RageCon 2025

The Grand Sierra Resort, viewed from the airport.

RageCon 2025

Although I have been posting mostly travel videos this year, I did not make a video for RageCon. I recently had a front tooth removed, so I’m a bit camera shy. But mostly I didn’t break out the video camera because I was heavily scheduled at this show, doing playtests and demos all weekend, and I didn’t need another distraction.

My last RageCon was in 2019, when they were at Circus Circus in downtown Reno. They have now moved to the Grand Sierra Resort, far from the hustle and bustle of the biggest little city in the world. 

Last month I regained full control of the Cheapass Games catalog, so I’m happy to be in charge of a hundred more games I can actually sell, and still figuring out what to do with them all. I brought a few new games to tinker with, and a few more to teach and give away. And it was nice to see all my friends from Reno and the Bay Area. Here’s how it all went down.

Friday

I arrived at the hotel at 2:00 via their airport shuttle, three hours before my first scheduled game. The crew at RageCon were friendly and welcoming, and I got my badge and my schedule right away. 

I go to a lot of cons, and by now you’d think I would be good at them. But every one has a different set of software and procedures, and it’s impossible to learn them all. RageCon uses Cardboad Events, which is pretty easy, and they also provided me with a rare and lovely printed schedule. Remember folks, I’m old, so I like printed things. And there was at least one thing on the sheet that I’d missed in my online schedule.

There was a Round Table Pizza just a few feet outside the convention space. They don’t have those near me any more, so I was delighted at the chance for novel junk food. When they opened at 4:00, I headed there to meet Aldo Ghiozzi and Mike Eckert from KublaCon. We ate pizza and played a hand of Lamarckian Poker, an ancient free game favorite that I’m trying to retool. (You can find it in the Poker Suite.)

Lamarckian Poker: After pizza, I had about an hour before my first event, so I roped some other friends into playing Lamarckian Poker.

A publisher has recently expressed some interest in picking up this game, but we agree that it needs updating. It’s a simple hand-building game with a pretty familiar simultaneous-play, cards fire-in-order mechanic. (Looking at you, Stage Blood.)

This game was good enough to be a free thing in 1996, but it’s not good enough to be a retail product today. The biggest flaw is that some players can never really get their hands started, while others can snowball out of control. And the game isn’t quite short enough to make that okay. In one game I had trouble getting my hand above three cards, while someone else gathered up fifteen cards including a straight flush.

So there’s work to be done here. I have a colossal design toolbox now, and I have lots of ideas for how to make it better. I’m sure I’ll be posting something playable soon, like “Lamarckian Poker II, a game about self-evolving that has finally evolved itself.”

Pairs Demo: I had a full table for my first event, Pairs. Most of the players were new to the game, so I showed them Basic and Continuous Pairs, before switching to Deadfall and Cursed Hand. That was a lovely hour, and I’m thrilled to get those old games back on the table again. Yes, a game from 2014 is “old”… so I guess maybe I should take “New” out of “A New Classic Pub Game.”

Kill Doctor Lucky: Next up was Kill Doctor Lucky. I had my favorite version, the Cheapass 19.5th Anniversary Edition, to give away to the winner. We had seven players, and we decided to start with the Bed and Breakfast board. After that game we still had enough time to flip the board and play again, this time with the Cat.

I don’t know what’s next for Doctor Lucky, now that he’s been off the radar for a few years. I’m hunting for a publisher to pick up the game, but I’m also aware that no single publisher can handle the entire line, or manage ancillary rights like video, so it will be an interesting challenge. In the meantime, I plan to make a new print-and-play version for Crab Fragment Labs, using the classic Cheapass look, but the newest version of the rules. 

Linos: I had a pickup game of Linos with a friend from Portland, Julie LaRoux, and we chatted about the drudgery of making one’s own pieces. I had just finished a new travel set with purpleheart and white oak, and the sanding alone took four hours (they are very dense woods). I need to find a machine that can do that; my disc sander is fast, but it removes too much material. If I figure something out, I can start offering sets for sale.

Late Night: One of my designer friends reminded me that I have promised to make a video series called “How to Gambling,” explaining the basics of gambling games. This sounds like a good project indeed, and I need to slot it into my ever-growing to-do list. Maybe I’ll get started in August. 

Saturday

Saturday morning I grabbed a croissant and a coffee in the hotel lobby, and then ran back-to-back playtest games in the Protospiel zone. 

