RinCon 2023

I just returned from RinCon, the last stop in my busy spring. RinCon is a small event in Tucson, usually held in late September or early October. But this convention has recently been whipsawed by Covid. It missed a year or two, and last year I had a conflict in September and couldn’t attend. This year they had to roll all the way back into June.

This weekend happened to be the same time as Origins, one of my other favorites, so I was sad not to be able to hit them both. But RinCon pays my way, and Origins doesn’t (at the moment), so I opted for Tucson over Columbus.

Their new venue is the Casino Del Sol, a large casino hotel outside Tucson. Like any hotel that has never seen a gaming convention before, they had no idea what was about to hit them. We filled their hotels (both of them) and pretty much used up all of their supplies.

I had a busy weekend running tests and demos. I focused on the two newest ones: Tomb of the Ancients and The Harvest. These games are both brand new this Spring, and although I pitched them two months ago at GAMA, it has taken this long to feel like they are ready.

Tomb of the Ancients: This is a simple puzzle game about digging in the desert, based on a specific license that it probably won’t be attached to. After extensive testing at KublaCon, I trimmed away the worst parts. The first drafts had a cumbersome wrapper with a scoring track, upgrading abilities, and so forth. That wrapper was never quite right, a lazy set of design choices and a source of unending tinkering. We kept adding new rules to fix the old ones. So after I was sure that the puzzle part was working, I went back to the drawing board for a better way to do everything else.

The result is a stripped-down game with interesting decisions and no fluff. I think there is no dominant strategy, just a mix of different ways to get to the goal. I played more than a dozen times this weekend, with up to seven players, and we never seemed to need any changes.

The Harvest: This game has been a bit more challenging, with even the core mechaic proving hard to lock down, but I think I finally have a working version.

Previously known as Mean Business and The Great Hall, The Harvest has been in development since mid-March. I cooked it up on a quiet morning at ConQuest Avalon in Sacramento. The game is a cross between a cards-that-do-things game (we’ve decided to call this genre “now you think”) and a change-making game, somewhere on the continuum between Dominion and Flip. (Yes, I know, that’s a broad spectrum.)

I’ve been wrestling with the core mechanics, fighting an uphill battle, but this draft finally has the right bones, which means I can get down to the business of posting a beta, and fixing individual cards. Take a look at the current version and let me know what you think!

Day 1, Friday

I landed late on Thursday, so that I could start bright and early on Friday. Well, at noon. This was the first of many “James Ernest Mystery Surprise” playtests, which were mysteriously all Tomb of the Ancients. In fairness, I also brought Agents of the Crown, in case I had exactly four players, and I always had The Harvest in case I had only two. But all my sessions filled up, so the best choice was always Tomb.

Seven players was pushing it, but we had a good time, and we managed to play two full games into the one-hour time slot. I still don’t think I’d rate the game for seven, but it certainly didn’t break.

I ran the game again with a different group at 3:00. This time we had only six players, and once again we ran it twice in the allotted hour. This is a great play time for a new group!

Friday evening was the Pirate Pub. This was four hours of gambling games, with me hosting in a pirate costume. We set up four tables and had upwards of 20 players, playing Starboard (from the Pirate Pairs deck); Whispers (with a stand-in deck, since I haven’t yet made cards for this game); Pirate’s Bluff, and Holdout.

Players started with 100 doubloons, and bounced from game to game at their leisure. The prize for collecting the most money overall was merely “bragging rights,” because it was too easy to cheat at that, but we dropped occasional small prizes into the pots on every table.

I had forgotten how often the pot gets split in Starboard, so we ran into some difficulty awarding the prizes in that game. The players decided to let the prizes carry forward in every split pot, but they got fewer prizes that way, so we eventually decided just to draw for the winner. This is something to figure out for next time.

One player named “B.S.” added a new wrinkle to Starboard. After a few games of Holdout, she thought that perhaps Starboard might be better with twin stacks. As in Holdout, each player who hits must declare which stack they are hitting. A player who locks is declaring that neither stack will grow. It’s an excellent variation that I’ll soon be adding to the Starboard rules.

At the end of the evening, once the group had dwindled to a single table, I dealt a few hands of my favorite bluffing game, Deadfall (this lovely deck is coming soon to DriveThru), and then a few hands of FALLING (which is already here!). Overall it was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, and afterwards I had just enough time to grab a slice of pizza before heading to bed.

Day 2, Saturday

This was my busiest day, with many back-to-back games.

I started at 11:00 with a two-hour demo of Littlebeard. We played the treasure-grabbing scenario on a large round table, and I learned how much impact the space can have on the results. The blocking team had trouble intercepting the raiders, because of the width of the table, so all but one of the raiders escaped. Technically this means that the blockers won, sinking the largest raider but losing all three treasures. However, we all felt like they could have done better if the channel were narrower.

Littlebeard continues to have excellent bones, and I really ought to spend a huge amount of time making it better. As soon as I finish everything else.

