Origins Game Fair Thursday

I played more demos on this day than I have in the entirety of my Gen Con attendance. Also found out about a bunch of other games but didn’t demo them.

We got premier badges for Origins, because we are elitist snobs it made getting a downtown hotel easier, and this includes getting into the Hall Of Wallet Emptying an hour early on day one. Finding the location for this, however, was kind of a pain in the arse, because the printed page which was included with my mailed-out badge specified a location which was a long way from the vendors, with absolutely no evidence of it being the right place. (It was not the right place)

This is because it wasn’t. The right place was inside one of the other halls. We, by which I mean Tom, found it eventually.

We got breakfast after the early access period ended, on the theory that it’d be quieter because everyone would be in the vendor hall. One of the foodcourt places did pretty damn good breakfasts, as it turned out.

Demoed:

• Molly House, about Queer culture & life in Victorian(?) London. Interestingly, it has an opt-in traitor mechanic, and the victory point mechanism kind of hints towards community building.
• Oddland, where you’re building & somewhat modifying a landscape to score points. Most of the thing, points for how many neighbors you have, that kind of thing.
• Lambada, which is a simple “get rid of your cards” game with some complications regarding colour & placement – you’re placing the letters in the name of the game, but the colours are important, some are preferred & one is forbidden, and those colours will change as the game progresses.

Learned About:

• Crabs In A Bucket – card game, kind of what it sounds like
• Café Barras – Capybaras running cafés, with a mechanic where a given card is either a thing to put in your cafe, or a customer for your cafe
• Monsters of Murka – a fantasy parody of modern day USA RPG setting 
• CBR-PNK – RPG of cyberpunk folks doing their one last job, the big score before retirement. Intended to be quick to set up & play, & has a bunch of setting expansions, such as Predator with the serial numbers filed off and Shadowrun with the serial numbers filed off
• The Last Caravan – RPG about a road trip after a war against alien invaders where both sides lost, so they’re not hunting you, they’re just as desperate as you are.
• Brancalonia – lowbrow spaghetti fantasy RPG setting based on renaissance Italy. I found a map/promotional sheet for it on the floor after Gen Con a few years back, so it was interesting to see the actual game. Apparently they’ve added a brawling system so that you can get into fist fights with your fellow knaves without it becoming a bloodbath.

It was a fun day & a late night. We went to a mexican place for dinner, then a very loud sports bar because there was an Indiana vs. Oklahoma(?) basketball game on.