First up was Rapscallion; I’d never heard of this game prior to the event wishlist process, and I’m so very glad that I spotted it, because it was my standout game of the Con.
Looking at the various documentation I have for events, I must have spotted it while looking for things to fill it out the tail end of my wish list. Presumably I was looking through events by Magpie Games, or maybe games that were Powered By The Apocalypse or Forged In The Dark.
The game was awesome. It was an extremely sandboxy scenario (“You wake up after a party; The rum is gone, and you can’t find your ship”), and they decent chunk of what happened was entirely the result of our characters and our poor decisions. We did eventually get back to our ship, then sailed off to try to recover a treasure & help a member of the crew, a Chronicler, complete their book on the islands of the area.
Said treasure turned out to be a bit magically protected, but after a hint from the GM to not be too literal with interpretation of a riddle, but instead to come up with a solution that fits the narrative, we were able to recover said treasure without sinking the island it was on. And all of the other ones.
It did, however, cause a bunch of new islands to rise, and in a longer game we’d have added them to our map. The map was an in-game thing we all added to, which was fun; The idea is that it’s unique to the group, and changes as you affect the world and find new things, so it’s not solely a GM thing.
As a first for me, Matt the GM was a professional GM, and had a little bag of stuff as a form of advertising.
Second game of the day was Avatar Legends, which … Was OK.
GM who was new to running games at Gen Con, and who seemed overly fond of getting people to make a roll on pretty much everything, plus a player with no internal monologue or inside voice, who seemed at times to think he was running the game.
It was mostly a “Who Kidnapped The Co-Ruler Of The Water Tribe” investigation game, and misogyny was the culprit all along.
Amusingly, we had three earth benders, a fire bender, a weapons specialist, and a technologist. At the North Pole, where everything is made of ice, so there’s not much earth & fire is kind of a problem. We made it work.
Not a bad game, and not badly run, and the group did come together well, but … Could have been better.
After the game was the VIG Mixer, which is a social event for the folks in the Very Important Gamer program. ( or the Cashed-Up Gamer program, as I sometimes call it )
It’s held at a nice restaurant, and it’s basically a sit around and chat with folks session; Found out about a game called Pirate Borg, which I need to look into, from the folks at the table I found space at. A couple of them had played it that day, and said it’s the sort of thing with fast character creation because you’ll go through a few of them. They were planning on playing Rapscallion a bit later in the con, so I told them about my experience with it.
After the event finished, or maybe we left before it finished (not certain), Tom & Kevin & I wandered through the never entirely empty board game halls , just kind of chatting about the day, and the next day, and the stuff around us.
The halls don’t really ever empty, and there may have been actual ticketed events happening somewhere out there. Some of the groups/companies lock up their stuff when they stop for the night, but some leave a sample of stuff out for people to look at and try if they want to. I’ve never done that, by maybe I should, just for the experience of the thing.
Pretty sure this evening ended well after midnight; I walked back to my hotel (the JW is connected to the skywalks, but sometimes it’s easier to just walk along the street), and Kevin zoomed past me on one of the Lime (?) electric scooters on his way back to his hotel.
I wanted to try one of them, but having seen someone on one hit a pothole and do a 90° pivot and faceplant, I wanted to be sure that it was covered by my travel insurance first, and kept forgetting to check the policy. I suspect it’s probably a no-go.