GenCon Wrapup

I'm still fighting the Con Crud, so this will be a fairly short post.

Here it is in all its glory: Our GenCon Haul from this year:



If you click on the pic, it'll take you to an annotated page that lists (briefly) all the stuff. Some of it is gifts.

Asmodee shot video of the convention, too.  Here is the short video they did of our booth:



The video reminds me that I need to lose a bit more weight ...

The Asmodee management is very good about making sure we have breaks for food and shopping - it's usually half an hour each day with an hour on Sunday.  This year, I didn't take those breaks. Stephanie went and got food for me and picked several products up for me as well. She fought the line for Airship Pirates. And ran back-and-forth  for Victoriana products when I wasn't 100% sure what we already had.

I was the only one in the booth who knew Claustrophobia de Profundis, so I spent a lot of time demoing it. Asmodee was kind enough to send me home with a copy - I'll be taking more photos and posting a full review in a few weeks.

I didn't play as many games as I usually do, because I had other responsibilities. For example, I didn't get to play Werewolves this year. But one evening, Asmodee asked me to play an unpublished prototype and provide feedback. It's the first time that's happened to me.

I also got to play Quebec and Blood Bowl Team Manager.  Blood Bowl Team Manager left me a bit cold - there were terms that were on the cards that I couldn't find in the rule book. In fact, I found the rule book less-than-useful. Mind you, it was late at  night, and I was pretty tired ...

Quebec wound up being my Game of the Show. Before playing it, I was skeptical - how interesting could a game that detailed the history of a single Canadian city be? Not only that, but how widespread could its appeal be?  I'm pleased to report that my doubts were unfounded.  The game could theoretically be rethemed, but it would do the game a great disservice. The game was well-balanced with some very interesting mechanisms.  Not only that, but a variety of strategies seemed to be equally effective. I did better than I had expected - I took third out of four players, but I was only four points out of first place (I had 128 points, the winner had 132). Fourth place was ten or fifteen points back. Going into final scoring, there was a pretty wide spread of points, and I thought I was going to lose by a fairly wide margin.  I'll definitely be grabbing a copy of this one when it drops.

Next week, I'll be prepping for PAX, where I'll be working to demo ZoxSo for Mindspan Labs, so expect an annoyingly short post, with my usual level of content returning to normal by the end of September.