So here goes: the last two days!

Day 3 (Saturday):

We got up bright and early to wait in line for Hickman’s Killer Breakfast, an event in which Tracy Hickman and his wife Laura entertain us with song and DnD theater. Volunteers, called “victims,” are called up to the DnD table to be killed by Tracy, their merciless DM. Each victim must state how they got there, and if their answer is entertaining, Tracy lets them live…for the time being. If they ramble on or aren’t interesting enough, he declares “YOU DIE,” banishing them from the table. Then he presents a quick scenario and asks each player/victim what they do. This is generally where the rest of the people die, to be quickly replaced by new victims.

It’s fun DnD theater, made better by Tracy’s quick wit, banter with Laura, and the victim’s funny characters. Oh, but there is no actual breakfast.

After running around the dealer room and eating lunch, we demoed Killer Bunnies: Quest for the Magic Carrot. It was a fun card game, though a little complicated for something so light and fluffy and fast. The game’s graphic designer, Jonathan Young, ran us through it and the game designer, Jeffrey Neil Bellinger, was also in the demo room and gave us some signed cards. Both guys were really fun and nice, and I’m interested to see more from them.

On to BattleTech Bootcamp! My boyfriend John plays BattleTech and he had run me through a game once before. But there’s a lot of info and it was good to have a refresher.

Then we went straight to Flight School for a quick intro game of AeroTech, the flight version of BattleTech. Same thing, but flying, and some small rule variations.

Then The Guild panel! Felicia Day was there with some of the Guild actors: Sandeep Parikh (Zaboo), Jeff Lewis (Vork), and Robin Thorsen (Clara). They filled the one hour with a Q&A from the audience, and spoke a lot about the spirit and nitty-gritty of independent web video. As you can probably surmise, their back and forth banter was very funny, and Felicia is even more beautiful in person.

The last event of the night was learning how to play the card game Citadels, a game by Fantasy Flight. I loved it. There will be a separate blog post on it alone for sure! I’m surprised it’s not rated higher on BGG.

Day 4 (Sunday):

Our teacher, David Dresh, made this. Sadly, we didn't get this far in the 2 hour class.

We learned about making terrain for miniature gaming from David Dresh. Fun and interesting, though I’m not sure I’ll ever get around doing it.

The last game I played at GenCon was Thunderstone. The graphic designer and AEG staffer, Jim Pinto, taught it to us and was a really nice guy. We loved it and bought it on the spot when he offered a discount. Thunderstone is like Dominion with dungeon crawling. That’s all I’ll say for now…until I do a separate blog post on it!

Then we ran around the dealer room before heading out. Saw Settlers of Catan being played on a Microsoft Surface!

Before going to the airport, we actually had to stop at TJ Maxx to get a cart to haul our loot back. The newly heavy duffel bag was otherwise threatening to break John’s back, and I could barely lift it.

I’m usually pretty conservative when it comes to buying stuff. But the GenCon dealer hall cast a powerful over this game geek. Pretty steampunk dice I don’t need? Yes, please! A rubber dragon pet I can wear around my neck? MUST HAVE!! Halfing minis? Gotta buy ‘em all!

The beginnings of my chainmail dice bag.

By the way, when I say “we,” I’m referring to my boyfriend John, our good friends and DnD cohorts Steve and Stacey, and myself. John and I had a great time just the two of us last year, but it’s double the fun having our friends along. Gaming is best shared with friends and family!

After the dicebag workshop, Stacey and I booked it over to the Wil Wheaton panel while the boys did something-or-other. My only exposure to Wil Wheaton has been Star Trek, his twitter feed, and his small parts in The Guild. (I know, I know, I don’t watch Big Bang Theory! I should.) But I’m definitely going to start following his blog and possibly getting some of his books. His panel was funny and touching. He read a few of his short stories that were memoirs of his experiences with gaming, especially as they related to his wife and kids. He received a lot of well-deserved laughter, applause, and I suspect a few tears. I recorded the audio on my iPhone – maybe I’ll post it next week.

I painted a mini!

