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Back from another great trip to Origins. I'm not sure quite how to convey exactly how much I love this convention. It seems to me to be everything a gaming convention should be: tons of gamers coming together to play lots of games, try new ones, meet new opponents, and generally have fun.
I flew out and back with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shield_toad111, and we stayed, as I often do, with mnemex and drcpunk (joined by ebartley this year). I like staying with them at conventions; I enjoy spending time with them and talking with them when I see them, our schedules and habits don't tend to interfere with each other's too much, and we all tend to do our own things which sometimes overlap, so we have interesting things to talk about and I don't feel like anybody's trying to dictate my schedule.
Origins was a bit different from me than it has been in the past. Mostly because I wasn't aggressively pushing NonCon on game manufacturers or players, so less of my time felt like work. I did hand out a couple of business cards to people that might be interested in the convention, and even got one product copy to either hang on to or give to the con, at my discretion for which will get it played more. I'll have to think about that one. It's Gambit, and we played it once that night. Not my favorite genre, but for a quick, light bash each other melee, it played pretty well. (I think I'd like to see the hand size increased by 2, though...there's a lot of time spent fishing for the cards you need. If players spend a lot of time figuring out what to do, that could get painful.)
Cheese Weasel ran a new version of that WoW Quest game that I'd won last year at GenCon. They replaced the linear plot quests of GenCon with gather the components quests. Probably an improvement, because you could decide what you wanted to visit in what order, and if a booth was requiring a 20-minute demo and there was a line, you could just remember to come back later. Probably better for the exhibitors as well, because the old way people might give up before they got to your booth if it was late in the chain. I didn't win, but I brightened a few people's days with my role-playing (and confused quite a few more, sadly) and got to see some neat stuff. I still think it's a nice way to give direction to my wanderings around the hall finding the new stuff I haven't seen before.
I spent most of the new time not spent in the Exhibitor's Hall up in the Lab. Probably spent even more time there than I have in the past, which means the overwhelming majority of the convention. In fact, let me just mention the other non-Looney things I did first.
Friday afternoon I played in a Clout Fantasy beginners tournament. They gave away starter-packs in the swag bags, and the tourney was starter only, choose your race from what you have. I made a pretty miserable showing, although I did pretty solidly in one of my games (which was about a 3 point gap between first and last). Missing the table with your base on your opening throw is painful. Oh, well. Got two boosters and a promo chip for my trouble. It's a cute game. I refuse to get into the collectability of it (especially at the very high price for two pieces in a booster, and the pretty tight constraints on army construction which make it pretty unlikely that you'll use what you get out of a booster unless you buy a bunch of 'em), but I like it and would be happy to play when opportunities present themselves. It kind of fills a similar niche to X-Bugs -- a miniatures-like wargame with a strong dexterity component.
Friday night, I headed over to the Kobolds Ate My Baby! Midnight Massacre. I think this is the only event that I make a point of going to every year, regardless of what else is going on. This year, the good folks at 9th Level were a bit understaffed, so I was asked to help out and Mayor a table. That was incredibly fun! Mostly because I had one of the best groups of Kobolds a Mayor could ask for. Although 6 of the 8 were completely new to the game, they dived right into the spirit of it (and into the zombie-piranha infested river on a number of occasions!). At one point I was laughing so hard I needed to pause to recover my breath before I could continue. My players had so much fun that they stuck around for a good hour after we passed our top player up to the finals table--nobody wanted to stop playing. That player even came back and joined us after he got knocked out of the finals. A great time was had by all.
Except for a couple of demos (nothing exceptionally noteworthy this year) and a late-night game or two in the hall, the rest of my time was in the Lab. This year's promo-card hunt was a set of four Fluxx promos. A goal which could be gotten for free in the booth down in the Exhibitors Hall, and three Keepers which had to be won off employees or rabbits by beating them in a game of Treehouse. Which meant I played a lot of Treehouse. Treehouse is fun. I'm not its biggest fan, preferring games with a bit more depth to them, but it's a fun way to have something to fiddle with while having a conversation with someone I like or playing another game. Kind of like Fluxx, really, except Treehouse interferes less with the other activity because you don't have a big hand of cards to deal with. When I got home, I discovered that my new promo cards bump my Fluxx deck over the capacity of the tuck-box. I need to decide what to do about that.
I also played in Ice Haggle on Friday night (Friday was a busy day for me). This was Sid Sackson's old party game Haggle, written up with Icehouse pieces depicted on the cards and played among the rabbits for 6 hours on Friday. I've always wanted to try Haggle, and I really enjoyed it. You start out with a set of cards which have some value, and a couple of rules which tell you about the values of the cards. All the rules are in play somewhere. You can then make any trades you wish (trading for information early is, of course, important), and eventually turn in a set of cards to be scored. I came in second. My only complaint was that a lot of the players were busy in games so it was hard to find trading partners. Ideally, I think the game would start at a time when the players will have a good hour or so with a low likelihood that there will be another event they'll want to go to, so the initial information exchanges can take place with relative evenness. After that, there can be a good long while where it doesn't matter so much who's available to participate...in fact, there's no reason for the game not to go all weekend, although most of the active participation will probably fade more quickly than that.
