I slept in a lot that first day.
Not having made it to the room until … well, I’m not actually sure, but maybe 1am? … did not make for an overwhelming urge to get out of bed.
Also, the blinds on the window were really good, possibly because of the constantly-lit carpark right outside.
First order of business, given that I’d well and truly missed the hotel breakfast, was to take a pair of scissors to my beard.
It hadn’t been trimmed since … Gen Con? … and it needed it.
Before
After
The downtime on this stay was mostly taken up with editing a Big Red Couch episode.
Fortunately, the hotel had both decent wifi and power points in useful locations. (that’s my one criticism of The Saint in New Orleans – There was one place I could plug in my traveling surge protector, and it was nowhere near the desk. All of the other places wouldn’t work because it’d hit furniture, or a lamp base, or something)
Caught up with Tom on Tuesday night, when we had dinner (Old Spaghetti Factory) and just sort of hung out, and then again on Saturday, when he was kind enough to drive into the shrieking nightmare of Indy traffic, pick me up, and take me out to his past & present stomping grounds.
Having seem so very many farms & rural areas from the train, it was nice to be able to wander about in them, get bitten by mosquitoes, avoid annoying bees (as in, avoid doing things which might annoy the bees. the bees weren’t annoying at all), that sort of thing.
It was a really good day.
Caught up with Frank & Kevin on Friday and Saturday, mostly at Good Games Indianapolis, who have a big space with a bunch of gaming tables, but we did break out for dinner at Kevin’s place one night, and a nearby place which was going for “upmarket sports bar” the other.
So, the games.
There’s Hit Z Road, which … seemed damn near incomprehensible at first look, because there seemed to be pieces which had no use. Turns out that Martin Wallace has a sparse writing style for rules, and maybe a note along the lines of “all will be explained – don’t worry about it now” could have helped.
Despite some misgivings with the rules, and one point where I looked up errata on my phone just in case, the game shook down very quickly, and if I weren’t traveling, I’d be tracking down a copy to buy.
The mechanics are very good indeed; It’s a zombie apocalypse road trip, but rather than having a map, pairs of randomly-drawn cards represent possible routes for ‘the next bit’, and the players bid to get first pick of route.
And like any zombie movie, don’t expect everyone to make it to the end credits.
Incredibrawl was sitting on the ‘please try me’ demo table, still in the shrinkwrap, so we tried it.
It’s a lot more thinky than we assumed from the box – I expected it to be a step above “we each take a corner and throw cards at each other”, but there’s a lot more subtlety, and some tactical thinking, to the game. Also some “OK, let’s unpick how this plays out”.
The general feel is like someone wondered whether Dracula could beat Saruman, someone else wondered whether Frankenstein’s Monster could beat a Great White Shark, and an idea was brought into being.
Again, I would buy this game, were I not a traveling man.
At Kevin’s place, there was LEGO Minotaurus. And dinner.
It is made from LEGO, which has the advantage that you can move the board around without pieces falling over. Usually.
You’re trying to get all of your little figures to the centre without being caught & sent back to the start by the Minotaur, who is under the occasional control of the other players, through a maze which said other players are rearranging when they can, all while doing the same devious crap to them that they’re doing to you.
It took forever.
Mostly because there were three people doing their level best to screw each other over, and a nine-year-old who is still learning how to balance risk in games.
Fun, and would play again, and I like the ability to modify the board in-play, or redesign the game and the board and the pieces to make a different play experience.
There was Red Dragon Inn, a drinking game.
As in, a game about drinking, working on the Last Man Standing principle, where you’re trying to force everyone else to get more drunk and less healthy, while avoiding it happening to you.
The game can apparently go up to 20 players, which would mean there’s a chance you’d be under the table and out of the game without ever getting a turn.
And something brought by a chap from, I think, the Gen Con unofficial facebook group, that I’ve been unable to track down a link for, or even 100% confirm the name of.
Spycraft, or something similar, where one player’s secretly the spy, everyone else is in the same secret location, and through asking questions the spy is trying to figure out where they all are, while the rest are trying to figure out who the spy is.
Interesting, tricky in that you want to not give the spy info about the place when answering questions, so you go vague, which is exactly what the spy has to do when asked a question to avoid letting on that they don’t actually know the answer.
Sort of “Guess Who: TSA Edition”.