Just sharing a few TrashFest ’09 nuggets with you chatty chipmunks. I managed to make all four days of the Game Days/TrashFest con in Maryland this year, with the last day being spent (as is now a tradition) with my kids.
Game Breakdown
I typically play a combination of crossover games, high-interaction Euros, and heady Trash, but – as my Trashfest ’09 ranking can attest (#3 in trash points, baby!) – I spent more time on the Trashies this year. Could be that the swine flu was in full effect, or that 25 years of syphilis is finally catching up with me.
Day 1: Tempus, The Bucket King, Cash ‘N Guns, Shadow Hunters, Battlestar Galactica, Age of Steam: Vermont, Pandemic, Ra, Can’t Stop, Micro Mutants, Mordred
Day 2: Small World (x2), For Sale, Thunder Road, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Age of Steam prototype map, Shadow Hunters, Terra, Descent, The Bucket King, We Didn’t Playtest This At All
Day 3: Small World, Blood Royale, The Club, Star Wars: Epic Duels, The Bucket King, Doom, superhero card game (prototype)
Day 4 (gaming with the kids): Pathfinder, Fast Flowing Forest Fellers, Tsuro, Gem Dealer, Break the Safe, Dungeon Dice, Hey - That’s My Fish! (Deluxe), Star Wars: Epic Duels, Vallco Professional Drag Racing Game
Highlights
The game convention being only five minutes from my house! Ha!
Mike B (malloc) trying to convince everyone that I was winning in Small World, which was certainly the case – and everyone not listening.
Bien, Dan, and I suffering a hilariously silly defeat in Doom at the hands of Lord Robotron (Nick). As one of the few players owning the game in my gaming circle(s), I’d never played as a marine before – so the gang hooked me up. We played a timed map from the original release (the dying scientists), and at one point we were so impressively humiliated by the game’s disregard for playtesting and balance that we laughed ourselves to tears. Tips: Do not expect to win as a marine, and be prepared to have a masochis-tastic good time.
In the Descent game, as GM, my rolling an odds-defying number of power surges to respawn the final “undying” boss repeatedly. Good times.
Blowing up the world in Terra, as usual. We will never win this game, which is as accurate depiction of reality as anything else in gaming history.
Winning two consecutive games of Playtest just because May is my birthday month. Being nearly 40 has finally paid off, it seems. (Also, don’t tell Bien, but I just ordered the sequel: We Didn’t Playtest This Either.)
Meeting the AT crowd from afar, including Steve Avery, Dogmatix, Chris T., and others.
Lowlights
The Club (played with IguanaDitty, Chris T., and Heather): How could a game that includes threesomes, AIDS, religion, and bisexuality go wrong? In every way, it turns out. See my comments below.
Game Comments
The Club
In The Club (aka the worst game that I’ve played in recent memory), players slide tiles on a grid to arrange dancers in such a way that they hook up and take their action elsewhere. So what’s wrong with this game? Here we go…
For starters, scoring depends on the degree to which characters on adjacent pieces share visible traits (including size), yet the sizes of the characters are nearly impossible to differentiate. It’s also unfortunate that many of the smaller female figures look like overdeveloped elementary students, which is just creepy.
The scoring rules are an unreadable mess translated into an unreadable spreadsheet. Moreover, even if the spreadsheet were "fixed", it would still serve as a blatant themekiller. When I think about gettin' busy on a table, an actuarial table isn't the first thing that comes to mind.
Compounding the scoring problems, players are limited to pushing tiles onto the rows on their side of the board (plus a few adjacent columns), and so most of the board is inaccessible. That, and the hook-up/scoring area (the dance floor) clears out frequently, with the result that players are stuck using only their own scoring tiles to gain any points.
There are also basic conceptual issues with the game’s scoring, such as what happens when two women go home together. Let’s say, for example, that one of the woman has a threesome-inclined roommate, but neither woman is bisexual. Do the three women spontaneously form a platonic knitting group – and therefore I score points for the hot roomie anyway? Or is the interaction a bust?
Finally, the board is completely non-functional, in that there is nothing to keep the tiles (which are slid about EVERY TURN, mind you) in orderly rows and columns. I love re-aligning board tiles every 30 seconds, yes I do.
Man, is this game miserably awful. And such a promising and unique theme, too.
The Bucket King
Let’s get one thing clear. Played with the proper variants, and contrary to its appearance, The Bucket King (or “The King”) is one of the most cutthroat and non-family-friendly games around. Nearly everyone to which I’ve introduced this game has enjoyed it tremendously, and I will continue to pimp the King until the news of its awesomeness has spread to all 52 states (the usual 50, plus the Moon and your mom’s love shack).
[For reference, the necessary Bucket King variants: (1) the direction of play (clockwise, counterclockwise) is chosen by the initiator of each round, and (2) the direction of play reverses (i.e., switches back to the previous player) when the card total is matched exactly.]
Thunder Road
Why don't more people own this game? Why don't I own this game? It's nice to play mass-market gems that I've never seen and find them massively entertaining.
Small World
I played Vinci once many years ago, and I wasn’t a fan at the time. That was before I’d returned to my wargame roots, however.
Regardless, I thought that Small World (a Vinci update) was a lot of fun for what it was. It’s only 60-90 minutes long, which is nice, and the final combat on each player’s turn is enhanced with a die roll, which introduces some randomness. Plus, the fantasy race/power combos are fairly entertaining. Eventually, I caved and picked up a copy from the con dealer for my kids and ADD gaming buddies. My interest may wane eventually, but it’ll get a reasonable number of plays in the meantime.
Age of Steam Prototype Map
I imagine that I’m bound by some sort of nondisclosure agreement, so I can’t give out any details - but the theme will be of interest to the AT crowd.
Vallco Professional Drag Racing
I am a better man for playing this game, although not by much.
Gameplay is ridiculously silly and absurd, in that each 45-second race is determined by three to four 2d6 die rolls. We were crushed by a six-year-old girl, which was awesome.
There's no reason why a 20-minute Vallco tournament shouldn't be held at every AmeriTrash convention/event until the end of time.
Final Thoughts
There were a few games that I wouldn’t have minded squeezing in, such as Android and Napoleon’s Triumph. But it doesn’t really matter. The beer and gaming sessions were both fantastic (tried the new Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPA? Nice!), and I will continue to attend TrashFest as long as it continues to exist.
Also, did anyone catch a view of the marble game with fantasy creatures embedded inside the marbles? Looks cool, and Rob B (Bobby Tweaks) picked up a copy.
Note to Steve Avery: My employer, no joke, is now hiring a “Sexual Assault Coordinator”. Interested? It’s nice to see that every specialty and skillset has its outlet – and is ultimately hirable. Wow.
Cody S./Dr. C/wkover