12/26 - Ferecon 3.0, Day 1

Once a year Hilary and I host a 2-day gaming extravaganza on the weekend between Christmas and New Years. We cook a bunch of food, put out a bunch of tables and chairs, invite folks over and game away for ~12 hours each day. Usually peak at around 15-20 people each day. Here's what we played on the first day this year.

Elementeo

Trevor def. Chris 2-1
Elementeo is a tactical card game with the unlikely theme of the periodic table. Players take turns placing cards into a grid and then moving, attacking and using special abilities that are kinda-sorta related to the elements in question, with the goal of getting across to the other side of the board to inflict damage on the other player.

Trevor got this to play with his mom (who is a chemist), but he was the first one there so we decided to try a few games of it ourself. It was quick and light, kind of a not-quite-finished attempt to create a Magic: The Gathering style game with a tactical element (which I hear that Summoner Wars has done quite a bit better). It had a couple somewhat interesting strategic wrinkles, and a lot more game design polish probably could uncover a really good game, but it isn't quite there.

Kind of a shame because the art for this game is really quite nice and professional. I saw Matt Leacock (designer of Pandemic) give a talk where he talked about the importance of keeping your prototypes (both in board games and software) aligned with your design stage - you don't want to sink a bunch of money and time into making super nice components when you might decide you want to change something dramatically and half to scrap them - you get married to poor design choices because you don't want to have to start over. This game seemed to demonstrate that principal well.

Steam

Chris 44, Bertram 41, Grey 32, Trevor 26
I'd acquired Steam several months ago, but hadn't gotten a chance to play it. This was my first play for the weekend, and the first play for all of us. I had set the game up to solo a couple of turns so I could teach it, and I'm glad I did because it went pretty smoothly. I think with teaching we were right about 2-1/2 hours. Neat game. Will have to play more and with more experienced people to get a better handle on it.

Small World

Bertram 84, Max 78, Chris 69, Grey 62, Trevor 67
Ferecon was in full swing now with 3 tables starting new games. I pulled out Small World, which I think was new only to Max. I had recently acquired the two small expansions for this game, which add a few new races and powers, but don't radically change gameplay. The most interesting new race was probably the Gypsies, who got points for abandoning regions at the beginning of a turn.

Red November

Another game I'd picked up at the Black Diamond Games auction ($7 for this one), Red November is a co-op where gnomes are stuck in a failing submarine and trying to keep the thing from breaking up, launching nuclear missiles, running out of air, or flooding for long enough for help to arrive.

It says something about the amount of the Warhammer and Warcraft mythos I've been exposed to that I don't find the idea of gnomes running a submarine strange in the least. It can be quite confusing to people whose picture of "gnome" is limited to the Travelocity mascot and fake ethnographic studies.

We played 2 games of this because we died so fast the first time. A pretty neat game, hampered by a somewhat disorganized rulebook and overall tinyness (it is designed to fit in a very small box which is either a clever nod to the cramped quarters on a submarine or a little cost-cutting on the part of Fantasy Flight). We lost the second game too, but I do want to try this some more now that I get the idea.

The Name in the Hat Game

The Name in the Hat Game is my high-school friend's name for the party game where a bunch of names are put in a hat, one person draws one out, and gives clues to try to get the other person to guess it. It's been sold under a bunch of names, most recently as Time's Up, and it is the basis for gameshows like $25,000 Pyramid and Password.

It is our traditional "getting towards the end of the evening, let's play a game with all 10-15 people who are left" game. We played. I kept score. I was kind of drunk, so odds are good I screwed up the score a few times, but according to what I had, Aaron beat me on a tiebreaker (I'd had one more turn than him).

Say Anything

A few people left, and those of us that were left played a 9-player game of Say Anything, basically a more free-form and slightly more personal version of Apples to Apples. When the score is fun to fun, everyone is a winner.