by John Kanost
PiranhaPig Con 2019!
PEGheads, a week is a unit of time consisting of 7 days. Expressed in other units of time, one week is equal to 168 hours, or 10,080 minutes, or 604,800 seconds! There are 52 weeks in a year, and typically each month includes four full weeks. The term "week" is sometimes used to refer to other temporal units comprising fewer than 7 days, such as the "work week" or the "school week" which usually consist of 5 days each. The English word "week" derives from the Old English wice, ultimately from the common Germanic root "wik" meaning "turn, move, or change". The concept of a week can be dated back to 6th-century BC Judaism.
The Weeks is also the name of an indie rock band from Florence, Mississippi. The Weeks began in 2006, formed by members Cain and Cyle Barnes, Chaz Lindsay, Damien Bone and Samuel Williams, all still teenagers between the ages of 14 and 16 at the time. Their debut album, Comeback Cadillac was released in 2008 on the Esperanza Plantation label and blended southern rock and alternative influences. It was followed in 2009 by an EP titled Rumspringa. The band's most recent studio album, Easy, was released in 2017. The Weeks' current lineup includes Cyle Barnes on lead vocals, Samuel Williams on guitar and supporting vocals, Cain Barnes on drums and Damien Bone on bass.
You might be wondering what the Gregorian calendar or an indie rock band has to do with an awesome weekend of gaming... unless of course you're a fellow Peghead, in which case you might have already figured out what's going on! I'm not hosting a contest, but this trivia has something to do with my most recent weekend away down in Massanutten, Virginia, hanging out with Christina and Robb Rouse, Patrick Kelly, and a whole mess of fellow Blue Peg, Pink Peg listeners and playing games for roughly 60 hours straight! Read on if you're curious...
15 February
Friday morning was a flurry of activity as my wife Amy and I got ready to leave for the 4-hour drive to Virginia. This was going to be the first time we'd ever left our boys Jonathan and Matthew, now ages 18 and 14, home alone for multiple days and nights. We had some shopping to take care of to make sure they had everything they'd need in our absence. That all got taken care of, and the car got loaded up and we were on the road by 11:30. The trip down to the Harrisonburg, Virginia area was thankfully uneventful in our direction, although I saw posts from several of our fellow travelers who got stuck in traffic coming north from southern points.
We arrived at about 10 past 4:00 and pulled up to the house to find the welcoming committee of [user=lfaren]Lon[/user] and Joanna waiting to greet us on the porch. Joanna immediately kicked into high gear with a fast=paced walking tour of the house. The name of the lodge house we were staying at was Payton Peak, and it was immense. Amy and I had secured the king size bed in the lodge's master suite at the far end of the first floor from the dining area where most of the gaming would take place. The lodge was wide and open, with only a few doors at strategic locations. Behind our room was a smaller room with two bunks in it, which we later found out were occupied by [user=Bubbazippy]Jim Sheridan[/user] and Isaac Childres. I don't think we disturbed them too much, since I'm pretty certain we went to bed before them every night.
Our tour included the upstairs of the house where the gaming library was to be located. There were two walls full of shelves, and the planning committee had already been through and relegated all the mass market titles that came with the place to a corner and labelled the rest of the shelves with each attendee's name so they could store the games they'd brought for the communal library. I'd brought two big duffel bags full of games as well as several smaller box titles in my backpack; we took up two shelf sections with everything we'd brought.
There were already two tables of gaming going by the time we got our luggage in, our food put away and our games stashed in the library. A steady stream of fellow Pegheads flowed in as we watched a game wrap up, and then we grabbed a table to get in our first play of the con.
Game: Coimbra
I'd already introduced Amy to one of the players in this game, "[user=The Professor]The Excellent Mr. Joe Pilkus[/user]"! I'd promised to teach him Coimbra, and he wasted no time taking me up on it. Joe also introduced us to Steven Sites for the first time in person (we already felt acquainted having spent many hours in conversation already before the con in the Blue Peg, Pink Peg Slack chat channel). Steven had played Coimbra before; in fact more times than I had, so a lot of credit for the teach is shared with Steven as he assisted and helped me remember some things and corrected my understanding of the rules on a few points.
This was an unusually long play of Coimbra. I clocked it at 3 hours, 7 minutes by the time we finished, and I'm not sure why other than there were a lot of distractions throughout the game with new people arriving and Joe being the social creature he is. We had some AP, I'm sure, but it didn't seem like more than typical. Also two essentially new players (this was Amy's first full game) may have slowed us down a bit too. Doesn't matter; I think we all had fun. Experience won out in the end, though; Steven took the game easily with 148 points. I came in second at 129, while Amy barely scraped by Joe for third place, 104 to 103.