Our next event was beginning miniature painting. Another great little class, especially since I’ve never tried it at all. Pictured above is my first attempt.

Since we were worried about the dealer hall being swamped tomorrow, Saturday, we spent the late afternoon getting loot. I got a female halfling mini I plan on painting and using for our DnD runs, some awesome Steampunk dice from the Q-Workshop.com booth, and this crazy rubber dragon I can wear on my arm or shoulder (RToriginals.com). And John has us very well covered in the game department. I’m not even sure of everything he picked up yet. Oh, and the WoW TCG is letting everyone get free loot cards! Just spin a wheel and see what you get. I spun well and landed on the “rare cards!” So I got to blindly choose from 9 cards – and I got the Red Bearon mount! Some guy was telling me to sell it, but I’m totally gonna use it.

I might have to go back to this booth for more awesome dice. BECAUSE I NEED THEM.

So it’s weird, but we only did one game today! And it was a great one: Pitch Car! Pitch Car is a dexterity racing game in which you flick your car, a small wooden disk, along a track. We had about 8 people playing on a few fairly large track. It’s fast paced and really fun, especially thanks to the gerat guys running it.. Lots of laughter and groans and clapping and cheering for each other. A great way to end day 2!

John, Steve, and me playing Pitch Car

We started the day at 8am with a match of giant Settlers of Catan. Which I won – It’s all about the longest road!

Then we moved into the dealer’s hall at opening, where I bought the first Looking For Group book from the Blind Ferret guys, and demoed a couple Mayfair games: Tsuro and a card game, Whammy. Both fun and fast and easy to get into.

After lunch we took a class on sculpting with green stuff to make miniatures. The guy running it, Joe Orteza, has made some amazing figures. He showed us a few introductory techniques.

Then came my favorite part of the day: a nearly four hour rpg session using the Fudge system. The GM was great. He was one of the writers for GnomeStew.com and the book, Eureka, from which he ran our little horror adventure. I wound up with my arm cut off and getting impaled with an evil bone that turned me into a demon monster. Good times! This was my first experience with Fudge, and I hope it isn’t the last. It seemed to embody the chance of DnD, but much simpler, leaving a lot more concentration for the story. It must be growing in popularity – all the dice vendors in the dealer’s hall were already sold out of Fudge dice!

Once we were done with our tale of horror, we grabbed dinner and then hit up True Dungeon. I had done a True Dungeon mini-quest before, but this was a full on two hour event. Think DnD in a haunted house. There are lots of puzzles to solve, and the dragon killed everyone in the end.

Thus ends our first full day at GenCon. I love the non-stop gaming. Ready for more tomorrow!

Above is our hotel, the Crowne Plaza. It’s in a converted train station. There are rooms in that train car! Not ours though, unfortunately.

Apparently the World of Warcraft TCG championships are taking place here!

There was at least one Gen Con event today: a fun little mixer called The Stink. Also in a train station!

Relaxed in the evening with beer and grub from The Ram, which was all decked out in RPG banners. Great beer. And great reminder of how stupidly expensive my hometown of NYC can be.

You may recall that this also happened back in March when I went over the three levels of nerd stigma. Well it’s here again, for the second time this year! Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to participate this time. I have a job at home this week along with preparing to go out of town this weekend, which means no subway/public time for me. But I do hope to go over Diaspora and Shock, and even though I’ll be doing that at home, I’m telling you about it, which is kind of public….right? Leave comments below if you plan on participating, and what tabletop RPGs you’re into.

boardgamegeek.com

Carcassonne was one of my own “gateway” games that got me into Euro board games and it remains one of my favorites. It’s an easy-to-learn tile laying game named after a medieval French town. You lay down one randomly drawn terrain tile each turn. You may place it wherever you like, as long as it’s adjacent to an existing tile and all the sides match up so that roads connect to roads, fields to fields, cities to cities, etc. Then you may place one of your seven followers, little wooden people affectionately known as “meeples,” on one of the tiles to claim a city, road, field, or cloister. On to the next turn. It’s really pretty simple. When the element you claimed gets completed, you can remove your meeple and gets points based on what the element was and the number of tiles it took up. If it never gets completed, your meeple stays on it until the tiles run out and you get your points then, but you may not get as many. A lot of the game is dictated by luck from the random tiles. But strategy is still very important. You may choose to conserve your meeples for bigger claims down the road, or you may wickedly try to take over another player’s claim.

