GobbleCon Report

SFO Terminal 2, Thanksgiving Day

I Went to a Con!

Yes, for the first time since February of 2020, I went to a real live gaming convention. The long-anticipated GobbleCon has actually been the only sure event on my calendar all year. Hopefully next year we will drift gently back towards normal.

At larger cons, I’m often booked up with meetings and panels. At smaller ones, I get to play games. GobbleCon was tiny, with fewer than 200 people. So I got to see many friends, run plenty of tests, and play a few games I’ve never played before.

Leading up to the show, I finished three big projects: Vines, Fist, and Copper Creek. I got to show all of these games several times, and I also squeezed in a few games of Tresotti, Letter Boxing, and Fairmarket. Aside from pretty minor stuff, they all seem to be working fine.

The joy of a small con is that you can almost always find a game. Everything and everyone is in the same tiny space, and there isn’t any programming to cut into your gaming time. It also helps that GobbleCon has access to the KublaCon game library, about 600 of the world’s best tabletop games.

Games I Played:

As I write scathing commentary about all the new things I played this weekend, I am reminded how much easier it is to criticize than to create. Hats on to the assorted critics of the world. Get a real job. Or at the very least, you could try to create something once in a while.

Plunder: A Pirate’s Life (Lost Boy Entertainment, 2020). This big-box Kickstarter game feels like a cross between Settlers of Catan and Captain Treasure Boots, without the balance of either. Start with the modular boards and treasure-seeking mechanics of Treasure Boots (the 2005 version), mix in the resource mechanics and menu of Catan, sprinkle in some lack of balance, and you’ve got yourself a game.

When I rebuilt Captain Treasure Boots in 2013, one big change was that I stopped requiring players to roll for movement. Movement is one of the most valuable resources in a game like this, and you really shouldn’t be handing it out with a die roll. I had to design the same game twice to figure that out, I suppose. (See also the nearly diceless Littlebeard)

At least this game has nice bits. Perhaps I could buy a copy and use them to play a better game?

Stone Age (Z-Man Games, 2008): I’d never played this quintessential worker placement game, and since a friend was teaching it in a “play to win” session, I jumped right in. Worker Placement usually leaves me pretty cold, since I can’t understand why only one person is allowed to bake bread every month. But the limited resources in Stone Age feel more legitimately scarce (aside from the copulation lodge; come on cavemen, find a bush), and I can see why this game is consistently found in people’s top ten lists. I lost my first game (terribly), but I also won the game, as in, I got an actual physical copy to take home. I’ll be glad to own it.

Abandon All Artichokes (Gamewright, 2020). Imagine the core mechanics of a deckbuilder, but in a throwaway party game. That’s the premise of Abandon All Artichokes, a literal deck un-building game that imports its entire structure from Dominion, then focuses on just one mechanic: trash all of your starting cards. It’s like someone said “Chapel is the best card in Dominion… let’s build a whole game around it!”

Artichokes is perfectly playable, if you already know deckbuilders, but the on-ramp makes no sense. It relies on an installed base of players who mostly hate exactly this kind of game. Anyway, kudos to whoever thought of that, because I watched people who hate party games enjoying this one ironically, like they were part of some secret cabal. Which indeed they were.

Just One (Repos, 2018): Just One is a dry erase party game that borrows the “matching answers cancel” mechanic from Boggle. One player chooses a secret random word, and all the others must write a single-word clue that leads that player to guess the word. You can’t be too obvious with your clue, because if multiple people write the same clue, their clues are eliminated. The scoring rules are absurd an no one uses them, but the core game is great - it’s a toy more than a game. I learned this one on the BGG Cruise in 2019, while retreating from Hurricane Dorian, and I will always say yes to a round.

Article 27: The UN Security Council Game (Stronghold Games 2012): Yeah, you heard me. You are a member of the UN, in this “negotiation game.” The advertised playing time was 30 minutes, and that was roughly correct, but before that we took a solid 45 minutes trying to figure out the rules.

Basically, each player has a set of secret goals and agendas, both long- and short-term, and the leader of each round makes a “proposal” that all the members must vote on. You can argue for and against the proposal, make bribes, renege on deals, and so forth. The game relies heavily on icons, which has become a pet peeve of mine. But I know I’m not in the majority there.

Article 27 was interesting once, but I have no idea if I’d ever pull it off the shelf again. It feels like the goals themselves are too random and abstract to make any lasting impression. “Hey family! Remember when we had so much fun with arbitrary short-term goals for global currency and nuclear proliferation? I was pro-currency, and you were ambivalent! And then we voted! Good times.”

On the Rocks (2021, 25th Century Games): This is one of those bag-draw marble games, where you collect sets of colors and turn them into points. The colors in this bag represent alcohol flavors, and the sets are drinks, and, uh, that’s about it.

I’m not sure why we’re using marbles instead of colored blocks or chips or literally anything else that doesn’t roll away, except that by virtue of that one component it becomes part of a set of avant-garde “marble-tech” games that feel fresh and new, yet also require special trays and bowls to keep the core components on the table.

This game is quintessentially formulaic. Make sets with the colors, some elements are wild, harder sets are worth more points, lather, rinse, repeat. Everyone enjoyed it, but when we discussed whether we’d ever buy it, it became clear that we all had older games that did exactly the same thing.

Exactly the Same Thing, All Over Again

On the subject of repeating oneself, I watched Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” this week. It’s an 8-hour documentary about the month leading up to the Beatles' famous rooftop concert, their last public performance, in January 1969.

The Beatles of this period are struggling with the desire to create something new, which means they reflexively reject everything that feels familiar. This happens to a lot of artists whose own catalogs (and their broader experience with the genre) fill up with too much content.

I’m trying to cook up new games right now, and I’m fighting with similar baggage. Not just my from own catalog, but from every game I’ve ever played. Nothing survives into a first draft without passing the “baggage” test. So I need to learn how to ignore that voice in my head that tells me everything has been done before, or I’ll never do anything again.

Did I work on any new games at this show? Not really. I didn’t even conjure up any new games for my existing decks, as I was hoping to do. That pursuit would have required more down time than I had. Instead, seeing old friends and playing new games was a much better use of that time. I did spend some time capturing ideas for a card game that I’ve been chasing for years.

And now I’m trying to review a list of new projects for 2022, trying not to kill every one of them with the baggage test. 

The struggle continues. See you in ‘22!

Thanksgiving dinner from the hotel kitchen. I think the brown stuff is everything.