Pacificon Recap 2023

So, how was Pacificon?

Lovely, as usual. 

In the week prior to this show, I spent three full days in meetings. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but these were nonstop eight-hour brainstorming and development sessions, high-octane game design with a team that could only meet once.

In short, a European mobile game studio needed some help with their design, so they called not one but three freelance designers to help coax their product into shape. Theie team was already in Seattle for PAX, so we rented a conference room and held a three-day design symposium. It was productive and exhausting.

The details are irrelevant, but the point is that I managed to start Pacificon more tired than I should be at the end. I actually viewed the travel as day a chance to get some rest, which shows you how tough the week was.

Friday wasn’t just a rest day, of course. Mondo gave me a busy schedule this year, so I had four or five games every day. Two hours after landing in San Jose, I was running my first demo.

The weather was perfect, the company could not have been better, and the food was the food. It was a shame to miss PAX again this year, but two is still just one more than the number of places that I can be in at once.

Here’s a breakdown of the weekend in no particular order.

Games

Shipwrights of Marino: I ran three scheduled games of Shipwrights, and another three off the books. I have been struggling with one major mechanic in this game, which is that players forget to pay themselves for their finished contracts, and have no way to trace back later and see if they did.

It doesn’t help that you can often feel pretty broke in the middle of the game, and really wonder if you’ve been paid, even if you have. The moment of launching a ship has many distractions: reading what the ship does, dumping the resources, taking a new contract, and paying yourself. It’s easy to miss the last bit.

We tried just counting up players’ scores at the end, and starting with more money, but that leads to a very boring round of fairly challenging arithmetic at what ought to be the end of the game. So it’s far better to track everything as you go, if you can remember to do it.

For a few versions, we have been pre-loading the contracts with the money they will eventually pay out. “That money isn’t yours,” I always say, “so leave it until you finish the contract.” And then I’ll do lazy things like paying for resources with that money because I know I’m about to launch the ship and collect it.

The real problem with loading up every ship’s output is that it takes a LOT of coins. Stacks of small change must be piled on a dozen unfinished ships, and the total amount of coins required in the bank was getting out of hand.

Thanks to this nagging pain point, we tried something new. Players now start the game with no money at all, and take the value of each contract immediately as an advance. In this scheme, you have to get by with just enough cash to invest in raw materials (and hopefully a little extra). In the end, if you have unfinished contracts, you have to pay back those advances, and your profit is whatever you have left.

This change satisfied another tiny wrinkle, which was that players kept asking me if there was a penalty for unfinished contracts. Paying back the loan isn’t exactly a penalty (because the money was free), but it does give us something to do at that step. Sometimes we need a little ritual to frame the experience.

The final scores are exactly the same (not counting the starting cash), but this version requires much less actual money in the bank, and it seems to be the best solution we have found so far. The limited cash also encourages you to be efficient in spending it.

We changed a few other things, like cycling some vanilla cards into the deck to replace the weirdest and least useful abilities. This game is getting better all the time, and these changes were easy. I will post an updated version later this week.

Tomb of the Ancients: I ran full demos of Tomb of the Ancients every day, and nothing in this draft really needed to change. This game feels like a winner. I’m sad that no publisher has yet made me an offer, but then again, it’s only a few months old.

The first draft of the Whispers cards got another test at Pacificon.

Whispers: I brought two versions of the Whispers deck. One with illustrations, and the other with a traditional pip design. The suit colors were too muddy, which I knew as soon as I opened the box. But I was also surprised to find out that the indexes from the illustrated version, which look fine, are too big for the pip version. They sort of invade the space for the pip design. It’s hard to explain. Nothing changed about the game mechanics, but I do plan to update both decks before I make them available for sale. 

Gloria Mundi: Just when I think this game is good enough, my standards go up. Gloria Mundi has always been a roller coaster, a thrill ride of brutal whipsawing and wild unbalance. So far I’ve been willing to say “games be like that,” and I do think the current edition is better than ever. But this weekend showed me that it still has a long way to go.

I ran Gloria Mundi twice this weekend, and we all agreed it’s a fun platform with a lot of rough edges. One player took voluminous notes, and they were harsh but fair. I’m going back to the drawing board with this one, hopefully to iron out some of the roughness while keeping the flavor we like. 

