OrcaCon 2023

It’s another space game where you roll dice and get stuff

The Year Begins: OrcaCon

OrcaCon is a great little game convention in Seattle, renowned for its inclusiveness and its excellent food trucks.

Every time I walk into the Bellevue Hilton, I am reminded of Dragonflight 1993, which took place in this same hotel, one week after the release of Magic: The Gathering.

But my time with this hotel stretches back even farther, to the summer of 1989 (I think it was a Red Lion back then). I came here to meet a tuxedo maker from Hong Kong, to be measured for a custom tailcoat. This was when I still had a slim waist and a juggling act.

A juggler and his natural enemy: darkness

This weekend at OrcaCon, everyone was chattering about AI art and the OGL. The former is a new tool for creating huge amounts of fantasy illustrations, that promises to put a lot of illustrators out of work (or make their jobs easier, YMMV), and the second is a new Open Gaming License that people think will make the old “free” license for Dungeons and Dragons retroactively disappear.

People love overreacting to things they don’t understand.

I spent most of the weekend testing games, mostly Bitin’ Off Hedz and Shipwrights. I also played some published games, caught up with old friends, and ate a pint of raw cookie dough from one of the excellent food trucks.

A new board (sketch) for Bitin’ Off Hedz

Bitin’ Off Hedz: The top game in development this weekend was Bitin’ Off Hedz, 25th anniversary edition. I love saying that last part slowly to people who look like they are old enough to remember. “Twenty-fifth anniversary.”

Bitin’ Off Hedz is a dinosaur racing game. The goal is to throw yourself into a volcano. People have been asking for a print-and-play for a while, but sadly I have lost the original files, and I wanted to make some changes before I set it loose again.

The new edition of Bitin’ Off Hedz will be ready in time for KublaCon this May, and an alpha test version will be online by early February. For this weekend, I threw together just a quick sketch of the board, pictured above, and we played on this mockup about six times.

The original version of Bitin’ Off Hedz had some issues. There was a risk that the game would take forever, because savvy players could keep other players from winning by also hurting themselves. That’s clearly not in the spirit of the game, but it was a potential with those rules.

In the new version, my goal is to “keep the temperature rising,” which essentially means that when one player is set back, another gets ahead. This means the game should trend toward conclusion, rather than having the potential to loop forever. For example, when you throw a rock at someone in the new draft, you don’t just knock them off the path; you switch places.

My testers tinkered with these rules all weekend, and in the final play on Sunday, the finishing positions were closer than I’ve ever seen. The endgame was nicely tense without being completely random, thanks to some new rubber-banding rules and a redesign of the board.

So get your dinos ready; Bitin’ Off Hedz is coming back soon!

Shipwrights of Marino: This economic game is still coming along nicely, but slowly. I noticed that the rules and the deck hadn’t changed much in a year. So, the week before the con, I conjured up 60 brand new cards, along with some new airship art.

We played first with that new deck to figure out if any of the cards were worth keeping. Over the weekend we boiled the entire set, old cards and new, back down to the best 54 cards, as we continued making small changes to the rules.

I hope to post an updated alpha of Shipwrights before the end of the month. Slowly this game will continue to improve, until I find a publisher willing to buy it!

Other Games

Friday night, my friend Rick introduced me to XIA, Legends of a Drift System. It’s a run-around and collect-stuff game, where you have a spaceship that moves and shoots and carries things, and you’re trying to score points without being shot. It has lots of dice rolling, including for movement. And even though you can upgrade your engines, they can still roll a 1.

I was a little frustrated by this, having literally removed the same mechanic from one of my own games, Captain Treasure Boots. The dice were not good to me; I tried to mine an asteroid with a free re-roll on a d20 and ended up rolling a 2 both times. This resulted in “death,” which wasn’t all that bad in game terms, but still very frustrating.

This kind of random stuff can be fun and funny in a shorter game, but X,LoDS is rated at 30 minutes per player, with a minumum of 3 players. In a game that long, I’d rather be the victim of my own bad choices than of terrible die rolls.

The other two players were big fans of the game, and there’s “a lot to like” about it, but I’m not excited enough about being a space pirate to try this one again.

I played Project L on Saturday night. This is a slick little puzzle game, where players upgrade their supplies of Tetris-like pieces and use them to complete puzzles, which turn into points and more pieces. As is typical in a first-play, I missed a key scoring rule, but I didn’t really mind. The rule made sense once I heard it - you lose points for taking more puzzles than you can finish, so you can’t just steal opportunities from other players, or force the game to end.

My friend Rick called this game an “engine-builder” though I’m not sure it qualifies. Maybe in the most abstract of ways; certain key shapes are better or worse for finishing certain puzzles, but mostly it’s just “have some big pieces and don’t waste your turns.” Overall it’s a decent light game and worth adding to the collection.

I tried Dice of Dragons for the first time, learning the rules with some friends who had never played it. It’s a cooperative press-your-luck adventure dice game where the goal is to steal gold (equivalent to hit points) from the dragon. We struggled with the rules but, as far as we could tell, the game was a never-ending slow circle around the drain. Or “try to roll a 6 and fail” for 30 minutes.

This game reminded me that I still need to finish “Game 13,” also called Dungeoneur, which is a micro RPG with a Pairs deck. It was created in 2018, the year that we put one game per month into Game Trade Magazine. Game 13 was the overflow project, and it never saw the light of day, because it kept getting funnier the more rules we added, and we were never quite done.

Sunday afternoon I played Bear Raid, a stock trading game with some strange indirect control of the market. Basically, players buy and sell stocks (you can short-sell a stock if you don’t already have some), with an inkling of how the price might change, and some limited control of that. Each stock has a deck of random special event cards, which change every round. Each event may drive the stock price up or down, depending on how much media attention it gets, and that media attention is based on dice that players can control. Sort of.

One oddity was that the price of a stock could change more based on an individual’s decision to sell it, and less based on global factors, so we weren’t sure whether we were supposed to be big investors or small ones; neither explanation made complete sense.

It was the first play for all of us, and we went back and forth between “aha, I think I get this” to “wait, no, I don’t get this.” Ultimately I think I’d like fewer abstraction layers between me and controlling the market, but that’s personal choice, I guess. You can tell what I think about simplified market control from Young Jacob Marley, or Panic! from Nothing Now Games.

All in all, I played something like 20 games at OrcaCon, ate food-truck food, and had fun with friends. Which was a perfect way to spend the weekend.

Can’t wait to do it all over again at DunDraCon.

The compulsory photo of Shipwrights of Marino, now with different card art!