GenCon 2017 - Friday

Had some intestinal issues Friday morning, so arrived to the site at 11AM.  Decided to check out the BoardGameGeek "Hot Games Room", which is a conference room in an adjacent hotel where stacks of newly released games are available for free play.  Observed a bit of Terraforming Mars, which is exactly what it sounds like - a scientifically psuedo-realistic world-building affair, where your goal is to make Mars habitable over the course of generations.  Scoring was a victory point system, and the gameplay was "frenemy"-esque.  Seemed worth playtesting sometime.

Then, was invited to play a game of Magic Maze, which I was skeptical about at first due to the theme, but turned out to be a wonderfully designed co-op party game.

One of the biggest problems with co-op games is "quarterbacking", when one player who is more experienced or more motivated directly or indirectly dictates how other players take their actions.  Magic Maze manages to make quarterbacking impossible, while still requiring high levels of coordination and cooperation to succeed.

You are four fantasy characters in a shopping mall (bear with me.)  Your objective is for all characters to steal their chosen item (the elf has to steal a bow, the barbarian an axe, etc.) and escape from the mall before time runs out.   The map is randomly generated via tile placement as the game goes on - think Zombies.  The game is real-time with a sand-timer.  Here's the first twist - each player can move every character, but only in one direction!  So I might be able to move pawns north, but I need my neighbor to move the pawn east first.  (With less than 4 players, sometimes a single player has multiple options.)

Still not so tough, right? Here's the second twist: No talking, gesturing, or communication of any kind! The only comms that are allowed are: 1) Staring intently at someone 2) Putting the "do something" marker in front of a person!

The game is surprisingly difficult, but does occasionally give you spaces which allow you to flip the sand timer and communicate until you take your next action (the sand timer still flowing while you talk, so it's not free, and you need to haul ass quickly.)

It rewards quick thinking, situational awareness, and a balanced team - a weak link will sink the group.  A great surprise of a game and another good one to play with gamers and non-gamers alike.

Next up was a demo of Alien Artifacts, a 4X card game that isn't scheduled for release until December.

Unfortunately, we were using photo-copies of game rules and cards, which is fine, except some were clearly from different revisions of the playtest meaning the wording was different, we had no rulebook, and the volunteer demo was overworked, didn't know the rules very well, and did a poor job explaining the rules she did know.

Once we figured it out, the game seemed to be well-designed at its core - it's a fun hybrid of Ascension/Dominion/Resident Evil and Civilization/Twilight Imperium.  It does suffer from "competitive solitaire" syndrome, though - there is not a ton of interaction - you can attack other players, but that didn't seem to be advantageous outside of a kingmaking situation.

The group I joined up with was super jovial and we had a great time making fun of the printing errors and the jankiness of the demo setup.  Also somehow we got into trading stories about hippos, elephants, and other oddities of Animal Planet documentaries. The game probably would have been fun had we been given a proper demo, but yeah...

I grabbed some dinner, then walked through the tunnel over to Lucas Oil to see what was going on.  At the 50-yard line, there was a "mini-museum" set up to commemmorate the 50th GenCon, containing various relics of past conventions.

Here are the original convention programs and maps from the late 1960's and early 1970's - the con was very small and held in Geneva Lake, Wisconsin - hence "GenCon".  (I hear that "Geneva Convention" was already taken.)

The original D&D "Red Box" and "Brown Box"

Just casual ~$150,000 in Magic behind a glass case, no biggie (not exaggerating - I priced these out)

First edition Axis and Allies (the one with the nukes!)

At 7:30 I met up with Ben, Dusty, and Alex, a group of guys from Ohio, for a cube draft - I had coordinated a meetup with them on Reddit.  They were a great group of guys - each of them in a sweet Mr. Meeseeks hockey jersey.

The amount of effort Ben had put into his cube blew me away - every single card in his cube had custom art, and sweet art at that.  Some of the custom art was cheeky - e.g. Brimaz was Mufasa with Simba tokens, Monastery Mentor was Obi-Wan with Luke and Anakin tokens, etc.

He also had a handful of Conspiracy cards sprinkled in, I picked up "Pretty Lucky" which let me go first each match.

