The Value of Smaller Cons

Birds of Paradise behind the Residence Inn, Sacramento Cal Expo

To paraphrase a popular meme, “Use the good china. Because just being alive is a special occasion.” Or to put it another way, no convention is too small. And here is the best example.

I’m on track for some pretty huge cons this summer, but I find that I get the most work done at the smallest ones. This weekend was Intergalactic ConQuest, in Sacramento. 72 hours of uninterrupted playtesting and zero responsibilities.

Gabriel “Mondo” Vega has been running the ConQuest series of conventions since forever. Sadly this year, just like last year, Gabriel was sick and missed the show. Our thoughts were with him.

The venue was the Scottish Rite Masonic Center, which lacks a nearby hotel. I can only assume the place was cheap. I stayed at the official con hotel, a Residence Inn three miles away. Google said it was a 90 minute walk, so of course I did not do that. Not in these heels.

I flew into Sacramento Friday afternoon. Alaska Airlines asked me to volunteer for a later flight, since this one was packed. I should have known this was a signal that I might get upgraded, and in fact that’s what happened. First class was lovely; I got legroom and a free granola bar.

I arrived at the convention around 4:00, and the event was already in full swing. For this show, that means there were about twenty people in the RPG / Protospiel room, ten more in the open gaming / vendor’s room, and ten more in the miniatures room. This con is as small as they come.

I picked up my badge, caught up with friends, and got straight into my first playtest. I don’t actually remember what order I did things on Friday, but I did play a couple of my own games, and a few others by local designers. There is a big Sacramento / Bay Area design group, and they stocked the Protospiel area with many snacks and prizes.

I put Sandy Diggs on the table Friday evening. This is the updated name for Tomb of the Ancients, now redesigned as something I might actually publish myself. I haven’t changed the game mechanics recently, but I wanted to get some feedback on the new art style and talk about how it might fit into a new line of games. I got some good answers that will help me put together a pretty new version next month.

How might I publish Sandy Diggs? Last month at the GAMA Expo, Carol got talking with the folks at Atlas Games about spinning up a new line of games with me as lead designer. This would make me the brand manager too, so I’m trying to figure out what that brand looks like. 

In doing this evaluation, I have come to realize that a lot of the games in my current catalog are pretty generic, because my customer has been “publishers,” i.e., a vague amalgam of everyone, with no specific one in mind. Most game companies seem to have no sense of humor, so a lot of my current games are fairly dry. They have been waiting (I suppose) for a publisher to decide just how wacky they should be.

My new brand certainly won’t be “Cheapass Games II,” because it can’t be built around making impulse buys at the checkout counter in brick and mortar game stores. But I’m pretty sure it will still have a sense of humor. So Sandy Diggs reimagines the fairly dry Tomb of the Ancients with a cute cartoony adventure-serial look, and I’ll be leaning into the humor a little more as I rewrite it for the sales pitch.

Yes, I will be pitching games to myself. When I launched Cheapass I had a half dozen games already in development, and picked the best game among them. That list included Huzzah, Get Out, Ben Hvrt, the Spy Game, and others. But best among them was Kill Doctor Lucky, and that game served as our flagship for 20 years.

So I want to choose carefully.

My last game of Friday evening was another possible entry in that new short list, Cold Comfort. I haven’t made any changes since GameStorm, not having the time, but we did get to see the core mechanics working sort of half-well, despite the dice pool drying up by the end. After the test, we brainstormed some special powers to assign to the public buildings, something I would love to accomplish before I play the game again this weekend. 

Cold Comfort is a little more obviously funny than Sandy Diggs, the puzzle-based archaeology game. This is a game where you take money from gold miners, serve them “soup” in expensive hotels, and roll drunks in alleys for cash. I need to make it abundantly clear that you’re playing the bad guy here, which seems easy enough.

Saturday was the biggest day. It started with free waffles and coffee at the hotel. Tragically I short-poured my waffle, using one of those hotel griddles that flip over, so half of my waffle was made of strange drippy nothing, like a scientific model of the insides of a waffle, But it was crisp and tasty. 

Back at the con, I started by digging into a pretty serious city building game. The designer had recently gotten the game back from a publisher, and he was looking to improve it. In its current incarnation it quick-started, with each player’s buildings leveled up to rank 2, and a few other bypasses that tried to cut through the early nboring rounds.This was all in service of keeping the play time under 90 minutes, but after we played most of the way, I thought he could probably start at the beginning, and accelerate the midgame instead. So I offered a few suggestions for how to do that, and we played it a second time. I feel like it got better, and at least we got through it faster the second time. The game had a lot of interesting mechanics that I won’t share, so it has good bones just looking for the right, uh, muscles.

