Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

A good convention, and a long overdue con report. This year the convention left its old digs, the Embassy Suites on I-17 and Greenway. I rather liked that hotel, it sucked in terms of logistics and layout, but I liked the location. It was 10 minutes from my condo and 2 minutes from one of my favorite restaurants, Chino Bandido’s. It had plenty of fast food places around it and a Circle K across the street, so you never had a problem getting food or munchies.

This year the convention moved to the Tempe Mission Palms. A VERY nice hotel, great for a game convention. In fact, I have zero complaints about the hotel for game cons, and it would be, IMHO, a great hotel for any convention. But it is a much longer drive and doesn’t have the fast food smorgasbord that the Phoenix location had. That is not to say that it doesn’t have food around it, there are tons of restaurants in close walking distance. But they are precisely that, restaurants, not fast food places. You can’t eat in this area inexpensively.

There was also an initial perception that we’d have to pay for parking Friday and Saturday, at least on Sunday meters are free in Tempe. The parking situation turned out to be incorrect – the hotel had a lot on the north side that was free to guests and attendees, so we exploited that for the weekend. Driving in Tempe has also become somewhat insane, they now throttle down Mill Ave. to a single lane north-bound when you get close to University. It basically comes to a crawl.

Well, the intrepid Ex-Buffaloes et al, cunning critters that we are, decided to do what we can to combat these inequities. First, we car-pooled. I was the longest driver, also with the largest vehicle, so I appointed myself driver. Friday morning I left my condo at 8:30 or so, fortunately it was pretty much the end of the morning rush hour, and cruised out to Tempe to pick up The Magic Rat. From there we picked up Rich, thence to the hotel. Our decided route was down Rural to University, then sneak behind/through the dorms to the hotel. We snagged a primo spot in the parking lot across the street, the plan to be leaving my Rodeo there all day. It also was great for showing off the official Spare Brains Games sticker that I’d applied the previous night. I had it made at Metro Center the previous day at a little middle of the mall vendor that made such stickers. Picked a really cool font, it’s a good 18” wide and 6” tall and has the URL on a second row. It’s pretty spiff, cost about $20, and will be a write-off as an advertising expense if I ever succeed in selling enough games this year to need deductions.

We got to the convention well in advance of Jason’s 10am demo of very cool games from a vendor whose name eludes me for the moment but whom I intend to add in later. Richard and I played a game of Alhambra, joined by two others. It was lots of fun and I did not win, still, I intend to acquire a copy when I am able. We then wandered off until my demos at noon, at which we played all sorts of my games with Rich, Jason, and Dan Watts’ daughter, Roe. Dan Reilly showed up later for more mischief. Richard pulled an amazing win of Zombie Cafe out of his **ahem** hat by rolling a 2 on 2d6 to get rid of his last brain that was heavily modified down, a 2 was the only roll that would do it. So that was cool. Many other games were played, then we all toddled off in different directions. IIRC, Rich was semi-soused by having lunch at an Irish pub nearby, so that added to the fun. I wandered off for some body fuel, and having planned on avoiding the local restaurants as much as possible, I went out to my truck, having cleverly cooked a package of Hebrew Nat’l Franks the previous night. I had lots of drinks, mainly in the form of water and Gatorade, buns, and Heinz Organic Ketchup. So I had a hotdog or three and wandered back to the convention.

Friday night was not terribly remarkable, Jason and I dug out our Pirates of the Spanish Main WizKids stuff and had a brief battle. The game played well, Jason horribly damaged one of my two big ships, blowing off three of its four masts through using a Captain chit that allowed the ship to move and fire on the same turn, normally you can only do one action per turn. That Captain chit is a HUGE advantage. My second ship, also a four master but additionally had better guns, had loaded up on treasure and soon found itself engaged. I was able to use my damaged ship to interfere with the fight and prevent Jason’s second ship from getting as involved as it should. Though I damaged Jason’s ship with the Captain, ultimately my two four-masters were dead in the water.

We each had one smaller ship in addition to our two biggies. I set upon his small ship with mine, it was a single-master versus my two-master IIRC. It didn’t go well for Jason, I stripped its mast in no time and captured it. Jason won an overwhelming victory, having captured my two big ships. But I did get my licks in by capturing his small ship which had treasure and damaging at least one of his big ships.