Participated in a few tournaments as well. Made the finals in Martian Chess (which I'd won last year), and third in Martian Hold 'Em (despite spending pretty much the entire tournament short-stacked, I was able to wait out a whole bunch of aggressive players by playing pretty tightly). I only played one game in the floating Volcano tournament, which I magically lost tomnemex (I was winning, neither of us is sure what happened.), so I actually did worse in the tournament than Potato. Oh, well. And I played in my first Icehouse tournament. No wins, and I was bottom in most of my games, but I feel like I made a respectable showing for a game I didn't really know. And now I'm kind of excited to play the game more and get better at it, because it's fun.
Plus a whole bunch of other random games, and I earned myself a new flower (good, I hadn't had a red one yet). I got drafted into demoing a few times. One was for a family who were a lot of fun...I took them through a few games in their sticker-hunt before I had to drop to get some food and make it down to the Exhibitor's Hall before I spent the whole afternoon in the Lab. They were really nice, and gave me a Rubber Rubberband Man in thanks. He's the cutest thing ever...can't help but smile looking at him hanging out of a pocket in my vest. I may post a picture somewhere later.
Scores for the convention included the Puerto Rico Expansion for $1 (Sunday Special), possibly the best 2E D&D supplement ever (Complete Bard's) for $2 (same Sunday Special), and Queen's Necklace for $8 (Funagain Games brought a stack of them). We gave Queen's Necklace a try on the flight home, and it turns out to be a solid game. Definitely money well-spent.
I think I probably underate a bit, but not too severely. Two bowls of kake soba (passing through the Detroit airport in each direction), five or so peanut butter sandwiches (yay Krema), a couple of peanut butter and chocolate milkshakes (ditto), three pints of massaman gai with a massive amount of white rice, and maybe a couple of little things in 4 1/2 days. Not as much variety as might have been ideal, but it left lots of time for playing games and was generally healthy and tasty.
Finally, lots of hugs and cuddling this year. While not a direct determinant for how I feel about a convention afterward, it certainly helps. And I got to reconnect withmistacat, with whom I'd been almost completely out of touch for quite a while, which was definitely a perk.
I flew out and back with
shield_toad111, and we stayed, as I often do, with mnemex and drcpunk (joined by ebartley this year). I like staying with them at conventions; I enjoy spending time with them and talking with them when I see them, our schedules and habits don't tend to interfere with each other's too much, and we all tend to do our own things which sometimes overlap, so we have interesting things to talk about and I don't feel like anybody's trying to dictate my schedule.Origins was a bit different from me than it has been in the past. Mostly because I wasn't aggressively pushing NonCon on game manufacturers or players, so less of my time felt like work. I did hand out a couple of business cards to people that might be interested in the convention, and even got one product copy to either hang on to or give to the con, at my discretion for which will get it played more. I'll have to think about that one. It's Gambit, and we played it once that night. Not my favorite genre, but for a quick, light bash each other melee, it played pretty well. (I think I'd like to see the hand size increased by 2, though...there's a lot of time spent fishing for the cards you need. If players spend a lot of time figuring out what to do, that could get painful.)
Cheese Weasel ran a new version of that WoW Quest game that I'd won last year at GenCon. They replaced the linear plot quests of GenCon with gather the components quests. Probably an improvement, because you could decide what you wanted to visit in what order, and if a booth was requiring a 20-minute demo and there was a line, you could just remember to come back later. Probably better for the exhibitors as well, because the old way people might give up before they got to your booth if it was late in the chain. I didn't win, but I brightened a few people's days with my role-playing (and confused quite a few more, sadly) and got to see some neat stuff. I still think it's a nice way to give direction to my wanderings around the hall finding the new stuff I haven't seen before.
I spent most of the new time not spent in the Exhibitor's Hall up in the Lab. Probably spent even more time there than I have in the past, which means the overwhelming majority of the convention. In fact, let me just mention the other non-Looney things I did first.
Friday afternoon I played in a Clout Fantasy beginners tournament. They gave away starter-packs in the swag bags, and the tourney was starter only, choose your race from what you have. I made a pretty miserable showing, although I did pretty solidly in one of my games (which was about a 3 point gap between first and last). Missing the table with your base on your opening throw is painful. Oh, well. Got two boosters and a promo chip for my trouble. It's a cute game. I refuse to get into the collectability of it (especially at the very high price for two pieces in a booster, and the pretty tight constraints on army construction which make it pretty unlikely that you'll use what you get out of a booster unless you buy a bunch of 'em), but I like it and would be happy to play when opportunities present themselves. It kind of fills a similar niche to X-Bugs -- a miniatures-like wargame with a strong dexterity component.
