KublaCon 2022

Last weekend I went to KublaCon, a show I’ve attended almost every year since it started. As far as I know, I have only skipped one (and regretted it). It’s one of my favorite shows, with some of my favorite people. And now after two disappointing off-years, it’s open again and busy as ever.

And it was over in a flash.

They keep me busy at this show, and when I’m not running demos or sitting on panels, I’m grabbing random friends and strangers to test my latest games. Between the playtests, the hallway meetings, and the scheduled events, the Memorial Day weekend disappears before I know it, and then I spend the next week unpacking my brain.

Friday

I flew to SFO on Thursday night, getting in early so I wouldn’t miss a minute of the show. But I missed a few minutes of Friday anyway, because a digital games client who had ghosted me two weeks ago suddenly reemerged, and we had a conference call from my hotel room. Apparently ghosts can sometimes rematerialize. 

After that meeting, I spent some time writing notes for my first seminar, “What’s new with James Ernest,” which was basically a summary of everything in this blog. And then I decided to sketch out a brand new card game, Postes de Cerca (fence posts), to justify the name of the Postas deck.

Here’s how that first page of notes starts: “Gambling game, theme = encirclement, building fences. 3 to 6 players. Deal 5 cards to each player. Reveal a deck card. Starting to dealer’s left, play a card of same suit or pass. You are trying to get as close as possible - encircling the range of the starting card. And because you pay into the pot for each card in the range, or you fold, and the last player who can play a legal card (rules TBD) takes the pot.”

So, that was a start, but it was also a mess. There are a few more pages of “what if,” desperately in need of a playtest. I went downstairs and found some friends in open gaming, and got to work fixing this mess, and pretty soon I had a 2- and 3-player version of the game in decent working order. You can read the rules to this game, which is now called Holdout, at the Vines page.

Sadly my first official event was attended only by three friends I had told about it in person - the event got into the schedule really late, and no one knew about it. So we played Copper Creek and caught up, and I ignored my notes.

After that game I went to dinner with a friend, and we discussed the outstanding questions about Postas: Does suit matter, and what should we do about running out of cards? At this point if someone ran out of cards but other players were still in the hand, they had to take a huge risk to stay alive, even if they were technically winning. We decided that suit doesn’t have to matter (there are, after all, other games with the same deck) and that if the situation above came up, that player should just win the game.

Back at the show late Friday, I found another group of friends and made them play the new draft. Game conventions are such a great place to write new games, especially fast ones, because there is always someone willing to test. I collected nineteen names in about a hundred hands of this game over this weekend, and I probably forgot some of them (sorry if I did).

Saturday

Saturday was jam-packed. The hotel elevators started breaking in the morning (no surprise there) so I was slightly late for my first event, a demo of Vines. We had a rocky start because people showed up slowly, so I jumped between different 3, 4, and 5-player games before finally settling on 6-player Coralon and Thief. That was fun, and at the very end I also showed them a quick play of Tablero de Berona.

Next came my first panel of the weekend, “Working in the Game Industry,” where various representatives of small and tiny game companies warn aspiring designers that there is no such thing as a full-time job in the gaming industry, ignoring for the most part that there are many huge game companies, not represented, that are filled with hundreds of full-time employees.

After lunch in the hotel, I ran a demo of Copper Creek. I got to teach some new players and see how they reacted to that game - it runs a lot smoother when an experienced player takes care of all the payouts, and I raced a bit because I had to race to my next panel. Here are some players enjoying the game in progress.

Next was the “State of the Game Industry,” a panel in which everyone complains that it’s getting harder to print things in China but also claims that it’s the only answer. I honestly know almost nothing about the state of the game industry at the moment, because I’m just quietly giving my games away for free. But I actually never printed anything in China, and I did just fine, so I have an unpopular perspective.

That seminar was the end of my obligations for the day, and I went up to the executive suite and started playtesting again. I bounced between parties and games all night, ending up in a late-night poker game.

Ten years ago I used to carry poker chips to every game convention, and I ran multi-table poker games at fairly high stakes. But poker isn’t as popular these days, and poker chips are heavy, so now I’m just happy to get invited to someone else’s game once in a while. Had fun, won money, and didn’t have to carry any poker chips. 

Sunday

Sunday started with a morning demo of Shipwrights of Marino. The toughest part of that game continues to be forgetting to pay yourself when you launch a ship. I almost want to start everyone with $500 and never pay the ships, just let them collect their values at the end of the game. But then again, the forgetting problem is worst in distraction-filled environments like the Grand Foyer at KublaCon, so maybe it’s not as bad as I think.

After that I had another hotel lunch (and game) with an industry friend, and then ran an official “secret playtest” session where I played Holdout again, but forgot to collect the testers’ names. So if you were in that game, please reach out to get your name in the credits!

Sunday afternoon I joined in a seminar where a bunch of old white guys bragged about how inclusive they were. It ran at least 20 minutes long, at which point I had to excuse myself because I had developed a pretty gnarly cough. Other panelists later admitted they were jealous of my escape. (As far as I can tell, my cough was dehydration and not Covid, though that’s always a concern and a perfectly decent reason to leave a room.)

Two hours later my hydration had improved significantly, and I ran a well-attended game design workshop. The usual format for such “let’s make a game” lectures starts with a blank slate, and lets the audience argue over starting ideas for 30 minutes, but I thought I’d try to give these folks a better sense of how it really works. I’d been sketching out a game for the Island Deck, called Down the Well, but I had not yet had a chance to play it. So we took that game from its core framework to a first playable in about an hour, cutting away useless rules until we had a working engine.

One of the old guard of KublaCon was double-booked all weekend, but he showed up to the con late on Sunday, and went to dinner with me and some other Kubla staff. It was a late dinner and nobody had the energy to play games afterwards, so I basically went straight to bed.

Monday

That same group from Sunday dinner reconvened on Monday morning for a one-hour game session, where we worked a little more on Down the Well and Holdout. I hit the Monday morning flea market, a garage sale of some pretty amazing games that I had no room for in my bags, and shortly after that it was time to head to the airport.

And on that airport shuttle I had a moment to reflect on exactly how quickly the weekend had gone by.

I saw dozens of friends and played dozens of games this weekend, spent a lot of time doing demos and seminars, and spent almost no time doing those things that usually pass the time away. It was an entirely different mode of being, which I basically haven’t been in for two years (I know, I say that about every event, but this one was busier than most). 

Every night I dreamed about games. Sadly none of the games I dreamed of were any good, but it’s always nice to get some work done while I sleep.

Now that it’s done, I can say I had a great KublaCon. I have some playtest feedback on a few games in progress. I played a lot of Tablero, and even more Holdout. That game, and Down the Well are already posted to their respective games pages: Holdout is in the Postas section at the Vines page, and Down the Well is a new game for the Island Deck.

And next weekend I get to go to ETX in Seattle, and do this all over again.