A little later, after the dealer room closed, Rich, Jason and I were joined by Jim and Ken. We played a game of office brown-nosing that I wasn’t terribly impressed by, then I went out to my truck and got out my copy of Finster Flure, a really cool German game where you have a small group of characters being chased by a monster. It’s lots of fun, the setup of the underground that you’re being chased through changes every game as the players take turns setting up stones and teleports and blood slides. The monster follows programmed movement, if his movement brings him into your square, you’re caught and thrown in jail, in the second half of the game that character is eaten/killed and removed from play. You need to get more than 50% of your peoples out of the dungeon to win. Still, it’s lots of fun, particularly when you think you have the monster’s movement figured out and it doesn’t quite go where you were expecting. One of the neatest aspect is luring the monster in your direction in order to get him to capture/kill someone elses token. Very fun game, and I understand that an American release is due later this year. It’s not a problem getting the German copy and you can get an English set of the rules online. This is one of those games where there are no playing pieces that have printing on them, so as long as you can get a rules translation in a language you understand, there is no barrier to playing the game.

That was pretty much it for Friday. Rich was feeling not at all well, I delivered everyone to their respective homes and went to bed.

Saturday started about the same, this time we parked in the hotel’s back lot. Jason had another 10am demo, my demo was at 2pm, and Rich decided to drive himself. We met up with him very early at the convention, his illness was a lack of protein that had really drained him. I suspected as much and was glad that he was doing better. This time I did more wandering, Jason had a much smaller turnout for his demos and Rich played a really cool game wherein he was a big game hunter only there were a heck of a lot of dinosaurs in addition to normal big game. It is something that I’m definitely going to have to play in the future.

My demo was very different. Only one person showed up initially. He was a die-hard board gamer, but he was also looking for lighter fare, and that’s a very apt description of the games that I produce. We started off playing Zombie Cafe. One of the neat things about this game is that it works fairly well for two players. In fact, you can have probably up to 7, though you’re going to exhaust the brain deck pretty fast, which is not really a problem. We played twice, not shuffling the deck between plays, so he got a very good feeling for what the deck contained. Aside from liking occasional lighter fair, he was also interested in games that he could play with nephews/grand children of much younger age. Zombie Cafe works well for that. And conveniently, I was selling it at the convention for the first time. I had first openly play-tested Zombie Cafe at last year’s HexaCon, and it went well. It’s undergone a bit of revision since then, but I’ve never found any fundamental flaws with it. Yes, it is light-weight, and luck is a major element. Still, it’s pretty fun. And my sole player liked it enough to buy a copy.

It was actually the second copy sold at the con, a friend of mine bought the first. He liked it enough to buy it at last year’s con, but I didn’t have any copies for sale then. I also gave away two copies, one to Jason for helping me with some text and as payment for a Village Inn stop after an RPG session a month or so ago, and I gave a copy to Ivan Ericson, the convention organizer. There’s an amusing story related to that that I shall eventually relate.

Next up, after our two plays of Zombie Cafe, was my cowboy shooter, currently titled Cowboy Shooter. I have a “selling” title already picked out, but I’m not broadcasting the name at this time. For this we were joined by a third player who is a semi-regular with the Arizona Boardgamers who meet with disgusting frequency (frequently 3-5 times a week) thoughout the valley. The play went well but devolved into a bit of nit-picking over special weapons. The game had already been modified after a test with Arizona Boardgamers a couple weeks prior to reduce the lethality of thrown/non-conventional weapons, and I think the modification was good. Now, instead of an automatic hit, you have to draw a bullet. (Brief explanation – bullets are drawn from a deck of two decks of standard playing cards, this is separate from the normal draw deck of the game, bullets are drawn only during gun fights or to check actions). If the bullet is black, you hit and the card does the appropriate amount of damage. It will be red, to symbolize blood. It also gave me an opportunity to add dynamite to the game, in this case you have to draw two blacks in a row to do 1d6 damage. It can make for a very bad day.

Anyway, the game still needs a lot of work. I wouldn’t say it’s broken or has any major problems, but it ain’t close to release yet. After the convention I received an email suggestion from someone who had participated in the Arizona Boardgamers session that I thought was excellent and it’s one that I’m going to include in my next test.

The third guy left, and the first guy agreed that the way that I did the special weapons was perfectly logical and the other guy was just going to add a lot more complexity to the game. I strive to keep my games to a single (perhaps double-sided) sheet of paper and let the cards speak for themselves, so that once you understand the game you shouldn’t have to refer to the rules except perhaps for startup.