Morning Card Games: At 10:00 I played some three-handed Bread Basket, and then a five-handed game of Shiny. That’s a new game I haven’t shared yet, a pirate-themed bluffing game based on a Pairs variant called Captain’s Orders. Everything in the new version is different, and yet strangely the same. In Shiny, players must provide their own shiny objects to wager. I’m still working on the first test deck, but it’ll probably see daylight in August.

At 11:00, in my second hour of “card games” I put Sandy Diggs on the table. Its not technically a card game, but still light and easy. We managed to finish a six-player game with all new players in just 50 minutes, mostly because I was cracking the whip. At six players it can be hard to plan, but most of us were fine with that, and I can’t wait to put the current version up on DriveThruCards. Maybe in August.

Lunch: The hotel basement was a treasure trove of fast food options. I settled for lunch at Johnny Rockets, where I ran into my old friend and gaming mathematician Joe Kisenwether. I met Joe in New Jersey in 1999, at the ShoreCon where I debuted BRAWL. He has grown a magnificent beard since I saw him last.

Joe does casino math for a living, so whenever I get stuck analyzing a game (especially a casino game), I reach out to him. Joe has also done some simulations for my non-gambling games, including a solution for a four-die version of Flip. (Five dice would have taken exponentially longer, though I’m still curious what it looks like.)

Coffee: As if the hamburger wasn’t bad enough, I also grabbed a blended thing at Starbucks. That gave me a moment to chat with Kathleen Mercury about game design, and my lecture series coming up at GenCon. I’m going to be part of the GenCon Design Academy next month, giving three separate talks on game design. Come see them!

Tablero: My next demo was Tablero di Berona at 2:00. I had two new players plus Joe. We played Tablero for 30 minutes, then changed over to Shiny.

Not to give too much away, since I don’t have that game posted yet, but Shiny is coming along nicely. This is the third weekend where I didn’t change much. It’s a bluffing game, so it’s fun to watch people figure out how to read each other, and learn what moves are risky. I won the last hand because someone had to learn that lesson the hard way.

Joe and I played some Bread Basket, and he agreed it had come a long way since the last time he saw it. And that’s true; Bread Basket entered a dead spot last year (sadly I pitched it to a publisher who didn’t like it). But this year I cleaned it up again, and it’s now very good. I hope everyone with a deck is playing by the latest rules. 

Lords of Vegas. I am not winning, but then again, I am not playing.

Lords of Vegas: I sent the convention a copy of Lords of Vegas for their library (because it’s way too heavy to pack), and ran a five-player demo on Saturday evening. I’d wish I could say that the game is easy to find, but as soon as the tariff hammer came down this spring, Lone Shark Games postponed their plans to reprint the new edition. It’s a fun game, and they still have a few copies left. But it’s mostly gone from stores at this point.

Escape from CG Island: Conventions are a great opportunity to cook up new games, and I’m starting up a new game project called Escape from CG Island. Think Jurassic Park, but instead of just dinosaurs, you’re being chased by every computer-generated monster imaginable, all having somehow escaped from their digital enclosures through gross incompetence and catastrophic coincidences.

I made the first cards at Tabletop Oahu (Hawaii seemed the right setting), and updated those cards for RageCon. I played once on Saturday evening, only to find that I didn’t have the newest cards. I had been meaning to sleeve the new version on the flight down, but just hadn’t gotten around to it, so I made apologies for the older cards, then went up to my room to grab the new ones.

Comedy Show: I know Grant Lyon a little, mostly as the author of I’m Kind of a Big Dill, the party game from Prolific Games and Left Justified Studio. I did the graphic design for that game, because I have a very particular set of skills. Grant was at RageCon playing games, and he put on two evening comedy shows. I was sorry to miss the first one (I was busy killing Doctor Lucky) but I was glad to catch the second show on Saturday night.

Dinner: I considered Round Table again, but there was a junior athletic event at the hotel, and the pizza joint was crawling with families. There was no line, but the cashiers said there was an hour and a half wait. So a group of us wandered up through the casino, as far from the food court as we could go, and found no line and decent clam chowder at the sports bar.

Reno. Famous for seafood.

After dinner I was pretty tired, but I did assemble a group to play the newer CG Island cards before I ran out of gas. It’s a simple premise, somewhat hard to balance, even harder to scale between 2 and 6 players, but I think I can manage it. Keep watching this space.

Sunday

By Sunday morning the high altitude was getting to me. All weekend long, I had felt a little out of sorts, and although my age is definitely a factor, the feeling was familiar from a con in Salt Lake City. That was at a ski lodge above Salt Lake City, at 7500 ft. The kind of hotel where they sell oxygen tanks in the gift shop.

Reno is only 4400 feet, but I’m a sea level boy, so it was high enough.

