GobbleCon 2023

Last weekend was the eighth and final GobbleCon.

A few years back, a group of staffers from KublaCon chose Thanksgiving weekend to play games in a low-pressure atmosphere, aided by KublaCon’s hospitality connections, institutional knowledge, and massive game library. It was a great idea. I went to several.

But this year they announced that GobbleCon would be no more, in part because KublaCon, now under new management, wanted to start a new event in November, and in part because Japji and Amrit Khalsa were tired of running this show. GobbleCon was never likely to get very big, being after all on Thanksgiving weekend, and for the Khalsas the con had become more trouble than it was worth. 

This was a last-minute decision, happening just a few weeks before the show. They are now considering something much smaller in the future, a “gaming weekend” that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a proper convention, because there are still some people who would love to get together and play games. So the future of this flightless bird is still up in the air.

I flew into SFO on Friday afternoon. At registration I played my first game immediately: Sophisticuffs! Japji and I had given a pack of ten new cards to every attendee at the show, plucked from a deck of a hundred silly steampunk turkeys that will be available for purchase real soon.

I played games all weekend, of course, including strange new things and old familiar favorites. Here’s a brief recap in no particular order.

Sandwiches!

Games from the Labs

Bread Basket: I’m still tinkering with this one. I didn’t play enough to find any problems or solutions, but I was glad to get it to the table. My proofs from DriveThru just arrived, so you should be able to buy a deck in the next few days, even though the rulebook isn’t quite finished. Here’s hoping the deck doesn’t get a massive overhaul.

London Vacation: I’ve been tinkering with this game for more than fifteen years, and it’ll soon be available at Crab Fragment as a print-and-play. It’s about spending the day touring London, with a core mechanic that I could reuse for pretty much any location, as soon as I have it figured out. I plan to pitch this game to one more game company this week, before posting it on Crab Fragment, so wish me luck and then look for it in late December.

Shipwrights of Marino: I usually play this game with a larger group, and small groups mean more opportunities for engine-building, so in the first three-player game I managed to build an engine that was way too strong. Basically, the cards let me trigger too many abilities with the same action. I’ll be rearranging the abilities just a little bit so that the “broken” combo isn’t available. Aside from that, I think this game is ready to call “done,” so I’ll soon be ordering proofs from DriveThru and making the cards and board available here.

Island Deck: The Island Deck came out a little this weekend, for a few hands of Down the Well and PowderKeg. I’m still trying to get my head around PowderKeg - I feel like I ought to nudge it somewhere, but I have no idea in which direction. Players enjoy the game, and “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” but I still wonder if some analysis might prove that it’s actually sort of dumb. Since it’s a bluffing game, I will have no idea until I play more with people who know it well.

Linos: This game is portable and always easy to have with me. I played a few games with Greg Whitehead, author of the AI Linos player, exploring our hypothesis that the “best” move isn’t always the one that scores the most points. We have only a little data to back that up at this point: his Monte Carlo player chooses the lower-point move about ten percent of the time, and we’re trying to see if it’s actually smart enough to learn how to lock the board. We’re running more sample games in the next few weeks, including a version without the die, where players can choose what color piece to play.

Tomb of the Ancients: This new archaeology game is pretty close to finished. One player told me that the game would be better if everyone got the same number of turns, but I really don’t think it’s that kind of game. I believe that going later in the early rounds means you have more access to potential dig sites, and so trying to fix the balance by giving everyone the same number of turns is just an empty promise that won’t really balance the game. I’ll keep watching and see if any publisher actually shows interest in it, at which point we can reevaluate things like this. Oh, but I did improve the design of the four market cards, so that’s something. New version coming soon.

Spots!

Games of the World

I played several commercial games this weekend, so many that I might not remember them all. 