Game: Wingspan
My next game was Wingspan, which ultimately wound up being the most-played game of the con. There were, I believe, 4 copies of it floating around throughout and there was rarely a time when it wasn't on a table being played. Wingspan was one of the games I saw being played when Amy and I were bringing in our luggage. Joe taught the game for us, and an excellent job he did too. We had a full 5-player game, including me, [user=Stryder2k]Derek Kuper[/user], [user=MAJBrown22]Jason Brown[/user], Mike Knickerbocker, and [user=newBoardorder]Steven[/user]. None of us had played before except for Jason.
I'm a Stonemaier Champion, but I'll be honest, I only signed up for it so I could preorder the Scythe Encounters expansion! Since then I've not really made use of the abilities that being a Champion affords, and wasn't really interested when Wingspan was announced. I thought the theme was interesting and certainly unique, but Amy wasn't at all interested when I mentioned the game to her, and I knew my boys would not very likely be into a game about birds. It's one thing when the hype is high before a game releases, but when it continues to build and everyone is talking about the game weeks after they've gotten it in their hands, I pay attention.
So this was really the only game on my must-try list for PPCon. Wingspan is an engine-building game of four rounds where players collect and play bird cards to their boards in an effort to create the best collection of feathery denizens. Each player has an identical player board with three rows representing forest, field, and water habitats for their birds. Each habitat has several slots going across their board as locations where birds may be played as long as they're able to live in the matching habitat. To play bird cards, the right food (tokens) must be collected and spent, and in order to increase the population of birds in each habitat, eggs must be laid and spent in order to unlock additional slots for birds as they are played from left to right.
Playing a bird is a basic action in the game which is taken by placing one of your allotted action cubes at the top of your board. Each habitat is associated with its own additional action--actions that are necessary to collect food (forest), lay eggs (field) and draw more cards (water). The engine-building aspect of the game becomes apparent as you add more and more birds to each habitat. When taking one of these actions, the marker is always placed in the right most empty spot of the row for the initial action; the cube then moves to the left and reactivates the birds living in those slots. Many birds come with an repeatable effect that takes place every time you take the action associated with its habitat--lots of potential for combos here! There are also birds with effects that can trigger once per round when an opponent takes a specific action, or powerful comes-into-play effects that are once and done.
Points are scored in a variety of ways; all birds have a point value and the higher-scoring birds in general are more difficult to play. Many of the birds also can collect resources or additional bird cards underneath them throughout the game to score bonus points. Birds of prey, for example, have a hunt ability and can "eat" birds with a smaller wingspan than their own. Other birds hoard food tokens that score points at the end. Some birds have end-game bonuses for collecting eggs on certain types of nests (one of the many identifying traits on these bird cards). Also each of the four rounds will have an end-of-round condition that gets checked, with playing scoring various amounts of points based on how well they met said conditions.
The end of round bonuses are marked using the action cubes, and so each of the rounds you'll have less actions you can take. So you'll definitely need to build up sets of powerful combos with your bird cards in order to do more work with fewer actions. This is one of the most interesting mechanical aspects of the game, and something I could have done a lot better at. By the middle of the game I was definitely jealous of the repeatable actions that several of my opponents had put together on their boards. Jason and Steven were doing the most hunting this game if I'm recalling correctly, while Mike had a bunch of different repeatable food-gathering abilities, including one that benefited everybody at the table. He was handing out grubs like they were candy!
I wound up specializing in egg production, and since I had one bonus ability that looked for eggs on a certain type of nest, I took those birds and played them whenever I could. It wasn't enough to catch up with Steven's huge stack of hunted bird cards, but it was sufficient to earn me a 3rd place finish. Steven won the game at 88 points, with Derek only two points behind at 86. I came in at 80, also just two points of Jason's 78 final score. Mike came in fifth at 64 points; apparently he was a little too free-handed with his bird food.
It was "only" 11:00 PM when we finished up Wingspan; Amy had already retired for the night and while I was tempted to stay up for another game, I had to get up early the next day to cook breakfast, so I called it a night after the second game.