Linos: I played a lot of unscheduled games of Linos, having not bothered putting a 2-player game on the demo calendar. Also, I don’t think this game even existed when I sent in my event list. 

I played Linos with esteemed hermit crab Greg Whitehead, who has already written a notation system and even wrote a bot that kicked my butt. We agree that it’s a nice little strategy game and the die roll keeps it interesting. It’s not as deep as Tak, but it doesn’t have to be.

I tracked score with chips, and it seemed to work. It’s been nice to have a paper record of the game, at least during playtest, but there’s nothing easier than pushing chips back and forth. This might explain why there’s no scorekeeping equipment in the archaeological record of DeVere. No one would store the game with a bag of money, because money. And even if they did, no one who found it would know what the money was for.

On a related note, I also got to play a few games of Tak with a new and enthusiastic fan. This is always a pleasure.

The Harvest: I played several unscheduled games of The Harvest. It’s a good pickupo game, and designers from Protospiel were exactly its target audience. I found one looping card combo, where both players could benefit from running the same two-card sequence in the Street. I have clipped that out and changed one card’s reset cost, and those changes are already up at The Harvest page.

The State of the Game Industry panel: Aldo Ghiozzi, Alphinius Goo, Gabriel Mondo Vega, Sarah Moore, me.

Seminars:

On Friday I hosted an hour of discussion all about myself, telling folks what everyone on this site already knows. We talked about how I got to where I am, running Cheapass Games through several phases of existence, and also what’s going on at Crab Fragment Labs. I mentioned my upcoming design book, which has gotten a lot scarier over the summer now that I realize that I hate everything I have written so far. The fans were patient and encouraging.

On Saturday I sat on a five-person panel, the “State of the Game Industry,” where we talked about crowdfunding, computer-assisted Art, and selling games in the post-Covid world. It’s fairly common knowledge, but these days it’s a great time to be a board game customer, but not a great time to be a publisher. There is a vast supply of new games thanks to factors like Kickstarter, and a glut of publishers fighting for smaller slices of a larger pie. As with anything, we must rise to the top or suffer in obscurity. The secret? Conventions.

On Sunday I was a judge for the costume contest, which had exactly one entry. It didn’t seem to have been publicized very well. The winner was a very good Batman, and we all took pictures with him and had a jolly time. About twenty kids who had just come from the hotel swimming pool wandered by as we were doing the photos, and they stared at us wondering what the heck was going on. Me too, kids, me too.

The Rest:

This hotel is getting pretty familiar; I’ve been going to multiple cons here for fifteen years. The food options in walking distance seem to dwindle, though the building that used to be the vacant building that used to be a pancake house is now a Starbucks. And I’ve still never taken the extra day to go to Great America, right across the street, because I keep forgetting it’s there. But I did get to watch the fireworks on Sunday night.

I had such a busy schedule that I barely made it into the Protospiel room, but the Bay Area designers were fun and helpful as always. I wish I’d had more time to test their games with them, but I know I’ll be back soon!

On Monday I flew at the golden hour, watching the sun set over Northern California. I wasn’t sure if the feeling of relief came because the convention had gone well, or because I wasn’t due at another one for two months. Maybe it was a little of both. In any case, I was less tired at the end of the weekend than at the beginning.

And although I didn’t make anything new, or even get to test everything in my bag, I was happy to improve on some projects that needed it. Over the next few weeks I’ll be fixing up most of the games on this list, though I fear Gloria Mundi may take a good bit longer. 

In other news, my daughter started her very first real job last week, working alongside her mom at the local hardware store. She had a rough start but now she’s settling in. Like many of her firsts, I was not there to shoot a home video, about which I assume she is thrilled.

Meanwhile, you should watch this new video from Presh Talwalkar, Mind Your Decisions, who shows us how metaphor is critical in explaining game rules. In this case, it’s actually a word problem, but it demonstrates the same thing. Game rules are basically an overcomplicated word problem, with fun hiding on the other side.

And now I shall get to work on all those games!

The Harvest is coming into shape. Watch out for that Paramour!