This was my earliest event of the con, at 9am, and it was a bit of a struggle. This doesn’t speak well for my transition back into working life. In previous years I’ve done early morning podcast recordings, or 5k runs, though at this particular moment I’m not sure how.
The game that Tom & Jay & Naomi & I had originally thought to play together was Wanderhome, but I massively misjudged the popularity of that event, and only the others got tickets, so I got a ticket for Our Brilliant Ruin instead. I can remember banner ads for this last year, though it’s still in Kickstarter from what I can tell?
Their game was in the room next door to mine, so Tom was able to take this picture of me. Could see out into the hallway, obviously, and for a while there was a line of people out there, which turned out to be folks queuing for Will Call; Didn’t expect a line that long on a Sunday, because the rooms we were in were way the hell out at the far end of the ICC.
The game is “upstairs-downstairs personal and sociological drama meets existential horror”, where the end of the world is approaching, the Ruin is out there, and … Some semblance of society & social class lives on.
We were on the hunt for a missing friend, an author suffering from writer’s block who’d gone to an abandoned manor house, right on the edge of the Ruin, with a terrible history. Gothic Horror ensued, the dead child was actually a monster, the ‘murdered’ mother was killed by said monster, the ‘murderous’ husband killed himself to protect the child he couldn’t bear to kill, the loyal family doctor had been dosing the monster with laudanum all these years, and the author came blundering right into the middle of it all and got trapped.
The GM for this was very enthusiastic, but kind of railroady. Very railroady. I don’t think we ever actually did a walkthrough of the whole house, because he was more interested in detailed searches of specific rooms for clues. By the end of the session, with our triumphant escape, it was pretty clearly a set-piece where things were going to go the way he wanted regardless of what anyone actually did, which is a shame because we were all very much on board with recovering the amazing experimental energy source that’d make us fabulously wealthy.
Interesting game, but the GM needed to calm down & lean back a bit. He did ask for feedback, but fortunately one of the other 2 players immediately started ranting about systems & newness & how people didn’t need to keep reinventing things because older systems like Traveller did fine with 2D6 and wasn’t that so much easier than all this newness and … I bailed out when he looped back to the start with no sign of slowing down or shutting up.
Remember this coupon? They had advertising in various bathrooms around the ICC, and I managed to photograph a few of them without being creepy. I hope.
Last game of the day, and the con, was A Gentle Rain.
I think my first ever Play A Boardgame/Cardgame event of Gen Con; I did do a learning to play of Battletech once, but this was a “here’s the game, off you go” sort of thing. It can be played with multiple players, or at least it doesn’t have to be a solo game, but I was playing by myself.
It was fun. You’re placing tiles & trying to place flower tokens. First game I found a lot of things which didn’t work for tile placement, second game identified something that did work and some specifics that didn’t, and the third game I actually got all the flowers placed before I ran out of tiles.
It’s a bit like some species of solitaire, I think; A lot depends on the luck of the draw with the tiles, but there are some things you can do that’ll make things harder or easier.
My third game ended as the session, and the con, ended, or I’d have been tempted to go and get a copy of A Gentle Rain.