16 February
The next morning I was up by 6:30 AM--too excited to sleep in--and emerged from the master suite to find The Excellent Mr. Joe Pilkus already up and working on his breakfast casseroles. My breakfast offering, two Bacon Explosions, had been prepared and pre-cooked at home, and so only had to go in the oven for an hour or so to finish cooking. After getting the ovens going and my explosions heating up, I snuck back to the suite to take a shower. By the time I finished Amy was up and we were able to get in our first game of the day.
Game: Legendary: A Marvel Deck-Building Game
We found [user=Furiousgiorge]Craig[/user] and Meg Tollin, a.k.a. "the Craighan", sitting in the side dining room getting set up to play Marvel Legendary, and they invited us to join them. We were both new to this game, although I was familiar with it.
Legendary is a cooperative deck-building system that has a number of different iterations; this is, I believe, the original. They had a bunch of expansions for it since it's one of their favorites. The game mechanics are similar to many other deck-building games, but is also a lot like games like Sentinels of the Multiverse or Aeon's End, where the players are working together to defeat some Big Bad. In our case, it was Galactus.
In Marvel Legendary, you start with a deck of 12 cards (not 10 like many other deck builders) and have a normal hand size of 6. Your starter deck includes SHIELD agents and SHIELD troopers, with the agents providing the basic resource to buy hero cards and the troopers combat power to defeat enemies. Legendary has multiple decks for different purposes and two "buy rows", one for Heroes and one for Villains. Heroes remain in their row until they are acquired or removed by a game effect, but Villains cycle through their row, each slot representing a section of the city. When they are bumped out of the last space, they are "escaping" and most have some detrimental game effect when that happens, so you want to take them out with combat before that happens. Some villains will "charge" when they enter the Villain row and push multiple cards off the other end. Every so often, instead of a Villain card this deck will produce a Scheme that triggers some effect by the Big Bad.
The game is on a timer; there is a "KO'd" section of the board where Heroes that have been knocked out by villain effects are collected. In our game we had until this area had 24 cards in it to win, so I'm guessing it's 6 cards per player? Anyway, the game kicked our butts. We never managed to deal a single point of damage to Galactus. Early in the game, a second mini-boss came out "Apocalyptic Magneto" whom we had to take out before we could hit Galactus, and we never managed to touch him either. We barely managed an occasional Villain from the city row, in fact; I think I only managed to scrape together enough combat to take out a Villain card once or twice the entire game, and no one else did much better. It was brutal.
Still, they say that's the mark of a good cooperative game, and Amy even said that she could see the game being fun--it just wasn't much fun this time!
Game: Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul-Kar
At long last, I finally got a chance to try the new Fireball Island! I remember last year when Restoration Games' J.R. Honeycutt was "on tour" with the prototype, the night he stopped in at The Secret Cabal's game night at Beermongers in York was the busiest I've ever seen the event. People drove in from miles around to check it out--I think there was at least one family that came all the way from Michigan! As such, I ogled the game but didn't press for an opportunity to play it; in part because I knew at least 3 or 4 different friends locally who were Kickstarter backers. Still, I surprisingly haven't seen this come out at any local gaming events since it fulfilled. My first opportunity to try it came at PiranhaPig Con.
This was [user=ThePostalPlayer]Gregory Jones[/user]' copy, with a freshly-added real Lucky Penny token I'd gotten for him at PAX Unplugged last year. He set the game up with all the expansions, including the Wreck of the Crimson Cutlass and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Bees! Amy joined me for this play as well, along with Gregory, [user=Bangarang138]Jill Greiner[/user], and [user=TimVirnig]Tim Virnig[/user].
I played the "Beach Bum" character (had to, Gregory's painted mini was wearing yellow shorts) while Amy took "The Lost Adventurer" character with his red flair. We all hopped off the "Hello-Copter" onto the Island and the action commenced!
I never played the original Fireball Island; never owned it nor knew anyone who did. I do vaguely remember the TV commercials for it, but my nostalgia factor isn't all that high for this game. Still, it's a fun romp. At its heart it is still essentially a roll and move game, even though Rob Daviau replaced dice with cards--you still only have two options to choose from for your move each turn. Those movement cards do each also give you the option to do additional actions, like manipulate the trees, turn the Vul-Kar idol, or launch various projectiles including the tiger, marbles of various sizes and colors, and even a boulder! Anytime you knock down another player's piece, you get to relieve them of one of their treasures.