THE BASICS:

Play Time: 40-60 minutes

Number of Players: 2-5. I haven’t played it with more than two very often, so I can’t say what the ideal number is. But BoardGameGeek users voted 2 as the best.

Suggested age: 8 and up.

Designer: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede

Published: 2000, Rio Grande Games (English version) and Hans im Glück (German version)

Buy: This game is widely available. It looks like you should be able to get it in the $15-20 range online. Or you can skip the shipping charges but pay a little more and support your Friendly Neighborhood Game Store.

There is also an awesome iPhone version out now. You can play it online or locally with a friend who has it, and includes a great solitaire game, with which you can challenge your friends to beat your high score. There is at least one big game-changer I noticed about this version though: it gives you the ability to see how many of each kind of tile are still left in the virtual tile bag. When I played with John I felt this gave both of us a new advantage we never had before. Sure, you could conceivably figure out how many of each tile are left in the original game, but it would take a lot of keeping track and counting. I’m not sure if I like this new feature, but either way, I very much recommend BOTH the original and the iPhone versions. There’s even an Xbox 360 arcade one if you’re interested!

How DnD is better than WoW:

1) The Snacks.

I don’t have a snack ritual for WoW. I just, you know, eat stuff like normal to ensure I’m not a hungry gamer. But whether we order out or make food or a combination of the above, snacks are always an integral part of playing DnD. They determine the breaks, give us stuff to talk about and do between turns, and they are YUMMY. DnD is possibly the only game I associate food with.

2) The Unknown.

If I’m going into a raid or a 5-man I’ve never been to before in WoW, I better read up on how each boss fight is gonna go so I’m prepared. But DnD? Nope. None of that. No peaking at the Monster Manual! (Depending on your DM.) We walk into a new room and have no idea what will jump out at us. We figure out tactics on the fly, find and exploit weaknesses, and solve puzzles. And then we don’t repeat it, because there are always new adventures and lands and dungeons to go explore!

3) The Face Time. (Ugh, is that term trademarked by Apple now?)

This one probably goes without saying, but I just can’t leave it out. Getting together, face-to-face, with friends for the common goal of fun and conquest is awesome.

How WoW is better than DnD:

1) Math. Lack of.

Unless you’re so heavily into theorycrafting that you’re actually making spreadsheets instead of just plugging numbers into them, you don’t really need to do math in WoW. Not with the regularity of DnD math. Of course, math in DnD isn’t hard, and it’s probably helping us keep dementia from aging at bay. And there’s a certain charm to adding die rolls together and knowing how all the stats work to make you awesome. But there’s something to be said for not having to do math every time you make an attack.

2) It’s faster.

DnD can be slow. Sometimes too slow, especially in this age of short attention spans. WoW is fast and snappy. You’re in and out of a raid in a matter of hours. It took many 5-8 hour sessions to get through our DnD dungeon. And that leads into the last point…..

3) You don’t have to coordinate schedules to play WoW.

You can log in whenever you want. You don’t have to email back and forth with all 25 people you raid with to see what works best for them. The guild sets a raid time and people show up. Our DnD group didn’t meet in May at all because we couldn’t find a time all of us could get together for a 5-hour stretch.

RoboRally is a hilarious robot race through a dangerous factory. It’s possibly the last thing I’d expect from the creator of Magic: The Gathering. Each player has to race to different check points in a certain order and the winner is the first to reach all of them. The challenge is that it isn’t exactly turn-by-turn. These aren’t androids or Cylons we’re talking about. They’re simple robots, and they need to be programmed.  Ahead of time.

So using the movement deck, each player has to program their robot’s next five moves before they happen. Then the round begins and you have to make those moves NO MATTER WHAT.

Easy, right?

