{"id":6656,"date":"2025-06-21T04:55:43","date_gmt":"2025-06-21T03:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=6656"},"modified":"2025-06-22T14:08:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-22T13:08:13","slug":"origins-game-fair-friday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=6656","title":{"rendered":"Origins Game Fair Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Demoed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Scallywager – Basically that dice game from the second Pirates of the Carribbean movie, but with some extra bits & fewer barnacles <\/li>\n\n\n\n
Trailblazers – building walking and biking and water trails between sites in order to get victory points. Requires more thought than it looks like at first glance, because I managed to absolutely tree myself very quickly.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Iconoclash – emulates side view platform fighting games. I got my ass handed to me, but it was quite fun<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Crabs In A Bucket – get rid of all your cards, but of course there are complications, and a solid crab theme. It was very fun indeed, and plays quickly – we learned to play and then played the game in maybe 5 minutes<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Learned About:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Cabby-Baras – still being developed. It’s about capybara’s transporting other critters to their destinations, and I do like me a good capybara pun<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Riftblade – I strayed too close to the booth and triggered a pitch about the game. Deck builder with various ‘unlike other deck builders’ features that I didn’t really understand.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Robot Quest Arena – adorable little robots blowing the hell out of each other, battlebots style <\/li>\n\n\n\n
A setting for D&D 5e that I can’t remember the name of<\/s> called Battlezoo, which started out as a bestiary, then a set of playable races from that bestiary, and finally it’s own setting<\/li>\n\n\n\n
String Theory, about conspiracy theory podcasters. Gameplay involves physically linking various elements of the conspiracy landscape with string, hence the name; Also, people were wearing tinfoil hats.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\nBasic mechanic is that dice game from Pirates of the Carribbean, with cards that’ll mess with other people, or protect you from losing dice.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\nThis was in the Under Development area – It started with the pun, I suspect. Elements of a tile\/tesselation game to fit the passengers in, some route finding once you know where they’re going.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\nI’d heard the pitch yesterday, but couldn’t stay for a demo, so I looped back<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nBoard game side scrolling platformer. I played a demo & got the crap kicked out of me<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\nWall of games at Arcane Wonders<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nI know nothing about this, I just like the art<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nDeck builder with innovative features which probably mean something to people who play deck builders? I listened to the spiel, but didn’t demo it<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
The Battlezoo folks look as though they’re having so much fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
A chance comment about the revised\/relaunched Twilight 2000 game led to a conversation with one of the other attendees about the game Dark Conspiracy; He’d never run into anyone else who’d ever run it. Sounds like his players were way more gun-happy than mine, but from the sound of it they were only just teenagers, so it makes sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m not certain that it was today, but it seems likely that this was the day that I ran into Mikey Mason in the elevator lobby of the hotel; I thought it looked like him, but I wasn’t 100% sure, but then he recognized me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few different booths were doing daily raffles, so I tried to be there during the drawings. Arcane Wonders raffled off a lot of stuff, and the guy running it had a fun crowd presence. I missed out on winning an absolute monster of a game bundle by one number; I was 429, he drew 428.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was really good at whipping up the crowd, and involving both them and his own staff in the “what do we raffle off next” process<\/em>. Also did a few “if you win this you have to give half of it away to somebody else in the crowd” kind of things, which was very fun to watch.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The folks from Robot Quest Arena, or more accurately from the booth that was selling Robot Quest Arena among other things, also had a raffle for a game I’d never heard of. I turned up anyway because why not; I can always give it away to somebody who will play it<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wandering the game hall in the evening, there was the same ‘pockets of people’ effect that you see at Gen Con in place; Chunks of open space, then some people wearing tinfoil hats, then a gap, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Demoed: Learned About: The Battlezoo folks look as though they’re having so much fun. A chance comment about the revised\/relaunched Twilight 2000 game led to a conversation with one of the other attendees about the game Dark Conspiracy; He’d never run into anyone else who’d ever run it. Sounds like his players were way more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[179],"class_list":["post-6656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holiday-2025","tag-origins-game-fair"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3O6N9-1Jm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6656"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6693,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656\/revisions\/6693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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