As is tradition, I drafted near mono-blue splashing Monastery Mentor and Dragonlord Silumgar.  I slowly ground down my B/W midrange opp round 1, but subsequently was crushed by my mono-red opponent round 2.  I definitely made a misplay game 2 - should have Force of Will'd my opponent's two-drop Harsh Mentor and it ended up doing probably 10 damage to me via attacking and fetchlands.

Here's a link to Ben's cube, with all of the custom art on display:
http://www.cubetutor.com/visualspoiler/131

After a few rounds of cube, we decided to get in a game of 7 Wonders.

Despite owning the game, I had never had a chance to play it.  The game is a hybrid of card drafting, resource management, and empire building - you draft and pass packs of cards just like in MtG, but each card is a building, which either produces a resource, gives you military power, enables cheap trade, or gives you victory points.

The game is very well balanced, and it's not "competitive solitaire" like some empire-building games - you have to pay close attention to what your opponents are doing, as their economic and military developments directly affect your ability to gain victory points, and "hate-drafting" plays a strong role.  For example - you get to slap your neighbor around and take victory points from him if you have more military power at the end of each round.  Having a monopoly on a certain resource (stone, wood, glass, textiles...) means your neighbors will have to buy the resource from you if they need it - make them rain coins on you!

Plus, the game is quick to setup and play - took us maybe 30-45 minutes for a playthrough, and we were also learning the rules.

What a typical city looks like after the game is done.

Was late at this point, so I made the trek home.  Tomorrow would bring maybe the best day of gaming yet!

GenCon 2017 AAR - Thursday

Hey all.  Had a blast at GenCon 50, and wanted to share/document my experiences for posterity, and for those who weren't able to make it.  Hope this serves as a good advertisement for future GenCons.

Bottoms up!

Arrived at around 9AM Thursday to pick up my event tickets.  Will call line was wayyyy better than last year - they really had it moving, it was never longer than a 5 minute wait.

Decided to start off with an Hour of Devastation draft.  Ended up with a disgusting U/R deck, featuring 4 Unquenchable Thirst, that of course lost round 1 due in part to mana screw, but my opponent from Toronto was great to banter with, and the games were really close. I probably could have won if I had waited an extra turn to trade off my Firebrand Archer.  I lost the game with the opponent at 1 life! C'est la vie.




Did some walking/scouting and grabbed some food before my noon event, which was a 4-man, 40-point, 1-ship X-Wing "Last Man Standing" event.  I brought a Countess Ryad in  TIE Defender (list here.)  This combination of upgrades/abilities allowed me high straight-line stress-free mobility, good defense with a focus and evade token every turn, and solid offense with Juke. We played 3 30-minute rounds, killing blows were worth 2 points, deaths were -1, and you could respawn after being destroyed if you were willing to take a point penalty.  Hilariously the guy who won had the exact build that I did, except he had Relentless instead of Juke, which gave him several kill steals on 1-hull-remaining ships!  Win or lose, everyone was there to enjoy the event, and we had a blast.

Ryad, Poe, and a TIE Bomber flying too close to the sun.

Firing into a named TIE/sf, Quick Draw, whose pilot ability triggered, causing the TIE/sf to fire into and damage the JumpMaster.  Now that's a two-for-one!

I decided to check out the CGE (Czech Games Entertainment) demo room.  Played a game of Codenames: Duet, which is a 2-player co-op word association game.  A fun mental and social challenge with a deathclock mechanic, highly recommend it if you're looking for a quick game to play with your wife/girlfriend/talking dog.

Also in the CGE demo room, I watched a round of Galaxy Trucker, then got in on the fun myself.  Galaxy Trucker is a two-phase game where you are piloting the equivalent of a space 18-wheeler, trying to make a buck.   Rounds of GT contain two phases.  First, you build your ship from a pile of communal, hidden tiles.  Ship components include weaponized lasers, thrusters, living quarters, shields, energy sources, and of course, space for your precious cargo.  This building phase is timed, but the time is not static - players can declare themselves "done", and if so, the other players' time is reduced!  This ensures that you don't get that "one guy" who takes 20 minutes to build the perfect ship.  The second phase is the truckin' part.  Your ships form a convoy, and one-by-one you reveal encounters - these can be opportunities to pick up cargo, abandoned outposts or ships that you can take over, pirates, smugglers, meteor swarms, and so on.  Encounters where your ship comes under fire will test your ship construction prowess - if you didn't build enough weapons, pirates or smugglers will take advantage of you.  If you didn't build enough shields, or left vulnerable components exposed to space, meteor swarms will badly damage your ship.  Even worse, if your construction created "single points of failure" on your ship, if that single point is damaged, it can cause half your ship to fall off!  Which of course, is exactly what happened to the left side of my ship, damn meteors!  Lots of hilarious schadenfreude in this game, but it still greatly rewards skill and quick thinking.