We had plenty of time left, so I pulled out Sneezin’s Greetings. This is definitely one of my stranger games. In it each player alternates between being a cat and trying to cause others to sneeze and being a person who is very allergic to cats who is in a house filled with cats. Well, perhaps stranger within the set that I’m currently testing, I have some really twisted stuff coming up.

I had not been planning on running this originally, it has two problems and I neglected to print out a score card that is required for the game. The score card does two things, first it keeps track of your current sneeze level, second it keeps track of how many times you’ve made your opponents sneeze, the latter is victory points. I thought this would be a game that my participant might really like, so I pulled out two pieces of paper and quickly threw together two score cards. I was correct, he liked the game, but best of all I figured out the solution to one of my problems. I think it will make a big difference in future tests, and hopefully soon I’ll get a solution to the other problem.

Well, that about wrapped up the playtest. He said he’d pick up a copy of Zombie Cafe from me Sunday during one of my favorite parts of the convention – double-blind Boot Hill. I packed up, took my stuff out to my truck, and headed across the street to Quizno’s for dinner before Jim ran Champions that night.

Dinner was decent, Champions was fun. Jim lives in Apache Junction and it is a pretty fair drive from his house to the hotel, so he got a room with his sister and his roommate, Ken. Said room was invaded by Rich, Jason, Bear & Felicia, and myself for a run of his Rescuers campaign. It was also visited by Chuck & Tracy briefly, neither of whom have characters in Jim’s game. The game was fun and is thoroughly written up in Magic_Rat’s blog.

After the game Jason and I went to the open gaming area and indulged in a couple of two-player games. The first was a card game from Wizards of the Coast game based on Looney Tunes cartoon characters. It was a collector game, but having all the cards really didn’t enhance the game. The basic box set contains all the components that you need and I bought two of them at the blow-out price of $1 each. I left one with Russet in Cloudcroft and have the other down here. The game was one of scene-stealing, you both are trying to make a cartoon but you’re also doing one-upsmanship. It was a lot of fun, and much easier to learn from someone who’d played it before.

The second game was a German import from Kronos called Balloon Cup. In it each player is trying to capture colored cubes, once you’ve captured X number of a specific color, you can claim the appropriate trophy. Person with the most trophies win. You have a hand of cards, each card is a color and a value. You have four competition cards in front of you that specify the number of cubes and whether you are competing for high or low value. The cubes placed on the card are drawn blind, so you never know what the mix will be. Let’s say the competition is for low value and it has a red, blue, and green cube. Each player must play one card of each color, hoping to achieve low total. The lowest (or highest) score wins the cubes. But here’s the kicker – you can play cards on your opponent’s side. So let’s say a competition has green and I have both a 1 and a 18 green. You play one card a turn, so on one turn I play the 18 on my opponent then on the next I play the 1 on myself. Then if I can get good values on red and blue I may win the cubes for that competition. After that competition has been resolved, the competition tile is flipped over and becomes a high value to win. The cubes are drawn from the bag and play continues.

It was a very fun game, I think it’s the ability to play cards on your opponent’s side is what adds a great fun dimension to it. There are five trophies available, and it takes a bit of time to win three of them. This is not a quick game, but play is very fast and it’s lots of fun. Definitely recommended, and another one on my list for Russet and I.

It turns out that we made a mistake. There are five colors of cubes (red, blue, green, yellow, gray) that are drawn and placed on competition cards. We missed the rule that said you can only have one of any given color on a competition card. It turned out that we both had two cups, the gray cup was the only one remaining, and we couldn’t win it. The competition, IIRC, had one yellow and three grays, and there weren’t enough gray cards remaining to enable one of us to win it. So technically the game was a draw, though I think I might have won a marginal victory by having won higher cube value cups than Jason. Regardless, even if it was a draw, it was lots of fun.

Thus endeth Saturday.


Sunday didn’t have the morning rush. Neither Jason nor myself had scheduled demos, we were going to play in the noon Boot Hill Double-Blind. This has become sort of a tradition to play in, it’s a huge amount of fun. The guy who runs it has two identical town maps in which two teams of five cowboys wander around and shoot at each other. You start as a cow poke named Bob and eventually die. You come back as a gun fighter (you get to choose the card, all Bobs are identical for shooting skills, but after that they start differentiating) then after your gun fighter dies you come back as a Hollywood Legend. Our team had, simultaneously, Quigly (from Quigly Down Under), the greatest Sharps Buffalo Rifle shooter who never lived and The Rifleman, the greatest rifle shooter that ever lived. We set up in the highest points of town and had a lot of fun! Though, in all honesty, ultimately we both died.