At 2:00 I ran a game of Shipwrights, which we decided to cut short, to dovetail into a discussion of the development of that game, which no one attended. I messed that up, as both events were scheduled at the same location. We should just have finished the game.

I ran Tomb of the Ancients again at 5:00, and then a giant game of Bitin’ Off Hedz at 8:00. RinCon made a huge cloth board, roughly 6 feet by 8, with plastic dinosaurs and giant foam dice. The dice were a nice touch, since they were too light to disturb the game (or injure the players).

And at 10:00 I tried to run a “mystery” game of Gloria Mundi, only to discover that my printed copy is not updated to the current version. Apparently it has been a while! I spent a few minutes puzzling over the components and the rules, and then decided to run Tomb of the Ancients one more time.

Day 3, Sunday

This was the easiest day by far: a Bitin’ Off Hedz game at 11:00, and two panels in the afternoon.

The morning Hedz game was fun, and I’m generally pleased with the way this edition came out. Several people asked where they could buy a copy, but I let them know that the only place to get this game is to print the files yourself, or buy the poster from DriveThruCards.

At 2:00 I joined Jessica Feinberg for a discussion of self-promotion for independent creators, where we mostly talked about Kickstarter and how expensive shipping can be. Jessica has run 55(!) Kickstarter campaigns for her art, books, and card decks. It has been a while for me, more than four years, so I’m behind the curve on social media and the state of crowdfunding. In a market like ours, we always have to reinvent our business model.

Jessica said that Patreon paid her mortgage, and I said that was amazing, and Patreon barely pays for my coffee, only to discover that coffee (spelled Ko-fi) is actually another funding platform.

At 3:00 I was joined by Greg Lourneau for a RinCon favorite: the speed game design challenge. We took ideas from the audience for themes, components, and mechanics, then mixed and matched them as challenges for lightning game pitches.

We came up with a game about blind robots in post-human forests, seeking out other robots using only their sense of smell. And a game set in post-apocalyptic Tucson, which was different from regular Tucson because the Wendy’s drive-thru closed at 10. And a “coffee game” where you have to assemble coffee drinks using only a fishing rod, with the elements obscured behind a translucent screen.

We decided that our fishing pole coffee making game could give rise to a whole “genre” of fishing pole coffee games, to the point that players just always expected any game about coffee to involve fishing poles, in the same way that games about trains involve connecting dots. “You seem to be having trouble with your fishing pole. Haven’t you played a coffee game before?”

And after that slap-happy event, I was glad for a rest, because my voice was shot! I spent the rest of the day catching up with friends, then catching up on sleep.

The Location

The Casino Del Sol is operated by Arizona’s Pascua Yaqui Tribe. It opened in November 2011, replacing the Casino of the Sun, two miles away.

Despite being a newish building, the casino is a maze - low ceilings, tight hallways, strange dead ends. The sort of layout I would expect in a Fremont Street hotel after decades of piecemeal remodeling. Many of the passages are filled with slots that don’t seem to have been part of the design. But hey, more slots is more money.

Still, the place is light and clean and friendly. Security doesn’t really mind if you’re carrying a bag of board games, as long as you tell them you have a room at the hotel. And the wait staff don’t always check when you pay them via a room charge, even when you accidentally give them a room number that doesn’t exist.

As much as I might have loved to play slots Friday while dressed as a pirate, I didn’t touch the casino games until Sunday night. Then I took my $5 of “new member” free play voucher and transformed it into seventeen cents of pure profit.

I think it won’t be long before every slot machine in the world is a Buffalo slot, and soon afterwards other objects will start transforming into Buffalo slots until one day the entire universe will be composed of nothing but Buffalo slots and the space between them, and then space itself will eventually transform piece by piece into Buffalo slots. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky. Basically it’s a very popular slot machine. Or perhaps you don’t understand because you are already a buffalo slot.

Other Games

I played a lot of pickup games of The Harvest, with various friends old and new. I hung out with fellow game designers Joe Kisenwether and John Wick, who played The Harvest several times. John was inspired to write a Fight City RPG, which he promises he can do in three or four days.

Joe and I also tried playing a two-player game of Agents of the Crown, with the two other houses playing their hands randomly. It wasn’t nearly as good as a four-player game, and since the heart of that game is negotiation, I think dummy players just can’t make it work. In fact, I think there may be no streamlined two-player version of this game that would have enough negotiation to make it fun. So I think that game is strictly for four.

Speaking of games that are for exactly four, I picked up a copy of Noli, a game I’d never heard of, which promises that I’ll “frantically roll dice” with three other players. I hope this doesn’t mean it has a real-time component, because I am pretty picky about those things. I haven’t read the rules yet, so I have no idea what is in this box. I picked it up on the recommendation of a friend, who said “Do you want this? It’s free.”

So as always, RinCon was a great success. I did a huge amount of testing and demoing, saw very good friends who I rarely get to see, and thoroughly enjoyed my time in Tucson. I’m sorry I can’t go back for 15 months, since they will be returning to their usual time slot next year, the last weekend of September.

See you all there!

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