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Thursday: Lab Rats & Cat.
Lab Rats is a fun little board game involving building a maze. It's heavy with strategy and I lost twice. I enjoyed the second loss more than the first because I knew what I was doing, understood how I came to lose, and made some difference in how it played out. But it is quite a fun strategy game. (As an aside, I have no clue if you can buy it or where you would buy it. The GM was on his cell phone when we finished the game, so we didn't find that out. And searching on 'Lab Rats' online, even with modifiers, doesn't turn up anything useful. But I would swear by its looks that it was a finished game, not a prototype...hunh. I can find references to it, but no sign that you can buy it.)
Cat was a blast. You play, well, cats. The system is light, sleek, plays easily and seems to work very well for what it's representing. Toccata and Fur (the scenario) is a fun little game indeed, and we smushed us some boggins. (We also briefly terrorized a scary but innocent dog, but we were on speaking terms again by the end of the game.) The game is available as a pdf for download at http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/ - the print version is out of stock, alas, and was at the con too. I object to the pdf - it has two pages per page. Which is accurate to the size of the book as published, but the layout prevents printing it and then stapling it into a booklet in any way that I can see, because of the way the pages are spaced. A pity. Only stapling them together as pages (rather than a booklet with a 'spine') seems like it would work.
It was easy to create characters, and it played light and easy and fun. Not sure how much I'll get to play it, but it was a blast.
The evening game that I skipped out on due to my gut complaining was Lesser Shades of Evil: Fear the Future. Not really my sort of game, but I signed up for it anyway, I suppose out of desperation (I really don't recall the reasoning). So missing it wasn't entirely horrid. But boy did I spend a lot of time in the exhibit hall, hotel room, and mall on Thursday. You'd almost think I wasn't at a con at all, although the exhibit hall somewhat gives the lie to that even if it is just a specialized form of a flea market. (Much more fun than Saturday Market, which is not an unpleasant place to go either!)
Friday: Seventh Sea, MyWord, Wizards' Gambit, Infested, and a LARP.
Started the day out with the 01 module for Crimson Valor, the Seventh Sea game that is the successor to Song of the Sea, the ongoing GenCon campaign I've been playing in. This was the last chance con to transfer forward your SotS character. So Nora made the transition forward. I had fun with it. During the hiring process, she wasn't at all afraid to sell herself (she learned about that after hiring onto the Misty Maiden years ago in SotS!). She should be willing to sell herself! She is a good sailor; a handy fighter with the sword, knife, and pistol; a decent hunter when on land; and a sail-maker (guild member, no less). A fairly valuable crew member, she can be. And she's a good lookout, too.
The game was fun. Captain Jack's ship is a nice one too. (A bit of Glamour, I do believe: it's many, many times larger inside than outside. Hee.) This was great.
Then went on to play MyWord, which is a card game (and was listed as a board game, because GenCon is contrary!) from Out of the Box Games. This is FUN. You get cards with 1 or 2 letters on them, deal them out, and try to form words. It's very much a "speed of spotting words" game, but there's a penalty for calling out a word that can't actually be made with those cards within the rules! This was a tournament. I won the first round at my table, and got thoroughly smushed during the finalist round. (The top 2 from our group and 3 from the other - larger - group were put into a playoff. First place was 111. I had 70-something and was second place. The rest were 53, 50, and 48, I think. somewhere in that close order.) But that got me second place, which was a $5 gift certificate, which covered the cost of a deck for the game (looks like the price was lowered slightly for the con), so life is good. (First place got $10 plus the deck. He'd played before and already owned it, so he gave the deck to third place.)
Then on to the Wizards' Gambit card game. This was a beta play test. It looks pretty well finalized and sounds like they are set to do a few revisions and head toward production soon. This would be good, because I want to buy it. It was very, VERY playable, with a combination of strategy and luck. I was gleefully evil on a few occasions and, while I did not win the game, I was at least in the running for it. (Short form: you want to try to claim spells to win the game, and to do so you have to put resources on them - but the last one to put any resource on a spell gets it. Then you have other cards you can play to change your situation or impact other players. Plus, the last spell you won has its effect in play, which is to your benefit with low-point spells and often to your detriment with high point spells. Since winning is based on number of points, this works neatly.)
Then Infested, a game run on the system In Dark Alleys. This was another 'well, I will give it a try' game. It was fun, though very dark, as is rather the point. The system worked very well - it played easily. I'm not sure if character creation is easy, of course, but the rest of the play was good. I got the Outcast character - sees things that others don't, homeless, generally viewed as insane, etc. She was really quite a blast to play. (And the GM had done something I thought was really cool: he created two copies of each character, one of each gender. Totally identical, except the name and picture changed, as far as I know. Most GMs don't come to the con with that kind of adaptability, and it was nice to get a gender-appropriate sheet and not have to fudge!)