The treasures are picked up simply by roaming the island and passing by the appropriate spaces on the board. Points are scored at the end of the game by collecting sets of the three treasure tokens, cursed gems from the Cutlass, golden honey pots (which cause bee stings when you pick them up), a golden idol, and of course the infamous Heart of Vul-Kar. You are playing as tourists, so the game also includes the possibility of bonus points by taking snapshots around the Island and aboard the Cutlass, but these points are only scored if you make it back to the Hello-Copter when the game ends.
The endgame is triggered whenever one of the available snapshot types is depleted, or when the island becomes too unstable to remain and the "Rift" at one end fills up to capacity with lava marbles. In either case, the Hello-Copter returns and everyone has a limited amount of time to get on board before it takes off and strands them.
I had a good time, until I decided to go for the Heart of Vul-Kar. Everything was going smoothly--I had a complete set of snapshots and a bonus card that would have given me extra points, provided I was able to get to the Hello-Copter and score them. I figured I might as well go for the Heart, but there were two problems: first, to get to the Heart, one must traverse one of the unstable rope bridges that leads to Vul-Kar's peak on the more dangerous side of the island. second, my wife was out to get me!
She kept drawing bee cards! And playing them! I was on the rope bridge (which is a required stopping point as an unstable location) when she played them the first time. The bridge toppled and I went down, down down the river, winding up near the bottom of the island, on my back and stung by bees. Getting stung by bees is bad, you see, because it makes you slow--the next movement card you play will be halved. So on my next turn, I got up, and made it a couple spaces down the trail before the bees attacked again. This time, they also woke up about half of the snakes that live on that side of the island too...
...so I was now stung by bees and snake-bit. Snake bites are about as bad as bees on Fireball Island; they make you delirious and unable to control your movements, so your next turn you have to draw the top card of the deck and play it for your move. Before my next turn, Jill completed her set of snapshots and summoned the Hello-Copter. I did my best to make my way there, but then the bees were launched a third time, and while they missed me, the snakes did not. When I drew my next wild card off the deck, I could see there was no way I would make it to the launch pad before the Hello-Copter took off, so I just ran the other way to try to pick up some other treasure instead.
Jill didn't make it off the island either, though! Amy played a card that stopped her movement right on the launch pad, and so the copter took off with just Tim on board. Tim won with 38 points, but Jill was a close second at 34, so had she made it on board her additional snapshot points would have made for a decisive win. Amy came in third at 19 points, but Gregory and I were left wallowing in our bee-stung, snake-bitten misery in the jungle with 7 points for me and 3 for Gregory!
Game: Unearth
We found our next game upstairs; Amy wanted to play something with a little more depth but didn't want to learn a new game so we visited the library and found just what she was looking for. We own Unearth and it's become a go-to on game nights at home when we want something of this weight. I got the game set up and ready to go and then grabbed the box top and went downstairs to see if I could drum up some players.
I returned with [user=spatten]Scott Patten[/user] and Jim Sheridan. Neither of them had played before, so I got to exercise my teaching skills once again. It had been a while since I'd had to teach this on so it was a little rough and I made a few mistakes during the game--sorry Jim! It didn't hinder our enjoyment too much.
One thing that often happens to me with this game is that I lose. Dice are rarely kind to me, so I thought this time I would try to work that to my advantage and go for a purely stone-driven strategy. Didn't work. First I was going for the wonder that requires four yellow stones and rewards additional points for having them; Amy cut me off and beat me to that one. Then I though I'd go for a Greater Wonder, but the yellow stones completely dried up and I had to go a different direction. Meanwhile, I wasn't getting any ruin cards, and there were NONE of the color (light purple) that I started with as my hidden card. They finally started showing up toward the end, but I only managed to get one more of them.
So I lost, coming in last place at 10 points, but Jim and Amy both excelled and were tied with 23 points at the end. Jim was declared the winner once we looked up the tiebreaker and saw that he had the higher claim value among the ruins he'd collected. Scott was third place with 19 points.
Game: Potion Explosion
We had Potion Explosion waiting in the wings, but Jim and Scott were looking for other games so we needed to find more players again. We didn't have to look far; [user=Emoney]Eric Huffman[/user] and his partner Mary Kay were close at hand, playing two-player games. We invited them to join us and they were more than happy to. Apparently Mary Kay had had her eye on a copy of Potion Explosion at their friendly local game store for months but hadn't gotten a chance to play it yet. I think we helped her make up her mind to finally buy the game.
Amy and I took a break from gaming for a while to run into town and get her some lunch (I was content snacking on the various goodies people had supplied to the community snacks table, but being gluten-free and lactose intolerant made it more difficult for Amy to find something she could eat). When we got back, we were luckily able to slide into a game that wasn't full yet, thanks to Joe who'd mentioned to Jim that I was interested in the game he was preparing to teach... Bruges!