Quigly killed Sharon Stone from that Western that she did with Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio et al, I put a world of hurt on someone whose name also eludes me for the moment (Chuck was running him). But best of all, I killed Clint Eastwood/The Outlaw Josey Wales. He was going down an alley and didn’t check his six (looking behind you). Man, those shots felt good.

Other Hollywood Legends that appeared included Matt Dillon, The Preacher (from the Sharon Stone movie), Trinity, The Virginian, and four others who I don’t remember.

The game has been modified from previous years. Chris, the owner/runner, is producing new maps, he also added one more incarnation – after your Hollywood Legend dies, previously, that was it. Now, your Bob makes a cameo appearance and generally dies pretty quick. In my case, my Bob was the last on my side of the board to die, The Preacher was badly wounded and finished off by Matt Dillon who then did me in. That left two on the other team, both Hollywood’s, still standing. In an amazing roll, Chuck’s badly wounded character finished off Dillon. It was quite an ending.

Another modification was Chris made some female characters after Tracy complained last year that there weren’t any and there were plenty of examples in cinema.

Thus endeth the convention.

Chuck, Tracy, Jason and I walked across the street to Monty’s, a great steak joint and Tempe Historic Building 1 of 1. A great meal, and we packed it up and called it a Con. Well, we did attend a party afterwards, so it actually ended for us a bit later.

Highes:
Selling two copies of my game.
Lots of fun with the Double-Blind. Last year I didn’t get a single kill with my Hollywood, I got cut in half by some nerk with a shotgun.
A fix for Sneezin’s Greetings, that much closer to a sellable product.
Discovered a way to improve my low-volume manufacturing process. To be discussed later.

Lows:
No money. It sucks being unemployed with zero income. Fortunately I got a free membership to the convention for running games last year.
Less money than I started with. Somehow on Friday I lost $15 of the small amount that I started with. That really sucks.
Low turnout for my demos. This is mostly my fault, I didn’t pimp them as much as I should have online, and they were kind of early in the day. I think I might have had better turnout if they’d been a bit later.
Not being able to be there Thursday night. At that time I was in school Tuesday/Thursday nights. I could have showed up, but I had lots of work assembling the copies of Zombie Cafe that I wanted to sell.


The Befuddling of Ivan Ericson. This was classic. During my Saturday demo, Ivan was wandering around the convention taking photos to post online. I decided that he was really busting his butt trying (and succeeding) in making this a great convention. So I pulled out a copy of Zombie Cafe and decided to give it to him the next time he passed by. When he did I handed it to him and said “Happy Birthday.” This is something that I frequently say to people when I give them things, regardless of whether or not it is their birthday. Ivan stops, perplexed look on his face, and says “How did you know it’s my birthday?” As it turns out Sunday was his birthday. Ivan invited me as a “convention worker” to the post-con party Sunday evening, thus Jason was also included in the invite.

The party was fun, it was populated almost exclusively with people who had worked the convention in one form or another. I introduced Tracy to another Wayne who runs a Harry Potter LARP at local conventions, I think they were all but inseparable after that point, I later gave Wayne a ride home as he lives about 4 miles north of me. This introduces the final bad point of the con: it looks like Wayne lost his digital camera, fortunately it wasn’t mine and my digital camera!

The party was also Ivan’s formal introduction of his own company to put on local game conventions. He ran two HexaCons and a DarkCon, a pseudo-game con held in January. He definitely has the chops and the organization skills to put on a good show, his con will be a few weeks before the 2005 HexaCon. I’ll definitely attend his and run demos, I might also do HexaCon, but it’s too early to consider committing to that. It boils down to whether or not I’m living in state at that time. If I am, I’ll attend, if not, then probably not as I can see one 1000 mile trip (round trip approx miles) for Ivan’s event, a known quantity. I can’t see doing two such trips in such a short span. There are other conventions that would be much better for me to attend to shill my product to major gaming companies.

Thus endeth the bloggage. I’ll probably have some additions/corrections, but it’s almost 1am and I’m tired and have a 400 mile drive ahead of me tomorrow/today/in less than 12 hours. Now I just have to write two book reviews and more on my trip.