Basically, there was a major nasty something going on involving a demon-infested person. We took most of the game to figure out that (and I'm not sure I've correctly diagnosed it - we didn't stop to go "what is this?" IC, we just fought it like made when we figured out enough to go forward). The first clue was a set of dead bodies, with the head, hands, and feet removed from each one (eek!). One of them appeared near where my character was and she got to see it, and could see the weird runes/markings on the chest. So then she hauls the others in (a necessary piece of the scenario; the Outcast is needed to move the plot forward, but it was structured so that the others are equally necessary in other ways, at least - though you can switch off some of them, if you have to, the Outcast is needed for the scenario to run, but s/he can't do it themselves).
That was a lot of fun but I would not buy the system, I think. It is darker than I want to own/run/play regularly. I think. If I was sure of a GM as good as that one, I might have to rethink. (I ran into him again later, Saturday morning, playing (planning to play...) in the game whose GM failed to appear.)
From there, I went to the LARP that Scott (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
terram) was in, because he encouraged me to come play. I was cast as an eshu following him around for the stories, hastily renamed to Haley (to be female; the original char was male, but there was no reason it had to be a guy). I hovered on the edges of things, explained things to the kid, chatted with the Galliard of the werewolf pack quite a bit, and traded barbs with the sidhe knight who was guarding him. Mostly weak, quiet ones. (He got a freebie, since the character hadn't been at the first night of the LARP or the first two hours of this night: "where have you been, anyway?" My reply: "Oh, here and there.") It was a lot of fun, even though I was fairly quiet during this session.
And to bed at midnight. Aie.
Speaking of "and to bed" it is time for me to go to bed tonight. Saturday and Sunday will have to wait. Probably until at least Thursday, because I believe we have gaming group over tomorrow to sort out what happens to the games rotation now that a couple has moved to another state and won't be here to do one of the ongoing games every four weeks. I'd just as soon not go to a week-on week-off or three-week rotation, but who knows. Maybe they'll talk me into it. That's for tomorrow, though. Tonight, sleep.
Oh, and I got our room for the C&G reunion. Yay. I am looking forward to all of these events. I am also looking forward to not traveling as much next year. Much as I'm enjoying this, it feels like I'm in a constant tizzy of motion. But oh they've all been great, for varying reasons! I love seeing relatives and friends, I love the cons, I'm having a blast. At the same time what a busy year!
Lab Rats is a fun little board game involving building a maze. It's heavy with strategy and I lost twice. I enjoyed the second loss more than the first because I knew what I was doing, understood how I came to lose, and made some difference in how it played out. But it is quite a fun strategy game. (As an aside, I have no clue if you can buy it or where you would buy it. The GM was on his cell phone when we finished the game, so we didn't find that out. And searching on 'Lab Rats' online, even with modifiers, doesn't turn up anything useful. But I would swear by its looks that it was a finished game, not a prototype...hunh. I can find references to it, but no sign that you can buy it.)
Cat was a blast. You play, well, cats. The system is light, sleek, plays easily and seems to work very well for what it's representing. Toccata and Fur (the scenario) is a fun little game indeed, and we smushed us some boggins. (We also briefly terrorized a scary but innocent dog, but we were on speaking terms again by the end of the game.) The game is available as a pdf for download at http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/ - the print version is out of stock, alas, and was at the con too. I object to the pdf - it has two pages per page. Which is accurate to the size of the book as published, but the layout prevents printing it and then stapling it into a booklet in any way that I can see, because of the way the pages are spaced. A pity. Only stapling them together as pages (rather than a booklet with a 'spine') seems like it would work.
It was easy to create characters, and it played light and easy and fun. Not sure how much I'll get to play it, but it was a blast.
The evening game that I skipped out on due to my gut complaining was Lesser Shades of Evil: Fear the Future. Not really my sort of game, but I signed up for it anyway, I suppose out of desperation (I really don't recall the reasoning). So missing it wasn't entirely horrid. But boy did I spend a lot of time in the exhibit hall, hotel room, and mall on Thursday. You'd almost think I wasn't at a con at all, although the exhibit hall somewhat gives the lie to that even if it is just a specialized form of a flea market. (Much more fun than Saturday Market, which is not an unpleasant place to go either!)
Friday: Seventh Sea, MyWord, Wizards' Gambit, Infested, and a LARP.
Started the day out with the 01 module for Crimson Valor, the Seventh Sea game that is the successor to Song of the Sea, the ongoing GenCon campaign I've been playing in. This was the last chance con to transfer forward your SotS character. So Nora made the transition forward. I had fun with it. During the hiring process, she wasn't at all afraid to sell herself (she learned about that after hiring onto the Misty Maiden years ago in SotS!). She should be willing to sell herself! She is a good sailor; a handy fighter with the sword, knife, and pistol; a decent hunter when on land; and a sail-maker (guild member, no less). A fairly valuable crew member, she can be. And she's a good lookout, too.