Game: Bruges
I'd been hoping to get this played again after finally being introduced to the game with Joe and Dave last year at PAXU. Neither Joe nor Dave was involved with this play; we played on Jim Sheridan's copy which included the fifth player expansion. Our players were myself, Amy, Jim, [user=jstearns78]Jennifer Stearns[/user] and Scott Patten. Aside from Jim, I was the only player who already knew the game.
If I learned anything from this play, it's that I may need to pay more attention to building my canals! This game I only built one length of canal at all, and that one wound up getting tossed to put out a fire. I went all-in on building houses and setting up people in them, but my abilities didn't synergize all that well; I did pull in a few bonus points at the end for scholars but that was a very last-minute thing and it could have been better. I probably should have gotten the hint that what I was doing wasn't going to pay off.
I did enjoy the first-come first-serve bonuses and the boat actions that the expansion provided, but once again I didn't really utilize them all that efficiently. I'm definitely still in the exploratory phase of my relationship with this game and need more plays, MORE PLAYS, to feel like I really know what I'm doing. Jim's experience with the game definitely gave him an advantage--he didn't seem to be doing so well early on but he had a plan and executed it well and surged ahead to win at the end. He had 61 points. Scott came in second at 49 with me nipping at his heels with a 48-point score. Jennifer and Amy ended with 40 and 33 points. Amy didn't like losing, but she did seem to like the game, so I'm definitely still interested in owning Bruges whenever it finally gets reprinted.
Game: Noria
After Bruges (which went pretty long for Bruges, but we did have 3 new players) we had a break of an hour or so for dinner. After dinner, Amy got into a multiplayer card game with Christina, Jill, and a few others, while I got together with Jennifer Stearns and [user=SimonStern]Pete Miller[/user] for our anticipated game of Noria--my first chance to play the game "for reals" with other players rather than by myself.
It had been a while since I taught myself and a while too since Pete and Jennifer had played, so we had to pore over the rulebook a bit during set up and reference it several times throughout the game when we came across questions. Pete was first player, and thus had the responsibility for pulling the round tracker chits off the board every round. He took the first spot on the first influence track (Onyx) as his freebie, and Jennifer took the same on the second track (Mycelium/Energy). I decided to join Jennifer on the second track instead of Pete, but I later jumped on board the Onyx track as well.
There was quite a bit of back and forth manipulating of the council seats for those two tracks early in the game, and the point multipliers were decided pretty quickly as a result. Later in the game, both Pete and Jennifer got onto the third influence track (basic commodities--fans, gyros and wings) while I settled on the fourth one for advanced commodities (lanterns and pistons). Thanks to some timely actions, I got the points multiplier on the fourth track set to 12 with theirs reduced to 6.
I spent most of my efforts in the early game on the Explore action, and put a lot of effort investing in ships to gain more resources. Once that was headed in the right direction and I had steady supplies of resources coming in, I started building factories and eventually got two of every commodity type into production. All of my basic commodities went to the black market to gain knowledge, both for influencing the councils and manipulating my wheels when needed. The advanced ones were spent climbing that track--I didn't have time to get to the top, but I did get to level 6 on that one.
In the end, my strategy paid off, and I won the game with 102 points. Pete came in second at 82 and Jennifer in third with 66.
Game: Terraforming Mars
When we sat down to play Noria, we'd already discussed and decided that we were going to play Terraforming Mars next. I figured I could handle staying up late to play games at least one night of the con, so tonight was going to be that night. Amy had already gone to bed by the time we finished Noria, but I wasn't about to miss out on some Terraforming Mars action! We also snagged Jim, who was wandering about looking for another game as we were getting set up to play.
We played with everything, so it was Jim's first time trying out the Colonies expansion. We threw in the works... Hellas map, Venus Next, Prelude as well. I chose an old favorite, Inventrix, as my corporation of choice. Jennifer also took an original, Helion, while Jim selected Manutech to represent his Martian interests and Pete went with Cheung Shing Mars. Hmmm... that sounds familiar... because it's the same corporation my son smoked us with the last time I played this, the previous Monday.
This game actually went very similarly to that one in one respect: Pete's strategy this game was almost identical to Jonathan's. There were some differences, but he too went all in on Colonies and found that "the money's in space!" I took a different tack this time and became "the Venus guy". Pete messed me over big time early on when he stole titanium production from me, though--it set me back at least two generations and forced me to veer away from the heavy space card strategy I was leaning towards based on my opening hand and first generation research.
