Regina RepliCon: the Novelization

I moved from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to Regina, Saskatchewan a little over three years ago.  Not a huge move -- only a bit more than a 2-hour drive away -- but certainly far enough to put a major crimp in the frequency I play board games.  When living in Saskatoon, I was usually playing games at least once a week, with my friend, Rob, hosting on Wednesday evenings and myself occasionally hosting on Saturdays or Sundays.  

Since moving to Regina, I'll go three or four months between gaming sessions, only sitting down at a table with a handful of dice if I'm visiting Saskatoon and Rob happens to be hosting some games on the weekend.  But, two years ago, Rob decided to host his own "gaming convention" in his basement, since he was interested in going to something like BGG.Con but unwilling to spend the dough it would take to get there.  Rob's convention (referring to a bunch of guys in his basement) has come to be known as KingCon (his last name's Kingwell), a multi-table, all-weekend gaming fest.  Tonnes of fun, but these rare Saskatoon excursions aren't enough for me to get an adequate gaming fix, knowing that it might be three months or more before I'll be able to join them again.  So, after the inaugural KingCon, I decided on the drive home that I missed the time when gaming was routine instead of being part of an event.  Obviously I can't insert myself back into the old routine of Wednesday evenings, so instead I decided to make the events more routine.  I didn't want to put the burden on Rob to host more than one of these Cons a year, so I decided to copy his convention and host a weekend gaming excursion for my friends down in Regina.  In 2011, it had the uninspiring moniker of KingCon: Road Trip.  This year, it was the slightly catchier:

(A suitable alternative name would have been Boy Slumber Party With Dice 2012.)

This year, the gaming joy spread over parts of five-days, with as many as eight people participating.  Here's a recap.

DAY 1

Only one game played on the Thursday before the May Long Weekend (Monday May 21st was Victoria Day in Canada).  The first two guys from Saskatoon showed up and after shooting the shit for a while, we broke out a game of Blood Bowl: Team Manager (BB:TM).  This is the game that was played most often over the course of the weekend.  I dig this game, though I think it does a better job of letting me coach a BB team (player assignment, tactical decisions) than manage one (team upgrades are more about luck of the draw than players' decisions).  I think I came in second place.

DAY 2

One of the two early birds slept at my house (the other at his parents') and so I taught him Summoner Wars (SW) after breakfast, me as the Tundra Orcs and he as the Cave Goblins.  I won a close game.  The other guy showed up halfway through so I then played another game with me as the Phoenix Elves and he as the Guild Dwarves.  He wasn't a big fan of the Dwarves' focus on wall attacks (though he might have appreciated it if I was the Summoner-attacks-with-walls Tundra Orcs again) and my Phoenix Elves' sure hits almost whittled him down, but he ended up beating me in another close match.  He was now 2-2, having also won last night's BB:TM game.  This dude always wins games.  It's uncanny.  His brain is just wired for gaming logic, I guess. 
Still just the three of us, so we followed that up with another game of BB:TM (guess who won?) and then a game of Sentinels of the Multiverse (SotM), with the Egyptian Sun God, the War Machine dude, and me as Fake Hulk against Fake Lex Luthor in the lost city of Atlantis.  Long story short, we had a piss-poor team to go up against Sexy Lexy since none of us were good at trashing his ongoing effects, but, with War Machine dead and both Sun God and Fake Hulk on their last HP, we eventually settled into a pattern in which Fake Hulk could do a "ground pound" every round, which negated any damage done by non-heroes.  Finally, we were starting to make slow and steady progress.  Unfortunately, Fake Hulk got overstimulated by our strategy and, when forced to draw and play his top card, he did a "rampage," killing the Sun God with what might have been the only combination of cards that could have interrupted our pattern AND dealt damage.  I don't want to think of the odds, mainly because I'm stupid.  So I found SotM to be a lot of fun, though it can run a bit long, and there are definitely too many duplicate cards in the decks.

Hey, two more people showed up!  We played a five-player game of Space Hulk: Death Angel (which has nestled itself comfortably within my ten favourite games).  There were some rookies on this mission, so I left out all the expansion stuff (I wrote about all four PoD expansions in a previous entry).  The Blood Angels ended up prevailing, surrounded by seemingly insurmountable swarms of genestealers, by successfully activating the panel in the final location on our third and final attempt.  I fucking love this game.

Then, inspired by the oh-so-awesome HBO show, we played a game of A Game of Thrones.  First time it's hit the table, at least with me in attendance, in over three years.  I was foggy on the rules, so I left out all the expansion bits apart from the ports.  I was the Lannisters.  One player frayed a few people's nerves when he complained for a couple minutes when I supported Greyjoy in a battle against his Tyrell knights (didn't matter that I had three valid reasons for giving support, apparently I was playing "randomly").  The game went the full ten turns with the winner (House Baratheon) scoring five cities.  Tyrell finished second, I finished third, Greyjoy finished fourth (yeah, I sure did determine the outcome of the game with that one support, didn't I), and the guy playing House Stark was beheaded.

DAY 3

Holy fuck [pain] what the fuck [searing pain] is wrong with my fucking head [immense searing pain]? Lack of sleep headache, that's what.  Felt like someone was digging their fingers around my right eyeball searching for loose change.  Not having been a father yet seems to have made me a relative pussy when it comes to sleep.  I didn't realize that so much until my guests with kids were waking up at the same time saying, "I never get this much sleep at home!"  In my defense, I had just returned from a honeymoon/work conference (romance!!) with a three-hour time difference the night before the first guests arrived.

