Back-to-Back Game Shows

Yes, this game of Bitin’ Off Hedz was, for a brief moment, exactly this close.

This month, I visited ConQuest Avalon in Sacramento and GameStorm in Portland, two gaming cons just a week apart. I met new friends, saw old ones, and invented a brand new game.

I’ve been to GameStorm more than a dozen times, but this was my first trip to ConQuest Avalon, and only my second to Sacramento (the last time was in 2005). It has been a looong time since 2005.

CONQUEST AVALON

ConQuest was a small con in a strange place, the Lions Gate Hotel in McClellan Park CA. Like many other facilities in the area, the campus is a refurbished army barracks. It includes a central “officer’s” building (reception, restaurant, and function spaces) and a smattering of 2-story outbuildings. The hotel breakfast was tiny, the main restaurant was closed, and most of the convention took place in two small conference rooms.

But in truth it doesn’t matter how small a game convention is, as long as there’s always a game when you want one. I had no trouble finding games and players all weekend. I met new friends, tested games, and even wrote an entirely new game.

The working title of this game is “The Great Hall” (originally “The Harvest”). It started when I had a dream on Thursday, about a card game that worked a little like Flip, but with character cards and abilities and so forth. I actually dreamed that I was teaching the game, which is odd since it didn’t exist. Friday morning I wrote that dream in my notebook, then I grabbed some blank cards and left for the con.

Gridding out the cards for “The Harvest”

Early Saturday morning there was not much going on, so I took out my cards and started to rough out the gameplay, writing a set of card abilities as I played through a sample game. An hour later, I had a working deck, and I played a few times with different people, each of whom brought new ideas and new expectations to the game. 

Sunday morning I rewrote my cards, and threw away some of the weirder mechanics in favor of something more straightforward. Back at home on Monday, I was ready to draft a new set of cards, and I spent most of the week building cards and spreadsheets.

At first I called this game “The Harvest,” based on the theme of planting various crops. But pretty quickly I decided that if individual cards are going to have interesting abilities, it made more sense to give them character-type personalities, instead of peas and corn and wheat. For the list of personalities I gravitated towards a Medieval fantasy setting, because, as happened in the case of Dominion, nothing else really seemed to fit.

When Donald X Vaccarino invented Dominion, he was faced with a similar challenge: choosing a theme for a bunch of character-type card abilities, using Magic: the Gathering as his most reliable benchmark. He started with generic medieval fantasy, planning to change it later, and eventually found that nothing else worked better.

Honestly, the archetypes of a medieval fantasy seem more varied and well-defined than any other vanilla genre. I’d rather write powers for blacksmiths and knights and farmers than for Romans or cowboys or modern characters or spacemen or anything else, unless there’s a real story with characters people already know. For whatever reason, a blacksmith just seems more interesting than an accountant. 

And speaking of Dominion, my first game of the weekend was in fact Dominion, run by a diehard fan with a huge box that held, I assume, every card in the game. He taught the game as if we had all played before, though I think the other two with me had never seen it. I was rusty too, since my go-to deckbuilder has been Ascension for something like the last ten years. Like, I forgot I didn’t have unlimited actions.

Nevertheless, despite the light refresher, we all got it. The three new players had fairly close scores, about half of the expert’s score. I was reminded of all the reasons that Dominion isn’t my favorite deck builder: cards that clog up your hand are like a feature combined with a bug. As derivative as they were, the clones of Dominion definitely came up with better ways to do that. 

I got to play most of the games in my bag at least once: Coat of Arms, Shipwrights of Marino, Bitin’ Off Hedz. I showed Whispers on Friday night, and also chatted about it with my favorite math whiz, Joe Kisenwether. We agreed that the pot odds calculations for the doubling cards is interesting, but too complicated to solve. At least, not until a casino wants to pay for it. One of the nice things about ring games (where there’s no house player) is that kind of math is optional.

ConQuest was tiny, maybe a hundred badges. We were not even enough to fill up the two small function rooms at the Lions Gate. But it was boisterous and reasonably welcoming and as I said, I never lacked for a game.

Attending this one had been sort of a last-minute decision, as I keep looking for more chances to make and test new games. I wedged this convention into my schedule right between two other events: the week before, I had just returned from the JoCo Cruise. And the following Thursday, I left again for Game Storm. 

About “The Great Hall”

“The Harvest” has become “The Great Hall” and will probably have a new name next week. This game is so new that it’s not really worth describing in detail. It’s still too rough and still changing too fast. But since it was written over these two weekends, here’s a glimpse of the thing, so we know what we’re talking about.