I played Floyd Lu’s mushroom-themed tile placement game, which was cute if a little dry. He’s still working on the core rules, despite having beautifully finished components (this seems fairly common). He started us off by saying “this looks polished, but ignore that.” We had a lively debate about how the art could still be improved, and made some notes about the scoring. 

Greg Whitehead was passing through, and he stopped by around 1:00. The room was really busy by early afternoon: three full tables of RPGs and about 20 game designers at six tables. Greg arrived just in time to be part of the game design “contest,” more like a three-phase workshop, run by Sacramento designer Jake Van Slooten.

The first phase was a 15-minute round in which teams were asked to come up with a broad concept for a new game: theme, core mechanics, and general description, using a random box of parts. I teamed up with Greg, and we received a box of red and green components. So we invented a Christmas-themed game called Naughty and Nice. This was a two-player game in which each player was a child at Christmas, giving and receiving presents. Each player was secretly naughty or nice, and the goal was to collect the right kind of points, and avoid the other kind, while trying to deduce what the opponent was doing.

In phase two, all teams moved to a new workstation, and we were instructed to fine-tune the rules and details of what we found there. Greg and I arrived at a cooperative horror storytelling game about predicting the end of the world, by slaughtering priests and reading their entrails. Ok, sure.

We spent most of this phase writing questions and keywords, like “Football” and “Envy” and “Why don’t more people like Captain Marvel?” This seemed appropriate since the next group who got here would need some components to test with, and I figure that good writing is the heart of a game like this. It might not surprise you to hear, but I’ve written other games like this myself.

In phase three, Greg and I found ourselves in another cooperative game, this time about Frankenstein’s assistants trying to divert lightning into his lab. Each player had access to two lightning rods. Working within our own room of transformers, we had only partial visibility into the cards of other players. The most interesting thing about this setup was how the game information was limited by sight lines. 

Greg and I made a deck, played the game once, replaced the deck, and tested it again. All of the teams begged for more time for this phase of the contest, and we stole components from another workstation to make our final draft. In all, this phase took about 35 minutes. By the end we had a basic framework that we liked, although the core rules were still far from complete.

After a short break, each team presented their final projects. Naughty or Nice had turned into a multiplayer trick-taking game, with a similar theme, and was pretty popular. I think Greg and I had fumbled the handoff for our storytelling game, because that third team basically abandoned it. And we got to present the Frankenstein game.

Each team got a blue ribbon for participating in the contest, and then Greg and I went out to dinner at Habit Burger. We overdid it on the fried food because of course we did. Onion Rings, Fries, and Green Beans. Hey, but those are all vegetables, right?

Later Saturday evening, we ran extra playtests of the design contest games. I noted that Naughty and Nice had DNA in common with many other trick-taking and hidden goal games, though its last design team 3 weren’t familiar with them. Frankenstein continued to be interesting, though it still lacked a core resolution mechanic. As a placeholder, we were trying to arrange numbers to make all the Lab rooms add up to the same total, but there wasn’t much fun yet. I proposed some kind of word game / deduction game instead. This might stray from the Frankenstein theme, but maybe someone could make that work.

After that, folks wanted to see TomorrowLab, including some players who knew it as Shipwrights of Marino. We are re-theming that game to sell it to a publisher who “doesn’t like steampunk” Yeah, Dew Point is fantasy, not steampunk, but whatever. It has airships, so it’s steampunk.

This draft played well, despite a couple of problem cards, and a new player named Sean picked it up easily and came in a close second. Sean, Greg and I all scored within a few points of each other, something like 148-150-151, with poor Jake trailing at about 120. Jake admits that he keeps being distracted by the engine building, and forgetting that his main goal is to make a profit. Or maybe he just forgets to pay himself.

I had made one basic change to the game, changing the Labs (the Freebooters) from 3 dice to 4, and then back to 3, hoping to keep the market from running too rich. I’m not sure if that change was the reason, but the market was nicely balanced in this test. Not many full channels, and a couple of fairly empty ones, to the point where I think someone even bought a last-place resource once or twice.

The big open question is whether the new cards are balanced. I have been working on the core mechanics, leaving the card balance for the next pass. There are a lot of new cards and it’ll take some time to be sure, but I think most of the new cards are working. There was some debate over whether the Submarine is part of any viable strategy (get a bonus if you finish the fewest cards). Jake always wants more engine parts, so he doesn’t like blank cards (and they are gone). He also doesn’t like the one-shots. But Jake also spent way too much time deciding which blueprints to sweep with the House Cat (once per turn, cycle up to three contracts from the market), so I think that card must die because of how much time it eats up.