In general I feel like game design has fallen into a rut - there are just a few mechanics repeating through several types of game, and as far as I can tell, the reasons for this are that (a) game designers copy from each other, duh, and (b) familiarity makes new games easier to learn, and so familiar games become more popular. I often hear gamers complaining that “everything is Mexican food,” meaning the same six ingredients in different proportions, but I don’t think it’s really a complaint. These ingredients are popular because they are familiar. But man, once in a while I’d rather play something new.

Spots (CMYK, 2022): This is a cute little press-your-luck dice game where the object is to complete the patterns on various dogs using the spots on your dice. Like many games in this category, the theme is paper-thin, and one should not ask too much about what the mechanics represent - when you finish a dog, what happens to it? Does this mean it’s not a dog until you make it? Or is it alive until you finish it, and then it goes away? What is a “dog” anyway? But seriously, the art is cute and the game is fine if you don’t already have a hundred press-your-luck games in your collection.

Archaeology: The Card Game (2007, Z-Man Games): As I’m making an archaeology game myself, I thought this might be interesting. Archaeology: The Card Game is a set-collection game in which players collect pieces of artifacts, each having different values at different breaks. Collecting full sets is pretty hard, probably too hard, because of the Sandstorms and Thieves that make up a large portion of the deck, and frequently tear holes in your hand. Map cards represent a huge point swing, granting you arbitrarily huge card draws on a random schedule, and while I’m sure there is probably more to this game, I saw no real value in trying to finish big sets when it was so likely that I’d lose my cards. I did manage to pull off one little bluff, making someone else think I’d not stolen a good card when I had, but I have plenty of other bluffing games in my house.

Parks (2017, Keymaster Games): I heard a lot of good things about Parks, so I was eager to give it a go. It’s a very pretty game, but the mechanics are only vaguely about exploring national parks. It’s more of a resource-management set-collection game (again) in which you collect resources like suns and trees, and spend them collecting pictures of national parks. On the one hand, hiking your pawns across the resource-creation board feels thematic. But when you scratch the surface of this abstraction, the mechanics-for-their-own-sake begin to emerge, and suddenly nothing makes sense anymore. Hikers can’t occupy the same spaces in the resource line (unless you flip over your “campfire” card) despite the fact that, thematically, you’re literally all visiting different parks. Different parks cost you different resources, and oh my god it’s just another ingredients and recipes game, with an engine-building component, and a convoluted way of acquiring resources. “On this turn I shall exchange my mountain tokens for identical mountain tokens, because when I ‘gain’ a mountain I also get a free sun.” Cool. But how does this actually feel like exploring national parks, aside from looking at pictures? Oh, and there’s also only one camera, but you don’t actually need it to take pictures, but if you do have it, taking pictures costs one less resource. Just like in real life.

Rummy (AKA Rummikub, et al): A friend brought an old boxed game called “Rummy,” and it had no rulebook inside. It was nigh impossible to find the rules online, because “Rummy” is a traditional card game with a million variants, but we managed. Game makers should think twice before naming their game after a famous game that is not the same game. The game we played is more commonly marketed as Rummikub. It’s a double-deck tile game about emptying your hand by completing sets. The last few turns are an exercise in analysis paralysis, since you can rearrange literally everything in play to make room for the tiles left in your hand. The game was perfectly okay, but it was nothing I’d write home about. Any version of actual rummy, played with a real deck of cards, would be just as good. Luckily I was not distracted by the incompatibility of the mechanics and the theme with this one, because those little tiles aren’t pretending to be anything they are not.

Just One (Repos et al, 2018): Just One is always fun. As usual, this party game was our closer on Saturday night. I stopped by the table just to say hello, and wound up playing for at least an hour. Despite the arguments about what is or is not a valid word, or how things should be spelled, Just One always makes for good conversations and memorable moments. One player wrote “Maginot” as a clue for Belgium, and after we looked it up and determined that the Maginot Line was actually in France, he had the chance to write the same word as a clue for France. Callbacks are the best.