Walked around the exhibit hall next.  Got pics of the new TI4 components.  From what I understand, they've made Imperial only grant 1 victory point, and only if you control Mecatol Rex.  If you don't control Mecatol Rex, Imperial gives you a secret objective instead.  Presumably the races have been re-balanced as well.  The Construction card now gives you a free PDS and Space Dock, and doesn't cost an activation, so that should make expansion easier and the game slightly quicker (it's still TI of course.)

Grabbed some dinner before my 6PM event, a 2v2 Rocket League tournament.  Was paired with a pretty cool guy who wasn't great but constantly apologized after making mistakes, I kept reassuring him that it was fine and we'd pull through.  We were paired against two brothers who clearly had experience teaming together. We lost in a 2 out of 3 set, 2-3, 4-0, 2-3.  The first and third games were absolute butt-clenchers, and we had a group of people around us watching. Hearing the "OHHHHH" reactions from the crowd when time expired just as we were about to tie up the third game was great.  Fun experience and it really shows the difference between in-person and online gaming.  (Of note, I still reflexively communicated kickoffs using the in-game chat menu despite sitting next to my partner.  I got it! Defending!)

Here's a (blurry) panorama and quick video of the gaming room, with League and OW on the big screens.  The crowd murmur you hear in this video was present all weekend - every room in the ICC was bustling with activity.

I decided to run back another Hour of Devastation draft and avenge my losses.  Ended up in an ok-ish G/W beatdown deck with cheap dorks and pump spells/removal.  Lost Game 3, mostly due to a huge blunder on my part where I pumped my attacking 3/2 with a Giant Growth into a 6/7 blocker.  In my defense, what kind of statline is 6/7?!? For some reason my brain shortcut it as a 6/6 and I 3 for 1'd myself.  Still would have enjoyed the draft had my opponent not been a joyless prick.  When he lost game two to me his expression was a clear "can't believe I lost to this scrub."  Any friendly chatter I tried to initiate with him was shut down (I got in some laughs with the guy to his left, too bad I wasn't paired with him instead.) The only people I encountered the entire weekend who didn't seem to be having fun were some of those doing the sanctioned cost-to-enter Magic events.  I'll remember that for next year.  If you're at GenCon and you're not having fun, just stay home so a badge opens up for someone else.

G/W beats.  For when all the good archetypes are taken.

That put me at about 8:30, dead-tired, and with a 45-minute walk-and-drive time I decided to hit the road.  Got home, scheduled my parking for the next day, scheduled some events, and slept like a brick.

This is getting pretty long, so I'll break at this point.  Reports for Friday and Saturday still to come!

Convergence Tactics: The Gun Line

The gun line army is an archetype that is fairly popular in WMH right now. Changes to ROF and pre-measuring have made this type of list feasible in most factions, and Convergence offers up some potent gun lines. In today’s post, I’ll break down the Chain Attack podcast on gun lines to see what a Convergence gun line would look like, and how fellow gear-heads can beat back gun lines in other armies.

CoC tactics: Archetypes--Control ‘casters

            In today’s Chain-Attack archetype discussion, we’re looking at control casters. What is control, how can the Convergence do it, and how can we beat it? Unlike many other factions, Convergence is somewhat removed from the control game for reasons we’ll get into below. However, some kinds of control are universal and can ruin a game if you aren’t careful.

Exhibit A for Control

CoC Tactics: Archetypes—Beating the skew

            WMH MK3 has been a wild ride these past six months. Navigating the meta without CoC theme lists (which will likely be the norm for another year or so) has been interesting, with TEP/floater spam carrying CoC to the top in tournaments. As I try to be more active in my local hobby scene, I started researching other factions and how my killer robots could kill them more effectively. A great resource for this has been the Chain Attack podcast, which has done a series on the various ways armies can be constructed (assassination, control, etc.). In this tactics series, I’ll look at those archetypes in the context of the Convergence. How can CoC build these archetypes, and how can they beat them in another faction? Today, we’ll start by looking at the “Skew.”