Friday night, I headed over to the Kobolds Ate My Baby! Midnight Massacre. I think this is the only event that I make a point of going to every year, regardless of what else is going on. This year, the good folks at 9th Level were a bit understaffed, so I was asked to help out and Mayor a table. That was incredibly fun! Mostly because I had one of the best groups of Kobolds a Mayor could ask for. Although 6 of the 8 were completely new to the game, they dived right into the spirit of it (and into the zombie-piranha infested river on a number of occasions!). At one point I was laughing so hard I needed to pause to recover my breath before I could continue. My players had so much fun that they stuck around for a good hour after we passed our top player up to the finals table--nobody wanted to stop playing. That player even came back and joined us after he got knocked out of the finals. A great time was had by all.
Except for a couple of demos (nothing exceptionally noteworthy this year) and a late-night game or two in the hall, the rest of my time was in the Lab. This year's promo-card hunt was a set of four Fluxx promos. A goal which could be gotten for free in the booth down in the Exhibitors Hall, and three Keepers which had to be won off employees or rabbits by beating them in a game of Treehouse. Which meant I played a lot of Treehouse. Treehouse is fun. I'm not its biggest fan, preferring games with a bit more depth to them, but it's a fun way to have something to fiddle with while having a conversation with someone I like or playing another game. Kind of like Fluxx, really, except Treehouse interferes less with the other activity because you don't have a big hand of cards to deal with. When I got home, I discovered that my new promo cards bump my Fluxx deck over the capacity of the tuck-box. I need to decide what to do about that.
I also played in Ice Haggle on Friday night (Friday was a busy day for me). This was Sid Sackson's old party game Haggle, written up with Icehouse pieces depicted on the cards and played among the rabbits for 6 hours on Friday. I've always wanted to try Haggle, and I really enjoyed it. You start out with a set of cards which have some value, and a couple of rules which tell you about the values of the cards. All the rules are in play somewhere. You can then make any trades you wish (trading for information early is, of course, important), and eventually turn in a set of cards to be scored. I came in second. My only complaint was that a lot of the players were busy in games so it was hard to find trading partners. Ideally, I think the game would start at a time when the players will have a good hour or so with a low likelihood that there will be another event they'll want to go to, so the initial information exchanges can take place with relative evenness. After that, there can be a good long while where it doesn't matter so much who's available to participate...in fact, there's no reason for the game not to go all weekend, although most of the active participation will probably fade more quickly than that.
Participated in a few tournaments as well. Made the finals in Martian Chess (which I'd won last year), and third in Martian Hold 'Em (despite spending pretty much the entire tournament short-stacked, I was able to wait out a whole bunch of aggressive players by playing pretty tightly). I only played one game in the floating Volcano tournament, which I magically lost to
mnemex (I was winning, neither of us is sure what happened.), so I actually did worse in the tournament than Potato. Oh, well. And I played in my first Icehouse tournament. No wins, and I was bottom in most of my games, but I feel like I made a respectable showing for a game I didn't really know. And now I'm kind of excited to play the game more and get better at it, because it's fun.Plus a whole bunch of other random games, and I earned myself a new flower (good, I hadn't had a red one yet). I got drafted into demoing a few times. One was for a family who were a lot of fun...I took them through a few games in their sticker-hunt before I had to drop to get some food and make it down to the Exhibitor's Hall before I spent the whole afternoon in the Lab. They were really nice, and gave me a Rubber Rubberband Man in thanks. He's the cutest thing ever...can't help but smile looking at him hanging out of a pocket in my vest. I may post a picture somewhere later.
Scores for the convention included the Puerto Rico Expansion for $1 (Sunday Special), possibly the best 2E D&D supplement ever (Complete Bard's) for $2 (same Sunday Special), and Queen's Necklace for $8 (Funagain Games brought a stack of them). We gave Queen's Necklace a try on the flight home, and it turns out to be a solid game. Definitely money well-spent.
I think I probably underate a bit, but not too severely. Two bowls of kake soba (passing through the Detroit airport in each direction), five or so peanut butter sandwiches (yay Krema), a couple of peanut butter and chocolate milkshakes (ditto), three pints of massaman gai with a massive amount of white rice, and maybe a couple of little things in 4 1/2 days. Not as much variety as might have been ideal, but it left lots of time for playing games and was generally healthy and tasty.
Finally, lots of hugs and cuddling this year. While not a direct determinant for how I feel about a convention afterward, it certainly helps. And I got to reconnect with
mistacat, with whom I'd been almost completely out of touch for quite a while, which was definitely a perk.
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Oh, the things I miss. Bah and Damnation, I *NEED* to get back to Origins. Before my brain crawls out my ear and I shrivel up and DIE.
Er, because that's very likely. Or something.
Hmm, plots. Bah. Glad you had fun though!
~Sor