The deck is roughly 50 cards, a mix of various characters from a generic fantasy  theme (to be changed later, perhaps). Players start with small hands of these cards, all face up, and there is also a group of cards in the middle of the table, called the Great Hall. 

Players take turns activating and moving their cards, using their numeric values and their special abilities to try to empty their opponent’s hand. The game is over when one player’s hand is empty. 

Functionally, it’s a change-making game, with fundamental rules akin to Pennywise or Flip (both games now availabe at The Pub). You push cards into the middle, and you take back cards of lesser value.

But on top of the change-making mechanic is a layer of special effects, with each card doing something interesting to affect the flow of the game. That’s the idea, anyway. When it’s closer to playable, I’ll build a deck to share!

GAME STORM

I have been going to GameStorm in Portland for literally as far back as I can remember, off and on for maybe 20 years. It’s a lovely quick train ride from Seattle, in a resort hotel on the Columbia Riverfront.

As soon as I got to the hotel, I ran into an old friend, Dave Howell, whom I have known for 30 years, when he was my boss at Wizards of the Coast. Dave presents his “Golden Guidelines of Game Design” every few years at Game Storm, and I’m usually heckling from the back row. This year he was also plotting a Kickstarter campaign to finance his musical based on the Wizard of Oz. 

Dave and I played a few rounds of The Great Hall, and we talked about how to streamline it. We’ve been designing games together since the Magic: the Gathering days, and it’s always nice to get his eyes on a new project. 

Over the weekend I also got some tests of Shipwrights of Marino. Most of my players remembered the game from last year, and I was happy to show them how far the rules have come. I think this game is almost ready to be called “final,” and I even have a sample copy with a publisher right now, so wish me luck on that.

Whispers was a big hit, and it turned out to be even more fun with more players. We had a group as large as seven players for a while, and I’d like to try it with even more. Crazy things happened in the big group, because of course they did (we saw a hand with a whisper and every rank from 1 to 6), and I think it will be a great anchor for a new story akin to Ten Cards Up, which was inspired by my trip to GameStorm last year.

My panel schedule was light and tight: three sessions back-to-back on Friday afternoon, then nothing else for the rest of the con. The audience was small, but I got to sit with some industry friends and talk about recent trends, like AI art, and Kickstarter, and the awful creep towards more expensive, more complicated games, which I’m proud to be counteracting at Crab Fragment Labs. 

Bitin’ Off Hedz also made it to the table a few times this weekend, and I’m confident that it’s ready for its close-up at KublaCon. I just sent artwork to DriveThru, and hopefully those posters will be perfect and I’ll be able to let players order it well in advance of the con. I also sent the file to Kubla, so they can print a giant board for our big game at that show.

There’s a talented crew of game designers and testers in the Portland area. They run an area of the convention called GameLab, which is basically my home base for the entirety of GameStorm.

In the GameLab suite I got to play Tyler Sigman’s Crows (Junk Spirit Games, 2017). This is a cute and creepy abstract game about crows, flocking to totems and scoring points. I must admit that I spent a lot more than 75% of this 4-player game waiting for my turn, and once I finally thought I had the hang of it, I blew everything on a final round that never came. But it’s pretty and I would try it again. 

Diceland: Back in 2002 I had to fight a bona fide trademark dispute over Diceland, one of the few games for which I actually registered a trademark, because there was another game from Europe with the same title. Harsh words were spoken, and we agreed to disagree. Now there’s yet another game called Diceland (originally Würfelland, Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag 2018). This one is a roll-and-write about… nothing. Territory control, I guess. You roll dice and mark off spaces and realize towards the end that you can’t win. 

Not unlike game publishing, now that I think about it.

What’s Next?

I’m pleased to have just added Flip, Pennywise, Queensland, and Take-Back-Toe to The Pub, mostly so I could talk about them in this blog post. They’re good old games; check ‘em out.

Bitin’ Off Hedz is very close to final, and I should be announcing print-on-demand boards by the first of May.

The Great Hall is a cool new game that popped into existence over the course of these two cons. More detail about that game is sure to follow. 

And Shipwrights of Marino is nearly good enough for me to call it done, and even share it with publishers. I’ll hope to post the deck and board at DriveThru by Summer. Or maybe I’ll sign a deal for it, so you can buy it in your favorite local game shop. 

As Forrest Gump said, “Maybe it’s both?”

Travel. Ain’t it grand?