I woke up before my alarm on Sunday, dreaming of all the breathing I was going to do when I got home. Had a real breakfast in the casino cafe, a decent waffle sandwich that gave me energy almost as if I were actually alive. 

Egg. What will they think of next?

Egg: On the way back from breakfast I found the newest, dumbest game on the casino floor, “Egg.” My friend Alex Flagg asked me what was different about it, and I said “Nothing. But what I mean is, this game is different, because it consists of absolutely nothing.”

You know how in every new slot game these days, there are three bonus symbols that *might* trigger a bonus game, but they usually don’t? Well, imagine a game that strips away the pretense, and all the mechanics of slot games, and just has one giant white egg. When you press the button, you bet a dollar, and the egg cracks a little, and once in a while it breaks.

And that’s it.

Egg is what happens when some gaming engineer says “who cares about the story of the spinning wheels? Let’s make a lightning-fast skinner box with absolutely no game.” Egg makes the Green Machine look like chess.

The graphic says “Every win is a jackpot” but not “Every spin is a winner,” which I’d prefer. Sometimes the egg breaks open and spills out a prize. Usually the egg just gets another crack and you’re done.

One feels like a complete imbecile playing it, which I guess is okay, because that’s how one ought to feel in front of literally every slot machine. But I think it’s entertaining to build mental models of how the game decides to pay you, even if those models are wrong. Egg gives you none of that.

(And yes, I won eight bucks.)

Abstract Review: I started the gaming day by testing an abstract game by Alex Flagg. It was a Clue-like game of deduction and piece-moving, a bit complicated and probably more than I could handle even at sea level. But I gave him some ideas, and saw a few things I might want to try myself. 

Cold Comfort: Sunday was “new board games” day, so at 10:30 and 3:30 I had 90-minute slots to show off whatever I wanted. I decided to play Cold Comfort in the morning. This game is in a really good place. I had six new players, so I didn’t play myself, and I think we finished in under an hour.

Sadly, as sometimes happens, one player got into a good position and the others could not fully conspire against him. There is definitely some rubber-banding in that game, but it’s not always obvious how to use it. Nevertheless, the game was a success, with people asking how they could make it or buy it for themselves.

I’d like to say that Cold Comfort was “coming soon to DriveThru,” but unfortunately this game has a few components that they don’t make. So hopefully it’s coming soon to a publisher near you, though in the meantime you can certainly make your own copy. 

After that game I grabbed hot coffee and showed “Egg” to Joe, and he located a slot that he needed to play for research (what a job), and then we headed down to the game design contest.

Design Contest: Johnny Pac Cantin and RageCon put on a delightful design contest. Johnny assembled identical sets of nautical-themed components, and gave seven groups of designers just one hour to design a new game completely from scratch. They had another ten minutes to put together a one-minute pitch, and then they faced the wrath of the judges.

Given those constraints, these folks came up with some amazing games. The pieces had a nautical theme, so we had scuba divers, oil wells, lost cities of Atlantis, and a partners game of fish versus fishermen. I was one of the four judges, and we had a pretty close call between the top few entries.

This contest has produced some actual published games in its history, and it likely will again.

Cold Comfort 2: My last scheduled demo was at 3:30, and although I pitched After the Fog to this group, not everyone was interested in a two-hour game. So I played Cold Comfort again, with an entirely new group. Honestly now I don’t remember if the game I described above was in the morning or the afternoon. Either way, they both went well.

After that game, I fulfilled my lifelong dream of eating Round Table Pizza again, then made it back to Protospiel for a bit more testing. I sat down with Johnny Pac Cantin, Grant Lyon, and Glenn Cotter, and played a few rounds of Escape from CG Island. 

I had been warning people all weekend that the game was pretty raw. “I don’t know how to start or how to finish; I’m still working on the core loop.” I will often just jump in with only a vague idea of how everything works, because I’ve found that no matter how finished your first attempt is, you wind up changing everything anyway. I have lots of notes from this test, which I wrote on blank cards, because my box didn’t even have a notebook in it. That's so raw! 

I took a stroll through the dealer’s room one last time, and said goodbye to friends as they headed out. Late in the evening I visited the casino and did a little gambling. I did not play “Egg” and I did not win four bucks. 

But I did walk past a delicious cake, and some twenty-something dudebro shouted “Don’t get sick!” because I was wearing a mask. Then I remembered that in Reno that’s considered adult behavior. I turned around and stared at him until he dissolved into a fine mist.

And that was the end of RageCon, a delightful little show that I’d happily visit again. See you at the next one: Gen Con!

Please one day let this cow cake be mine.