GobbleCon ‘22

Just four friends selling second-hand body parts

Another GobbleCon is in the books!

I’ve mentioned this before, but I really do enjoy a small convention where I don’t have a lot of scheduled events. I get to play games, see friends, and recharge that energy that only comes from getting out of the house!

This weekend I went to GobbleCon, the tiny little 200-badge convention that is run by some of the same folks as KublaCon. It’s a familiar hotel, familiar friends, and even some of the same perennial favorite games.

Here are just a few of the fun things I did this weekend.

Burnout: I got to play a few sessions of this new 2-player Pairs game, as well as making a few failed attempts to expand the player count to three. There are some very specific things in this game that are hard to expand to three or more players, but this is fine, because the original goal was to create a decent 2-player game. Burnout was originally called Fishmonger, and its origins are mentioned briefly in my Paris blog post. You can download the V1 rulebook right now from the Pairs page.

Coat of Arms: This game is still in early development, but it’s coming along smartly. We still have not decided whether to release the game into an open beta, so for the moment all I can tell you is that it’s looking good. Coat of Arms is a lightweight family game for 2 to 6 players, in which players compete to finish quests for the Realm in exchange for upgrades to their heraldry. This weekend we closed a few really good loopholes in the core rules, and got the game to a better place. Testing will continue this month and into the New Year, and hopefully we’ll find a publisher next year!

Bitin’ Off Hedz: Folks have been clamoring for a new edition of this game (or at least a PDF of the old edition). We lost the digital files, the only such tragedy in the entire Cheapass catalog,. This fact, plus the fact that I desperately want to update the art and the rules, means it’s still a project for later. But we made some good progress in this weekend’s test, and I can’t wait to get this game back to the drawing board.

Parts Unknown: A friend brought this old Cheapass game to the table this weekend, because he had never actually played it. The game has always been fairly dodgy - lots of fiddly rules about how the market works, a runtime that’s a bit long, some special effects that sort of kill the game. You’re all retailers, selling body parts and equipment to the scientists of a small town, who are all trying to imitate the success of the mad genius Viktor Frankenstein. You will buy and sell various items, trying to manipulate the market and make more money than everyone else. The game would need a lot of design work, if I wanted to do an update, but I’m rather excited by the prospect of cooking up a bunch of new horror-themed cartoons. And also I like saying “I have Gleebs at 32.”

Just One: I joined three rousing sessions of this perennial favorite party game, including one where we invented a new house rule. Like most games in this category, there’s really nothing preventing us from writing our own clues, so in the house-ified version of Just One, a player writes a word for their neighbor, and then everyone (including the author of the word) gets to write a one-word clue. It’s the same basic format as the card-driven game, but can be more versatile, more personalized to the group. We ended up cluing the names of friends, some favorite board games, and even a reference to a terrible clue from a previous round!

Air, Land, & Sea: This compact 18-card battle game from Arcane Wonders pits players against each other in three distinct theaters of war. It’s another in an endless collectoin of “capture-the-line” games that includes games from Lost Cities to BRAWL. Nearly every card in this one has a special ability, so the sequence of play is important, and of course it’s critical to know the entire deck and what your opponent might hold, as well as the interactions of your own cards. They have managed to pack an entire CCG-style play experience into just 18 cards, and that’s impressive, but I kept losing to a player who knew the deck better than I did. That was probably great fun for one of us, but ultimately I don’t think I’ll be picking this one up again.

Pax Pamir: Described by my opponent as the best-designed game he has ever played, Pax Pamir is set in Afghanistan in the late 19th century, a period historians call “The Great Game.” It’s a mostly-abstract game built on a matrix of interconnected special powers and abilities, in which one false move can lead to disaster. As with many games of this type, I went through three distinct phases in this demo. First, I was overwhelmed by the complexity. Second, I figured out something I thought might work, and tried that. And third, I found out that I missed something obvious and lost horribly. As with Air, Land & Sea, I feel like I’ll always be beaten by players who know the game better than I do, and while games of that nature have a definite target audience, that block doesn’t include me.

Space Base: I played this dice-drive engine builder twice. It is a stellar example of “decide, then roll,” a game where you make a strategic plan to try to account for as many possible die rolls as you can, and then watch the dice consistently avoid you. It has all the frustration of biased randomness (a mechanic where the dice pick a winner) combined with the pain of “you did this to yourself.” And while I know I’m as guilty as the next designer of using mechanics like this, I’m also willing to admit that they can be pretty terrible, and are best used in games that last less than five minutes. However, to be fair, I should not judge a game after only two plays. There are almost certainly stratagems that I’m missing. The first two plays felt like “build a money engine if you can, then hope it works, and then buy all the point cards, because there really isn’t time to do anything else.”

Fish Cook: My friend also brought Fish Cook, which we both like a lot. This one is surprisingly non-biased, despite some card shuffling and dice rolling. For the most part, the die rolling happens before you make the master plan, not afterwards, and the only really random factors are the other players. We had a good game and I wish I had the chance to make an upgraded version of this game… but it’s not too late. I should, at least, post a PnP of Fish Cook at Crab Fragment Labs.

Moxana’s Game: The stripped-down version of Girl Genius: The Works needs more work, I’m afraid. The game isn’t very spicy without the special abilities on the cards, so the few plays I accomplished this weekend were fairly dull. I still want to make this game happen, but I also want it to be better than, as one tester described it, “the worst game I have ever played.” Then again, maybe there’s room at the bottom? I’d love to publish literally the worst game ever, and at the moment BGG still thinks that’s Tic-Tac-Toe.

Fight City: I’m looking at some older customizable card games in my catalog, including Fight City. This game shipped as two pre-built decks which weren’t exactly the most well-designed, but were the most efficient way to get every card into circulation. I figured that players would construct their own decks, but really, there was never a player base large enough to make that worthwhile. In the modern age of DriveThruCards, however, it’s possible to build a custom deck and print exactly the cards you want, so I might take a stab at bringing this game back. I played Fight City about five times this weekend, and my deck died a horrible early death four of those times. At this early stage, I’m not sure whether to blame the deck, or the game itself. More research will follow.

The Symphony: Surprise, in the middle of a game convention, I went to the Symphony and watched The Godfather with a live orchestra. It was awesome.

Sophisticuffs: I showed Japji, the owner of GobbleCon, how to play Sophisticuffs, and we decided to make a promo deck for next year’s show bag. So sometime before that show, I’ll be creating a hundred anthropomorphic turkeys and putting them into a custom Sophisticuffs deck. Below is the proof of concept sketch (which may or may not indicate the final style). And yes, at the moment it has way more fingers and toes than an anthropomorphic turkey should probably have. It’s equal parts handsome, cute and creepy!