Pete was the leader the entire game, although Jennifer did her best to keep pace with him on the TR track, even passing him a time or two. But it was never long before Pete soared into the lead again using his trade fleet, and he finally outpaced us all. When the game was over and Mars was ready to live on, Pete's score was 20 points ahead of Jim's 3rd place score of 62. Jennifer and I were pretty close to Jim in terms of points, with me at 66 and her at 60, but Pete's commanding lead at 82 points earned Cheung Shing Mars the most glory.
17 February
Game: Arboretum
Our first game of day three was a "quick" game of Arboretum while we waited for breakfast fixings to be ready. We spotted Pete and Eric Stevenson getting ready to play, and I asked if Amy and I could join them. It was Eric's copy of the game, and he was teaching it to Pete who'd never played it before as far as I know.
Eric earned the #goodteacher award for this play; he not only came in last place but his score was exactly half of my 3rd place score of 12 points. Pete won 2 points higher than I at 14 and my wife came in second at 13. Very close game other than Eric. My forest was a hot mess for most of the game; I started with a hand full of 7s and 8s and tried to keep most of them for the entire game. I was banking on blue spruces being my best scoring path (I had the 8) but the 1 never turned up and at the end it proved to be Pete who was holding it.
Game: Glory to Rome
[user=tromidy]Rody[/user] was sitting at the other end of our table the entire time we were playing Arboretum and afterwards while we were wolfing down breakfast with a game of Glory to Rome set up and ready to start but no players. I wanted to play, and Amy wanted to play, so I went on another player hunt and recruited Lon to join in. Lon had never played it before.
This was a true copy (not a print and play) of the Black Box edition, so that was pretty nifty to be playing with the real deal once again. Once she got the hang of the game again, Amy was a real threat! She got the Forum in play fairly early and was definitely gunning for the win by getting one of each client in play. She comboed it with the Bar, which allowed her to get an extra client randomly from the deck every time she performed a patron action. At one point, she had every client she needed except a Merchant, but then Lon completed a Prison and swapped it with Amy's Forum.
I started out laying foundations for a couple Stone buildings, but finished the Scriptorium first and was then able to use Marble from my stockpile to complete a couple more buildings ahead of schedule. For quite a while, I was using my Colosseum to thwart Amy's bid by taking away her Clients, and once Lon ended that by taking away her Forum, I realized I had a pretty solid shot at winning just on Influence alone, so I started looking for opportunities to Vault my stockpile materials and build any decent buildings that came my way. Vaulting stuff didn't go so well since we were nearing the end of the game and it soon became apparent that there were little to no Merchant cards left in the deck.
The game ended when Lon drew the last two cards of the deck on his turn. When we totaled up our scores, I'd won with 27 total influence (5 or 6 of which I got thanks to having the most materials of a type in my vault). Amy's 24 points put her in second place, with Lon and Rody tied for third at 18 each.
Game: Teotihuacan: City of Gods
Next up was Teotihuacan, which I got to teach to full table! Lon remained for this one, while Amy sat out. I wasn't sure she would like this game, but we agreed to try it together at home some time. Instead, Lon and I were joined by [user=piranhapig]Christina[/user] and Jill. This was my first time setting up the game and playing with the variable set up, and (I often seem to say this with such things) I doubt I'll go back to the "vanilla" way.
We rolled the dice to determine player order and Christina was randomly picked to go first, then Jill, me, and finally Lon, who got the job of keeping the Eclipse tracker moving from round to round (and a fine job he did of it too).
I've found that I'm drawn to building the pyramid in this game. Doesn't seem to matter where I start or what my opening positions, resources, etc. are; I gravitate towards a building game. The worship spaces we had on the palace helped with that this game, at least at the start. As the third player in order, I had plenty of cocoa at the start so I went to down on one of these spaces that let me convert cocoa into wood and stone. We also had the technology for the +1 worker & discount material for Action 8, so I invested in that early and raked in most of my points over the course of the game by building tiles.
Christina seemed to be drawn to the regular worship spaces and collecting masks. She'd put together a set of three by the first Eclipse and had five or six of them scoring by game end. Jill saw the points she was getting from masks and started grabbing a few of her own, but didn't collect quite as many as Christina. No one really pushed the Avenue of the Dead this game; everyone dabbled in it a bit but no one really built a lot of the white buildings. As a result the point multiplier stayed fairly high for most of the game, and those of us who ascended our workers more often benefited from this. I was in last place on this track along with Jill for most of the game, while Lon and Christina did a bit more on it.