The game was fun. Captain Jack's ship is a nice one too. (A bit of Glamour, I do believe: it's many, many times larger inside than outside. Hee.) This was great.
Then went on to play MyWord, which is a card game (and was listed as a board game, because GenCon is contrary!) from Out of the Box Games. This is FUN. You get cards with 1 or 2 letters on them, deal them out, and try to form words. It's very much a "speed of spotting words" game, but there's a penalty for calling out a word that can't actually be made with those cards within the rules! This was a tournament. I won the first round at my table, and got thoroughly smushed during the finalist round. (The top 2 from our group and 3 from the other - larger - group were put into a playoff. First place was 111. I had 70-something and was second place. The rest were 53, 50, and 48, I think. somewhere in that close order.) But that got me second place, which was a $5 gift certificate, which covered the cost of a deck for the game (looks like the price was lowered slightly for the con), so life is good. (First place got $10 plus the deck. He'd played before and already owned it, so he gave the deck to third place.)
Then on to the Wizards' Gambit card game. This was a beta play test. It looks pretty well finalized and sounds like they are set to do a few revisions and head toward production soon. This would be good, because I want to buy it. It was very, VERY playable, with a combination of strategy and luck. I was gleefully evil on a few occasions and, while I did not win the game, I was at least in the running for it. (Short form: you want to try to claim spells to win the game, and to do so you have to put resources on them - but the last one to put any resource on a spell gets it. Then you have other cards you can play to change your situation or impact other players. Plus, the last spell you won has its effect in play, which is to your benefit with low-point spells and often to your detriment with high point spells. Since winning is based on number of points, this works neatly.)
Then Infested, a game run on the system In Dark Alleys. This was another 'well, I will give it a try' game. It was fun, though very dark, as is rather the point. The system worked very well - it played easily. I'm not sure if character creation is easy, of course, but the rest of the play was good. I got the Outcast character - sees things that others don't, homeless, generally viewed as insane, etc. She was really quite a blast to play. (And the GM had done something I thought was really cool: he created two copies of each character, one of each gender. Totally identical, except the name and picture changed, as far as I know. Most GMs don't come to the con with that kind of adaptability, and it was nice to get a gender-appropriate sheet and not have to fudge!)
Basically, there was a major nasty something going on involving a demon-infested person. We took most of the game to figure out that (and I'm not sure I've correctly diagnosed it - we didn't stop to go "what is this?" IC, we just fought it like made when we figured out enough to go forward). The first clue was a set of dead bodies, with the head, hands, and feet removed from each one (eek!). One of them appeared near where my character was and she got to see it, and could see the weird runes/markings on the chest. So then she hauls the others in (a necessary piece of the scenario; the Outcast is needed to move the plot forward, but it was structured so that the others are equally necessary in other ways, at least - though you can switch off some of them, if you have to, the Outcast is needed for the scenario to run, but s/he can't do it themselves).
That was a lot of fun but I would not buy the system, I think. It is darker than I want to own/run/play regularly. I think. If I was sure of a GM as good as that one, I might have to rethink. (I ran into him again later, Saturday morning, playing (planning to play...) in the game whose GM failed to appear.)
From there, I went to the LARP that Scott (
terram) was in, because he encouraged me to come play. I was cast as an eshu following him around for the stories, hastily renamed to Haley (to be female; the original char was male, but there was no reason it had to be a guy). I hovered on the edges of things, explained things to the kid, chatted with the Galliard of the werewolf pack quite a bit, and traded barbs with the sidhe knight who was guarding him. Mostly weak, quiet ones. (He got a freebie, since the character hadn't been at the first night of the LARP or the first two hours of this night: "where have you been, anyway?" My reply: "Oh, here and there.") It was a lot of fun, even though I was fairly quiet during this session.And to bed at midnight. Aie.
Speaking of "and to bed" it is time for me to go to bed tonight. Saturday and Sunday will have to wait. Probably until at least Thursday, because I believe we have gaming group over tomorrow to sort out what happens to the games rotation now that a couple has moved to another state and won't be here to do one of the ongoing games every four weeks. I'd just as soon not go to a week-on week-off or three-week rotation, but who knows. Maybe they'll talk me into it. That's for tomorrow, though. Tonight, sleep.
Oh, and I got our room for the C&G reunion. Yay. I am looking forward to all of these events. I am also looking forward to not traveling as much next year. Much as I'm enjoying this, it feels like I'm in a constant tizzy of motion. But oh they've all been great, for varying reasons! I love seeing relatives and friends, I love the cons, I'm having a blast. At the same time what a busy year!
