Adventure Diary - OrcaCon

These boats. People love these boats.

Another Con is On the Books!

This weekend I visited OrcaCon, a tiny Seattle con made even tinier by bad weather and random road closures (not to mention this annoying global pandemic).  It was lovely and here we go.

Holy Heck! Humans! Covid is worse than ever, but screw it, I guess. We’re all learning to live with it, and I’m glad to get out into the world and see some friends again. Everyone seems to have aged two years since our last encounter. I hope I didn’t.

I feel like we need to get out and move around again, even if it’s just to play board games in a hotel basement. 

There’s an invigorating joy in the new banality of ordinary things. When I woke up on Friday morning (after editing my game until 2:30 in the morning),  I felt too exhausted to drive to the venue, but the time I spent playing with friends filled me with new energy. I felt less tired by the end of the day, and even better by Sunday night. Why, if I do a whole convention season., I might even feel normal again. If I live.

New Game: I spent a good deal of the weekend testing Shipwrights of Marino, a new game I cooked up over winter break. It’s an economic game using a familiar market-based engine (from Fish Cook), with a bunch of tweaks and changes that suit the theme.

Basically, players represent competing airship factories in DeVere’s capital city, taking manufacturing contracts from various merchant families. It’s a fine theme, though really this game could be about anything where you turn raw materials into finished goods. In one session we pretended it was about dog grooming.

I had tested Shipwrights with Carol and Nora quite a lot, as we were snowed in over the holidays. So it was decently balanced for three players, but had never seen more. This was my first chance to play with new players and bigger groups, and we found that the economy wasn’t very well balanced for six. But the game has nice bones, and the fixes seem easy, so now it’s back to the drawing board.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about Shipwrights in the next few months, as we sand down the rough edges and scrape off the extra fat. Or whatever. If the schedule holds, I’ll be at a game day in Portland in two weeks, with a brand new version ready for another six-player test.

Food Trucks: OrcaCon is famous for food trucks. There are always three or four, and they post their schedules online so you can know what to expect (unless someone’s deep fryer breaks, dangit). I had some lovely burgers and dogs, a tasty meat pie, and a scoop of gingerbread cookie dough with vanilla ice cream. I probably don’t need to eat again for weeks.

Vines: OrcaCon is the birthplace of Vines. In January 2016, I brought a new five-suited deck to a table of friends at OrcaCon, and a few hours later we walked away with the makings of Ducks and Geese, which became the fundamental game for this deck (back then, we called it Dames and Deuces). Some of those first-day players still come to the show, and we always make sure to play a few hands. This time I also got to teach Thief to a new group.

Bluffaneer: The only new game I played this weekend was a little game called Bluffaneer (Big G Creative, 2021). It has two interesting bone-shaped 4-sided dice, eighteen of the tiniest little cards I have ever seen, and a sturdy cheat sheet for all the results of rolling doubles. The game is a bit like dreidel or LCR, plus a tiny bit of secret information and a microscopic amount of bluffing, which could more accurately be called “guessing.” It’s ultimately not enough bluffing to live up to the promise of the title. This was Tim Beech’s copy, and he had already invented a sort of self-working dungeon crawler with the same components, but I sat down with him and Jessica Blair on Sunday morning and pieced together a different bluffing game you could play with the same parts.

Swashbluffer: Our new game was basically a micro version of Pirate’s Bluff. We talked a little about the core goals of bluffing games (you can read about them here), and then we cooked up the following: Start each player with ten coins. Each hand, shuffle and deal each player a hand of four cards*, which they will examine and then discard one. (Each card has two different symbols on it.) Roll one die, which will produce one of the four symbols. Now, ad-hoc (without turns, as in Pirate’s Bluff) players may bid the number of that symbol which they think is found in all players’ hands. Bids can only increase. You may “call” the last bid if you think it is too high. If a bid goes without being called, the other players owe that player one coin each. If a bid is called, then all players show their hands, and the wrong player pays the right player one coin. Shuffle, rise, repeat. *These are the rules for three players; with more players the starting hand size would be smaller, enough to allow a small stub after the deal.

As I said, it’s basically miniaturized Pirate’s Bluff, although I do like the intrigue of discarding a card to control the symbol distribution. Pirate’s Bluff does have a card-passing variant, but not a discarding variant, so maybe we ought to try that sometime.

What’s Next? I was hoping to shoot some videos last week, but random emergencies interfered. Like, being forced by my carrier to replace my perfectly good iPhone 7 because they’re shutting down their 3G network. If I get the video gear set up, I’ll shoot a few How to Play videos, possibly some design lectures, and probably a “who is Crab Fragment” video. Will this happen next week? I have no idea. I got hit with yet another emergency project this morning, so who knows?

Such is the life of a semi-retired game inventor.

Actual players Tim Beech and Jeff Wilcox, playing an actual game at an actual con.