The three Temples weren't given much more than cursory attention this game either. Jill was the only player to make it high enough to score an end game bonus (she collected the flat 15-point one for climbing the green temple, but didn't make it to the very top for the extra bonus points). It was enough to tie her for the win, though! When all the final points were tallied up, Jill and I both had 121 points; I won the tiebreaker for having more leftover cocoa. Lon and Christina scored 117 and 100 points.
Game: The Hanging Gardens
Next up was The Hanging Gardens, owned and taught by Joanna! It only plays four, though, so Joanna did not play. Playing were myself, Amy, Jenn Irwin, and Christina.
The Hanging Gardens is an old game from 2008 that Joanna recently acquired after playing it and liking it on one of the online board gaming sites. (Yucata, maybe?) It plays up to four and is a tile-laying, set collection game. The main game board is very simple; spaces for the card and tile decks, four spaces for the currently available cards, and spaces for two face-up tiles each which may be collected when scoring cards. The game also has a first player marker that passes around the table.
Each round, the players in order select and play as a "tile" one of the available cards from the boards. If you've played Honshu or Hokkaido, these cards are similar, each divided in to a grid of six squares. Some of the square are "empty land" while other contain garden terrain features of several types. Everyone starts with a 6x6 land-only card in front of them to build off of. The rules for laying a card are thus: no garden features may touch the table... that's pretty much it. Your goal is to lay these cards in such a way that they form contiguous spaces of the same type of garden feature. These are scoreable once they are at least 3 and up to 5 blocks together. Each player also has five temples; these are played in one of the squares of your garden grid when you want to score it.
Scoring a 3- or a 4-section garden will allow you to take one of the cardboard tiles available in those spaces of the main board. Scoring a 5-section or larger garden will not only allow you to take one of those tiles but also a second bonus tile randomly from one of the face down stacks. The cardboard tiles score points at the end of the game based on various sets that you've collected over the course of the game.
It's really simple and easy to learn, but fun. I enjoyed it, and I'd play it again, though I wouldn't say I was blown away by it. It does show its age, to be sure, both in terms of mechanics and production. However my wife seemed to like it a lot, so I may wind up picking up a copy--I'm told a reprint is potentially coming later this year.
Christina won, of course. Tile-laying is her jam.
Game: Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition
Next we "rolled" right into a game of Railroad Ink, har har! Once again Joanna taught (her game) but did not play. Railroad Ink plays more folks, so Steven and [user=rookenoble]Robb[/user] were able to join us as well for a six-player game.
This train-themed roll and write consists of four custom dice and dry-erase player boards with a 7x7 grid. Over the course of (I think) 7 rounds, the dice will be rolled and everyone will decide how to allocate them to their boards. The dice sides display a variety of paths of both railroad tracks, streets, and junctions where the two meet or cross paths. Your player board also has a selection of special connections--six to be precise--and you may use no more than three of these over the course of the game (never using more than one during any given round).
Your goal is to create paths of roads and rails on your board that connect as many of the exits on the outer edges with as few errors (rails and roads that lead nowhere) as possible. There are a number of scoring opportunities that get checked at the end, and whoever did the best wins.
Amy and I were miserable at this game. For my part I had no clue what I was doing; I thought I was doing pretty well but I had quite a lot of errors at the end (in part because I didn't fully grasp what an 'error' was). Amy in the meantime hated the drawing aspect of the game; she just could not draw the various paths in a recognizable way and several time asked me to draw her paths in for her. She and I came in last and second to last with 32 and 36 points; everyone else scored in the forties. The winner was Robb, who scored 49 points and tied with Jenn, but won the tiebreaker.
Game: Fiasco
The last game of the evening was a session of Fiasco, facilitated Tim Virnig and enjoyed by myself, Christina, Joanna and Jenn. Amy watched "the show" and offered some ideas even though she wasn't playing. We played the "Manna Hotel" scenario; this was my third time playing Fiasco. Christina was also a Fiasco veteran, but it was the first time for both Joanna and Jenn.
Joanna and I established our relationship as identical twin siblings, Kevin and Kenneth Johns. I was Kenneth and was involved somehow in the medical profession--it later emerged that I was a medical examiner. "Kev" was a recenty-released convict who'd spent 3 years "in the clink" with his other neighbor, Jenn, who was simply "Gladys", an 80-year old lady. Between Gladys and I sat Christina, playing the role of "Cornelia Burbank", a younger, but still well-aged woman who attended church with her neighbor Gladys. "Corny" and my relationship involved my medical profession somehow.
