RinCon 2024

James Ernest in his natural habitat, a casino

I just returned from RinCon in Tucson, a lovely 650-person convention that is always glad to have me as a guest. (Hear that, bigger cons?)

RinCon’s schedule has been buffeted by the winds of Covid, blowing from mid-summer to mid-autumn, and landing this year on the same weekend as BGG.Con (sorry, Dallas). Next year, RinCon will settle back into their preferred slot, closer to my birthday in the first weekend of October.

Their venue is the Casino Del Sol, in the middle of nowhere, just a few miles from the airport. It’s a lovely hotel with reasonable food and 24-hour gambling. Really, what more could anyone ask?

While packing for this event, I uncovered a 20-year old project called Paradise Road. It’s a simple dice-based racing game set randomly in South Carolina. The original game was never all that great, and it never made it to the public. But I was inspired to make it better, so I packed some bits and figured I’d build a new version over the weekend.

A new logo for a 20 year old game in playtest, Paradise Road

Friday

I flew into Tucson on Friday, landing in the early afternoon. My first scheduled event was “dinner with the designers,” where we grabbed something from the concession stand and gathered in a conference room to say hello. It was nice to catch up with all the folks from the show, most of whom I see exactly once a year.

At 8:00 I showed off Doctor Sweet’s Carnival of Chocolate Horrors, which is coming along nicely. This particular session was about right, ending in just over an hour with reasonably even scores, and a good time was had by all. By the end of the weekend I would have a few more tests, not all that good, and a whole rack of changes for next time.

At 10:00 on Friday evening, I had a rollicking good time showing six new players The Island of Doctor Lucky. I’ve been giving away some leftover games as prizes, so the winner of that game got to take it home. I notice that Greater Than Games is blowing this game out for $10 right now. Rush out and get it - that’s probably less than I paid to print them.

RInCon’s treasured giant Bitin’ Off Hedz board

Saturday

RinCon owns a giant cloth board for Bitin’ Off Hedz, courtesy of KublaCon in 2023. They augment it with toy dinos, real rocks, and hand puppets. So it’s always a delight.

On Saturday morning I was scheduled to run two games on this board, one for “kids” at 9:00 and one for “adults” at 10. The kids didn’t really materialize, but nevertheless I had enough adults to run three games.

With some free time before my next scheduled event, I grabbed Paradise Road and found some willing testers. We came up with a reasonable set of rules, which were fun but somewhat flawed, and that game was on its way to a renaissance.

At 2:00 I played another game of Doctor Sweet. This one didn’t turn out quite as well as Friday’s game, and I started making some changes. Basically the game went on for a bit too long, the challenges were a bit too hard, players didn’t move fast enough, and so on. But the theme was still a delight, and it’s well worth fixing, even if we were only halfway done at the end of the hour.

The afternoon’s event was the “Whose Die is it Anyway” design challenge, which I co-hosted with Emily Vincent from Pink Hawk Games. The audience gave us tidbits for game ideas, and we fleshed them out into speed pitches. A game for cats with marbles in zero-G; a game where you use chapstick on your skin to pick up clues in sand; a game about deciphering the secrets of civilizations that have been lost in black holes. You know, usual stuff.

Later Saturday evening I hosted an evening of pub games, this time of the non-gambling type, including Prudh, Tablero, Tresotti, Autumn Leaves, and a new version of Cursed Hand. Attendance for the event was lighter than last year, and by the end of the evening we were down to just three players who craved something stronger. I was lucky to have also brought along a copy of Young Jacob Marley. One of the players gave me the feedback that “even in some of your games that I don’t like, I find something to like,” which I guess was okay.

Paradise Road, the original map on cardboard.

Sunday

Sunday morning I was in charge of the unofficial Unpub room, a gathering place for new designers testing new designs. I helped Emily Vincent tune up her newest card game (she can tell you what it was), reviewed some other designers’ games (all secret), and ran another test of Paradise Road, with a new set of rules based on the earlier tests.

I also played a few hands of Bulldog, and I leraned that while the current rules do seem balanced with four players, the game is pretty dull with six. I need to go back to the drawing board, or at least figure out why the game is so much duller with two extra players. Luckily, it’s quick and easy to fix!

In the afternoon I had two games of Stage Blood. But the first session had no signups, so instead I kept tinkering with Cursed Hand and Paradise Road. The second session was full, so we played the game and had a great time.

Stage Blood is pretty far along at this point, but I’m not in love with the title. I want to save the name “Stage Blood” for a completely different game that’s also about Shakespearian actors, but about their marriages and bloodlines, not about agents sending actors to work on plays. So I’m considering other titles for this game including “Season of the Bard” and “Company of Players.” I’ll probably change to one of those in the next update.

Late Sunday evening, after the convention was packed away, I played the weekend’s best game of Doctor Sweet. It worked terribly, worse than any other session of the weekend. But it was the best game anyway, because we came up with some really good and non-obvious changes that might solve some of the game’s toughest problems.

Actually I have no idea if the new changes are any good, but it’s always a delight to steer a design in the right direction. And I’ll find out soon enough!

Doctor Sweet’s Carnival of Chocolate Horrors, still in flux but looking strong!

Other Things

Food at this show is reasonable for a desert casino. RinCon offers meal tickets for purchase: breakfast, lunch, and dinner at a concession stand outside the gaming hall. This made fooding super convenient, and the stand usually had a nice mix of options. I also ate at the casino’s indoor taco truck, their Italian place, and the diner (twice). Was also curious about the steakhouse, but I decided I should just drop all my money into the slot machines instead.

I spent the weekend with a vaguely pained expression on my face, because I was still recovering from a rather aggressive biopsy on my lower lip. The doc says “it’s not cancer, but it’s not nothing,” whatever that means. Getting old sucks.

Somewhere along the weekend I talked with one of the retailers about some of their games being too gory for some players, and not all games being for everyone. We joked about making a game called “More Blood, More Rainbows,” a cutey-horror game in which the core mechanism is a choice between, essentially, shearing sheep or skinning them, but with more horrific metaphors. My notes read “Squeezing: Few rainbows from the butt. Repeatable. Decapitation: Many rainbows from the neck. Permanent.” This game definitely needs to happen.

I had printed my new Blossom Deck (below) on DriveThru’s linen finish cards, at the suggestion of one of our players. The cards look great, but I have a heck of a time getting them to separate, despite the promise that a linen finish should make them slip better. So I think I’ll stick with the standard card stock for now. Of course, both paper grades are casino-quality and durable as heck. Maybe these cards will slide better once they are broken in.

And now I have ten days at home before leaving for my next events: GobbleCon and PAX Unplugged back-to-back. Just enough to tune up all the games in progress and re-pack my bags!

The Blossom Deck. Check it out while the games are still fresh!