not to use any files with “spaces” in the name… I usually don’t but my camera was trying to be helpful...) Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Aug 23, 2009 at 04:09 PM | #

Matt - wow great report! If there was any doubt at all that with a press pass you got a free ride, you sure earned your with with this! :) - Larry Posted by Larry Baxter on Aug 23, 2009 at 04:29 PM | #

I also don’t see the pictures, but I do have an idea.  Look at the source for the page, the ads (which I do see) have a “<img src=....” line while your photos use “<src=...”.  Perhaps that’s the problem? Posted by Andrew Kreps on Aug 24, 2009 at 05:22 PM | #

I don’t think so, Andrew, as the photos have an “<img.....>” tag surrounding the “src” – the image section just clarifies the width and border as well, and the order of those elements shouldn’t matter. The main problem with me trying to replicate the problem is that I don’t own a PC and my IE is really old, so I don’t have the same issues that you and others have. That said, I renamed two of the images using shorter tags with no spaces, yet one of the commenters above said that he still couldn’t see the images – so I’m really baffled now. Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Aug 24, 2009 at 05:30 PM | #

I’m just good at breaking things… ;) Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Aug 24, 2009 at 07:51 PM | #

I actually still use IE6 on this machine!  So I saved the webpage (which to my surprise included all the images I couldn’t see).  After opening the saved page in an html editor, I could see the broken images (as red X’s).  The error report says it couldn’t find the image on disk. A little playing and the solution was to rename the image files to remove the %20’s from the filenames and then from the HTML. %20 is the ASCII code for a space.  I guess the original files had spaces that were changed to %20s when uploaded to the webserver.  I thought that was legal, but it obviously isn’t working. Andrew Posted by Andrew Kreps on Aug 25, 2009 at 11:49 AM | #