One of the Protospiel designers (I didn’t catch his name) was testing a geometric game that was slightly akin to Sandy Diggs, so next I took a look at that. Each player had a set of three four-color puzzles that we were trying to build in a shared space, and when a pattern was finished, it got pulled off the board. In both of the games we played, one player accidentally built someone else’s final puzzle while trying to complete their own. Such a high degree of interactivity can be pretty frustrating, but I don’t immediately know how to fix it. 

We broke out Sandy Diggs, and had another solid experience. I think this game could actually be the first in a series of games in a similar vein, basically the 1930’s Indiana Jones adventure serial style, where I would also love to make a game called The Black Bird, basically the Maltese Falcon adventure board game.

We finished Saturday evening with a few hands of Whispers. I want to make a new version of that deck, because now I have a new game (Papa) that requires the four colors to be more distinct. I think I’ll reimagine the Whispers deck specifically for Papa, and make one with only four suits, possibly even set in the Sandy Diggs universe.

Sunday morning, I had the same breakfast, same waffles, same coffee. This time I managed to pour enough batter to fill the entire griddle.

The convention started slowly on the last day. Many of the badges they sold had been for Saturday. I played a few games of Tablero with Jackie Epner at registration, and I taught it to Aldo Ghiozzi, who was sitting behind a table of discounted games. No one showed up to Protospiel until about 10:00. But when they arrived, they came with donuts.

Floyd showed me some new solitaire versions of the mushroom game. Then we playtested another one of his games, a Castlevania-style adventure game where the object is to walk across a room. This took two hours and we didn’t even finish. It was frustrating because the big hook is a marble that rolls across the board, knocking over monsters and pawns indiscriminately. This happens a lot, and when the marble hits you, it knocks you back to your last checkpoint. This is only two spaces behind, but considering how hard it is to move forward, it feels like a mile away.

I tried forging ahead with my starting cards, while Floyd held back and filled his hand with better cards. I battled with the third player for access to the end space, and we knocked each other back again and again, while Floyd collected power cards.

I hoped that eventually Floyd would rush past us and win, as we continued to get battered back by the monsters and the marble. But that never happened, and eventually we threw up our hands and said “this has to stop.” We chatted for a while about how this game might be streamlined, possibly with the addition of a few mandatory card draws that act like breadcrumbs leading into the upgrade deck.

One big issue for me, and the reason I gave up early on upgrades, was that after drawing three more or less identical weapons, I saw no more value in that deck. I wanted to draw special moves that would help me through the maze at the end of the room, and I hadn’t seen any. At the very end I finally got one. If I had known that card existed, I’d probably have gone for it sooner. We gave Floyd some notes and suggested a lot of other games this one might become, probably a lot more than he was looking for.

After that, I played a robot-fighting card game that was pretty raw. The components looked final, and the art was "done” (and apparently expensive), but the rules were pretty sketchy. Four players tried to learn the game from the rules while the designer watched and tried not to interfere, but eventually we had to give up and bring him in to help us.

The designer’s primary experience seemed to be with Magic, and he used a lot of heavy language and timing rules that are really only necessary in a trading card game, not a screw-your-neighbor game with four card types. 

I gave some feedback that he flatly rejected (“everyone else who has played this game doesn’t have these problems”), and after a few rounds of “but why,” I basically checked out of the test. The designer wasn’t all that interested in feedback, at least not of the “this game isn’t working” variety. In fact, this went so poorly that I lost the urge to bring out anything of my own, and my Sunday ended a little early. But I learned some things. One of them was perhaps not to try being smart and patient all day on a diet of donuts and coke.

I headed back to my hotel at about 4:00, and wandered over to the mall next door. Burlington Coat Factory, Nordstrom Rack, a strangely large number of nail salons, and a California Fish Grill, where I got cajun catfish, street corn, and coconut shrimp that were tasty.

And since the hotel was cheaper than the difference in the flight, I stayed another night in Sacramento before heading back home.

Are small conventions worth it? Honestly, yes. I playtested more games at this show than I would at a big con, and learned a lot from playing everyone’s games, and talking about how to make them better. I’m inspired by some of the dead-ends in their games, to explore ideas of my own.

I’m pretty sure that Origins and Gen Con will be completely different; at those shows I might not playtest anything at all. I’ll be too busy doing meetings and lunches and business, which is really what those big shows are for. 

So yeah, I’ll keep investing in small conventions, and trying to learn more about this thing I do for a living.

So what do you think? All-Fire Games? Sandy Diggs? Why or why not?