Wrong. You were planning on moving your bot forward three spaces? Well your nemesis, the Twonky bot, has priority and slams into you, pushing you on the conveyor belt heading nowhere fast! (Twonky really is one of the RoboRally robots, and also has a presence in Borean Tundra.) You still have to move forward those three spaces because it’s in your program, but the conveyor belt has turned you around, so you’re really going the opposite direction you intended!

This game takes a lot of thinking ahead, visualization, and anticipation of possibilities. It’s easy to learn, hard but fun to play, and quite unique.

THE BASICS:

Play Time: 2 hours

Number of Players: 2-8. I’ve never played with just two. I think it wouldn’t be as hard or chaotic (or fun), but I should try it. 4-5 seems ideal to me, but if you really want your head to explode, go for 8!

Suggested age: 10 and up.

Designer: Richard Garfield (The creator of Magic: The Gathering!)

Artist: Phil Foglio of Girl Genius worked on the original Wizards of the Coast version. The latest Avalon Hill version has art by Peter Bergting,  Bob Carasca, Jennifer Lathrop, and Peter Whitley.

Published: 1994, Wizards of the Coast. Avalon Hill is the most recent publisher.

Buy: $35-45 from various sites.

boardgamegeek.com

Wise and Otherwise is the intellectual elite big brother of party game Balderdash. But instead of words, you deal with proverbs. One designated Reader each round reads the first few words of a proverb, along with the country of origin. Everyone else then writes down an ending to the proverb and passes that to the Reader to be read aloud, along with the correct ending. For instance, an example proverb would be “There’s an old Croatian saying: ‘Those who eat porridge…’” So it’s your job to come up with a convincing ending! Once  all the endings have been read aloud, everyone guesses the right one. You get points for being correct, and points if people guess your answer. I really enjoy creative games like this. It can be a little mentally exhausting, and ego bruising if no one ever chooses your proverbs, but it can also be hilarious. There’s always one person in the group who writes the most ridiculous, laughter-inducing phrases. Then there’s always those rounds when the actual proverb is so unbelievably weird and funny that no one votes for it! I recommend the game, especially if you’re looking to trying to spice up your party game repertoire.

My biggest criticism of Wise and Otherwise is that there’s a board included, which is just dumb. It helps with scoring, so the player who reaches the end of the board first wins the game. This just seems wasteful – it’s just as easy to keep score on a piece of paper (or smart phone) and announce when the first player has reached 20. The inclusion of an unnecessary board seems like a ploy to make you think this is a bigger, more expensive game than it should be. Lose the board and shave ten bucks off the price and now we’re talking.

THE BASICS:

Play Time: 45 minutes

Number of Players: 2-6.

Suggested age: 12 and up.

Published: By wiseandotherwise.com, 1997

Buy: I found it on Amazon for $42. Internet pickings seems slim. Board Game Geek doesn’t rate it very highly, so I’m wondering if this game just kind of died out. Don’t forget to check your local friendly board game store.

Image courtesy of Z-Man Games

Pandemic is a cooperative game in which you and your fellow players team up to eradicate the threat of four deadly global diseases. Each teammate plays one of 5 randomly chosen characters, each with their own unique abilities: Dispatcher, Scientist, Medic, Researcher, and Operations Expert. Every round more disease spreads, as you race to discover cures by traveling the world, using a simple system of cards and tokens A lot of luck is involved, but it’s up to you to come up with the best strategy using your team’s given abilities and situation. The game is fun, but HARD. I’m sorry world, but we regularly succumbed to pandemic while playing leisurely over the Thanksgiving holiday last year. Fortunately the game is fast enough that a loss isn’t too discouraging. Instead it would embolden us to try again, until we were victorious. I sometimes dislike co-op games because they don’t feed my competitive hunger, but the ease and quickness of this game make up for that.

THE BASICS:

Play Time: 60 minutes

Number of Players: 2-4. BGG users recommend 4, and I agree, though 3 and even 2 is fun too!

Suggested age: 10 and up.

Designer: Matt Leacock

Artist: Joshua Cappel (graphics and illustration), Régis Moulun (cover painting)

Published: 2008, by Z-Man Games, among others.

Buy: I found it on Amazon for $27.