His: Gencon recap pt. 2 (Day1)

As mentioned last time, this year I decided to participate in events at GenCon rather than just walking around, demoing and looking slack-jawed at all of the amazing stuff. That began promptly at the way-too-early time of 8AM on Thursday. Being local, I chose to park in my spot in the garage downtown, which required getting up by 7 to guarantee a shower and the commute.

My first event was a round of the Starship Troopers RPG at the new JW Marriott. It was the first time I've been there, and honestly it felt more like an airport concourse than a hotel lobby. Place is huge. While the organization of the game was a little sketchy at times (a lack of coordination, missing pages, uncertain schedules) it was fun. One of the parts I enjoyed most about playing an RPG with complete strangers is seeing the awkward tension melt away as time went on. Being a 4-hour session, there was ample time to really get comfortable playing the roles and really enjoying the time. That's kind of a ground rule when it comes to GenCon as a whole: don't worry about how you look. When you're surrounded by people who have a lifetime of experience not looking cool, relaxing comes very naturally. The more you can do that, the more fun you'll have.

From there I made pace to the dealer hall to catch up with a friend where we played a demo of Rune Age. Like Dominion (the golden standard) the game is based on a deck building mechanic. Unlike Dominion, you have objectives to defeat and resources to manage. The version we played had all four players working together to defeat a dragon, though you can also play a competitive game to defeat all of the other players or to see who can defeat the dragon first for victory. The game (as far as we got into it) had four different kingdoms you could play from, each with a unique mechanic that gave you some sort of advantage that the other players didn't have (resource management, troop draws, combo boosters, etc.) I had a lot of fun playing this game, though I think I still prefer the largely non-combative nature of Dominion.

At that point we headed to lunch. While being local can save me money on parking, it sadly doesn't make eating downtown any more affordable.

Heading back , we spent a lot more time in the dealer hall looking at the new games. We picked up a demo of the game Poo and it's counterpart Nuts. The premise of Poo is to fling as much... well... poo at everyone else as you can. When you hit 15, you're out of the game. Nuts is the reverse, you try to collect or steal nuts until you hit the requisite number to win. I ended up purchasing Poo. While I prefer collecting than dealing-out, Nuts was probably a bit too crass to take home and hope to see much table time. (Some of the cards included "Grabbing your nuts" and the like)

We also got in a demo of Warmachine. This was more or less a mech miniatures game with a few twists based on the faction you chose to play. I had a good time playing it, and the Privateer Press guy really knew how to get the game across to us, but it's definitely a more complicated game than I would probably choose to play. In a nutshell, each player chooses a faction and uses the fighting abilities of each unit to fight the enemy. When you hit you find out how much damage you did, but unlike other games there is a fairly arbitrary assignment of where that damage goes. It might shut your mech down, it may have destroyed the arm, it might have immobilized you. For each unit, there's a card to keep track of damage and determine unit status, though I'm not sure how inclined I am to do that much management on a miniatures game.

At that point it was getting a bit late and we called it a day, heading back just after the dealer hall closed.