Gen Con Recap! (September 2021 newsletter) (Patreon)

Hey folks! September was busy for a lot of reasons, but the main thing for me was going to Gen Con for the first time! Yes, I know it was different because of the pandemic, but it was still a great experience. And if you want to read more about the safety issues of the con, I did a Twitter thread about that which you can read here. Anyway, the thing I want to tell you about is some games! But instead of covering absolutely everything I played, this will just be the highlights (and the stuff I remembered to take pictures of). Above we see Caesar! which got a lot of attention due to the recent SUSD video covering that and Blitzkrieg!, and both of those games definitely deserves some praise. Caesar! is a whip smart 2-player strategy game that has a lot of tense decision making, but still plays in 20-30 minutes. It's not out yet, but when it does release, try to get your hands on it. I might have enjoyed Blitzkrieg! a little better, but by the time I was going to try it out, they had sold out their entire stock. And by that I mean the company's stock, not just what they brought to Gen Con. I got to watch a game go out of print in real time. It was fascinating.

AEG had a cool demo room for content creators and I got to check out a few upcoming releases. Rolling Heights is definitely near the top of my list for upcoming games. I've actually played a prototype of this game a couple times, and besides having an excellent board presence, this also a really innovative city builder. You can see in the background a couple meeples on their sides. That's because you actually roll them to determine how effective they are as workers. It sounds weird and gimmicky, but it totally works.

Another AEG game I got to demo was The Guild of Merchant Explorers. This one was a little odd, because it really feels like a roll and write, or flip and write I guess, but it isn't. You reveal some cards and those tell you what kind of space you can plop down some control cubes down on your map, with different areas getting you different bonuses and unique abilities. But then after the first set of cards runs out, you clear all of your cubes from the board (except for a couple that turned into buildings), add a card to the deck, and go again. It ends up being a really tight efficiency engine, and while it has a certain charm to it, there's more depth than first meets the eye, so I hope people give it a chance.

I got to see a couple upcoming Pandasaurus games, and the one that really stuck out to me was That Time You Killed Me. Besides having a near inscrutable title, this one is fascinating because it's an abstract strategy game played on three boards at once, with each representing a different moment in time (past, present, and future), so if you move your pawn in the past, it also moves it in the present and future. There's also an interesting mechanic where after you take a move on one board, you have to announce which board you'll be affecting on your next turn, so there's a lot of planning and reaction involved. This is another game that I hope people don't sleep on, because it's got such a distinct style.

Pandasaurus was also kind enough to give me a review copy of Dinosaur World, which I will probably be covering on Rahdo some time in the future, but unfortunately have not had the chance to actually play yet. Still, it looks big and ridiculous and I'm very excited.

Maybe my favorite experience was playing a megagame called Den of Wolves. This was about 50 people doing a 6-hour board game/LARP based on (but legally distinct from) Battlestar Galactica. I've done a megagame once, years ago, so I was thrilled to go again. The picture above wasn't my station though, that was the ship board for the Aegis, the head of the fleet. No, me and my friend Amir came in late, so instead of being the crew on a ship, we actually played as the press. No one else had taken the role and I knew from experience how important it was in a megagame. This basically involved talking to each of the various ships and reporting the news at the end of each 30 minute game round. It wasn't what we planned on, but it was still a ton of fun. We ended up being pretty silly with it, and because we didn't have any game mechanics to work with, it was a very low stress experience. I would probably want to do something different next time, but I'm very glad I got to try it out.

I also got to play Luna Capital on Gen Con's twitch stream. This picture isn't that, but I played it with Ruel Gaviola (right, blue hat) and Banzainator (left, death stare), and you can watch it here (our part of the video starts at 40:47). The game we're playing in the picture above is Pictomania, which might be my favorite drawing game of all time. It's one of those games that starts off fairly chill and then gets ridiculous almost immediately.

And that's about all I have for you. Thanks as always for supporting RTFM. It's because of you fine folks that I'm even able to go to conventions like this, so I can't tell you how appreciative I am. And I'll leave you with one of the coolest things I saw at the con: a game of Robo Rally with actual robots.