Alhambra: The Dice Game (Queen Games, 2006): Imagine starting with a popular tile-based game about building a castle, where you literally arrange the tiles into the shape of a castle, and then abstracting the tiles out of it completely, replacing them with a Yahtzee-like dice mechanic that feeds into three, yes three, levels of scoring tracks. You score your innings against other players on track one, then compare your scores on track one to move along track two, and then there is the occasional scoring round where your position on track two gives you points on track three, which is the only one that matters. It’s as if someone heard that you should never average averages, and made a board game out of it. I actually don’t think this game was all that terrible, as press-your-luck dice-driven three-layered scoring-track games go, but A:tDG has almost nothing in common either with the original Alhambra or with the general notion of building a palace. So, I’m not thrilled to play it again.

If you’re wondering whether I hate literally everything, it’s not really true. I do take issue with the weaker parts of almost everything, because I’m perpetually in playtest mode. I like the core of Alhambra, for example, but that game also has an asinine mechanic where there are four colors of currency that can’t be exchanged for each other. If they are really currencies, why aren’t they traded on the same market? Also in that game, when you buy something with a big bill, you get no change. Obviously there is a very good mechanical justification that “money” doesn’t act like “money,” but, seriously, why? 

I feel like unrealistic limitations in game mechanics are just stupid walls thrown up to prevent players from making sensible choices, and sometimes they are very stupid indeed. I hear players accusing games of being “too simple” when they can just find the correct move and make it, but isn’t that literally what you’re supposed to do in every game? Is the allure of these counterintuitive games just the difficulty they present in navigating the walls to find what is still, in essence, the best move?

And, to be clear, you should not assume that I “love” all my own games and “hate” everything else. I have issues with most of my own stuff too. But hopefully, at least, most of my game mechanics don’t contradict the real-world things they are supposed to represent.

Parks!

Everything Else

I playtested some other inventors’ games that I’m not comfortable commenting on, but it was generally good to share wisdom and feedback with them. Design help is the most fungible currency in the game industry. You can read their blogs to learn more.

Over the years I’ve become acutely aware that “crunchy” games, i.e., those with several overlapping systems, are safe harbors for bad mechanics. If a game has myriad systems, they still ought to make sense on their own, before a player can begin to guess how they will all work together. I feel like I’ve played so many games lately where the component systems are twisted together like old plumbing, and none of them makes any sense on its own. They only work as a set of compromises for each other, steering a massive engine in the direction the designer wants it to go. For example, I played a game about feudal politics, or so I assumed, but it was really a game about fighting. I tried a no-fighting strategy and got destroyed, to which the designer remarked “did you consider fighting?”

If I make another crunchy game, I would at least hope that each subsystem makes sense on its own.

At the Flea Market on Saturday I picked up two games by Michael Schacht that I’m curious to read and play: Industria and London Markets. I think the Game Library was giving them away because they had not been borrowed enough (if at all). I also picked up a free copy of NMBR9, still in the shrink-wrap, and some weird self-leveling minis paints that are supposed to produce three shades of color from the same bottle. I’ll let you know how that goes.

I had a lovely dinner at Benihana on Saturday (a GobbleCon tradition), where I chatted with Greg Whitehead about the unchecked success of unscrupulous people. This actually sounds like a game title. The next morning I had a dream about getting a contract to create a trading card game for a familiar cult-like political movement, and I spent the latter part of the dream trying to decide if I should take the work. Was the money worth it, or how much money would make it worth it, and was it even reasonable to ask that? It was an interesting conundrum that I can’t even answer when I’m awake.

And of course I met all the lovely people that make my trip to San Francisco worth it every time. You know who you are.

In all, GobbleCon was a delight, and I’m bittersweet about its demise. On the one hand, I always enjoy playing games with friends, and it’s a shame that this opportunity is going away. But then again, I like to watch entrepreneurs get out clean, and not crash and burn while struggling to prop up a dying enterprise. So kudos to Japji and Amrit and all the GobbleCon staff, and let’s celebrate this great thing that has (probably) come to an end.

And now it’s time to book my Spring schedule!