As our story evolved, it turned out that Kevin and Gladys had gone to prison for the theft of some thousands of dollars from a foundation formerly operated by Cornelia's husband, who had died under mysterious circumstances some years prior but whose death I had ruled accidental thanks to some prodding (i.e. blackmail) by his wife. Corny had no knowledge of my brother Kevin, and I did my best to keep it that way, but unluckily for all of I had unknowingly put my brother up in the Manna Hotel room 17, the very same room where Corny and her deary departed hubby used to come spend time together "on the weeks". One thing led to another and my blackmailer and my brother met up, causing chaos to ensue. Cornelia learned about her "friend" Gladys' involvement both in the death of her husband but also in the theft of his foundation money.
Kevin and I wound up at Cornelia's house together; each character trying to find out the truth--Kevin wanted to know where the money was hidden and Corny wanted to know why Gladys had "all her passwords" (fluffy-nu77er). Kevin wound up clobbering Cornelia and knocking her out, and we took her to Gladys' house for first aid. They started plying her with alcohol (a great idea) to get her to tell where the money was hidden, and when it finally came out that it was hidden in the mattress at room 17, the brothers Johns took off. Back in the the house, Cornelia pulled a pistol out on her former friend, and it went off.
Outside, unable to get the car to start (Gladys had apparently sabotaged it) the brothers argued about what to do--Kenneth wanted to go to the police; Kevin was dead set against it. Hearing the gun go off inside, Kevin found a working scooter and took off, leaving Kenneth in the dust. Kevin did go to the police station, but posing as his brother Dr. Johns, tried to give a false lead to Gladys' house so he could get to the hotel and retrieve the money. Unfortunately, he was recognized by a former high school classmate and had to high-tail it out of there!
The information about something going on at Gladys' house did lead the police there, though, and there they found Kenneth Johns, who'd gone back in to see what was going on. Cornelia's shot had missed, and she'd dropped the gun. Kenneth picked it up just before the police arrived, and and overzealous rookie shot him (non-fatally). But, having just seen someone matching his description fleeing the police station, he was arrested as Kevin and wound up taking his place back in the clink.
As our story wrapped up, we found out that Gladys had been having an affair with Cornelia's husband back in the day, and had sworn revenge against her friend for pushing him down the stairs. She eventually carried it out, pushing Corny down the same stairs after whispering "this is for Frank" in her hear. Corny wound up alone and wheelchair-bound, living out the rest of her years in misery. Nothing really changed for Gladys after that; she went back to her normal life. Kenneth remained in prison in his brother's place, while Kevin managed to keep a low profile and stay out of trouble, getting a job as a maintenance guy at the Manna Hotel. And none of our character ever found out what really happened to the money, but in the last scene we saw Sally, the former Manna Hotel manager, on a tropical beach somewhere, sipping a drink with a tiny plastic umbrella in it...
Saturday evening all the gaming stopped for a brief ceremony of sorts to award the winners of various achievements that we'd been tracking over the course of the weekend (thanks to the IT efforts of Lon). I'm not going to try to remember what all these were in detail, but they were all fun and well-deserved. And I bet you can guess who got the prize for winning the most games...
18 February
Monday morning came too soon. I'd had an offer from Pete to stay up and play Scythe on Sunday night, but buy the time we'd finished Fiasco he was deep into a game of Nemesis and I knew it'd be too late with us having to get up early the next day for checkout and the drive home. Everyone was up by the crack of 9:00 AM to pack up, load up, and get the lodge cleaned up for our 11:00 AM checkout.
Game: Strike
A few of us did get one last session of gaming in, however! Most of the games had already been packed up and loaded in cars, but [user=wonko101010]Dave Turner[/user] had held back his copy of Strike! We got a five-player session going and played about three games with Amy and me, Dave, [user=leeloo1612]Cheryl[/user], and Zach. Cheryl won the first two games back to back, but he final game was won (I think) by Zach.
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And that's PiranhaPig Con 2019 in the books! What a great time! If you weren't counting, I got to play 16 different games over the course of the weekend. Five of those games were titles I'd never played before, and almost every game I played was with people I'd never played games before. All new friends, and I absolutely plan to try to attend again next year--so I can have some fun, while I play those games!