Two more guests arrived Saturday morning, hauling about 60 games between the two of them.  What the fuck, guys?  I appreciate the enthusiasm, but part of the fun of playing games in Regina is that we can play some of my dusty old games for a change.

We opened the day with a game of Quarriors, first time for any of us.  Fun game, but I'm not sure if there's enough variety to give it the same kind of legs as a game like Dominion.  Still, rolling dice is more fun that picking up and laying down cards, so I dug it.

We then played a seven-player game of Red November.  In some reverse-role playing, my gnome took after me and passed out, burning me in a fire and eliminating me fairly early.  Not sure how the game ended as I became distracted by hosting duties.

Four of us then played Chaos in the Old World (CitOW) while the remaining three broke out Merchants & Marauders (M&M).  This was my first game of CitOW since it was first released, and I was playing against some wily veterans.  After a few rounds, when I saw that I had little chance to win with either dial advances or victory points (I was the blue magic dudes), I instead opted to strive for the world-is-corrupted-everybody-loses ending.  I ended up “winning” in that very loose sense of the word since everyone lost, with one guy (Khorne) a dial turn from winning and the Sex God only a handful of VP away from the requisite 50.

My headache was getting to be too much, so I took a nap (funny thing to say at 9:00PM) and missed out on a game of Eclipse.  Too bad.  I've yet to try it.

After I woke up and the guys wrapped up their game, we played three games of The Resistance.  Great, great game.  Unfortunately, I'm a piss-poor actor with no poker face, so I'm shitty at pretending I'm not a spy when I am, in fact, a spy.  But I decided to do the opposite -- pretend I am a spy when I am, in fact, not -- and I was able to hide my identity one way or the other much more sneakily.  One dude played great, receiving a couple of "Well played, sir" acknowledgments: One, for deflecting suspicion off his spy-ass by jumping all over a true-blue Resistance member who was taking a few too many seconds to put his card in on the mission; Two, for effectively forcing me to reveal myself and another player as spies due to his unassailable logic about who should be included in the mission based on last vote.  Very quick working through the logic on his part.  Some people say this replaces Battlestar Galactica.  It definitely doesn't, even though it captures one aspect of it.  As the dude who kicked so much ass said, it feels like compressed games of poker more than it feels like BSG.

We wrapped the night up with Citadels.  I think the dude who always wins won, but I was damn near hallucinating by that point.

DAY 4

Played two games of Mord im Arosa.  Neat game.  I can't think of another game that tests the audial acuity of players.  I destroyed in both games I played.  Weird.  I guess I should have played the xylophone.

Another game of 7 Wonders without me.  No big loss.  Was it dragonstout who compared it to knitting?  Astute.

Time to put that kiddy shit away and play with a real man's game.  One with intergalactic kitty cats and turtly turtles.  Fucking Twilight Imperium: third edition, bitches.  The double-rainbow of board gaming.  We played a six-player game (my wife joined us) that went about 11 hours (including dinner break).  We added the three new races, flagships, mechanized units, mercenaries, and political reps from Shards of the Throne.  I was the University of Jol'Narr, an attractive victim for the new tech-hungry Nekron Virus, but I was luckily on the opposite end of the system.  I managed the dumbest move in the history of dumb board gaming moves.  My fledgling fleet was uncomfortable neighbors with a couple of dreadnaughts from the Barony of Letnev.  I grabbed the 1 Initiative Strategy Card so I could use my first move to retreat towards my Deep Space Cannons.  So what did my sleep deprived, beer addled brain do with my first move?  I played an action card to break up a trade agreement.  To which the Baron said "ta very much" before dreadnaught-raping me.  That screw-up hamstrung my mobility, and therefore my resources, for about the next seven hours.  Still, I had a blast.  This was our first TI:3 game in years.  I forgot how great it is.

The other two guys who opted to sit out of TI:3 played M&M, BB:TM, Cadwallon: City of Thieves, and probably about 17 other games in the meantime.

After that marathon, we broke into two groups.  I played in two four-player games of SotM.  We won both games: we eventually whittled down the robot factory and beat the demon/alien/general pretty handily -- or at least we thought we did until we looked at what would have been his next  card draw and saw that he would have beaten us by building up his full minion army from the discard pile.  The other three played a game of BB:TM and Red Dragon Inn.

Sleep.  Thank Christ, sleep.

DAY 5

*two hours later*

C'mon, cats, shut up and let me sleep!

Before heading out for breakfast, I got in another game of SW, me as the Guild Dwarves and my opponent, KingCon Rob, as the Tundra Orcs.  Rob has the Master Set and is much more experienced than I am.  He beat me but good.

A few of the guys left for home before breakfast.  After eating, my heart still wanted to get a game or two in (this close to setting up Earth Reborn), but my brain and body said "fuck off, heart," and then I passed out for five hours.  When I woke up, everyone was gone.  Except my wife.  Who said, "clean the goddamn basement."

THOUGHTS AFTERWARDS

How is it that I can play games for five days straight and still only have scratched the surface of what I wanted to have hit the table?  No Runewars?  No Here I Stand?  No Greed Incorporated?  No Battlestar Galactica?  No Yomi?  No Cosmic Encounter?  Still, I certainly can't complain.  And if I do start to complain, please reach through the Internet, slap me, and say "you just played Twilight Imperium, asshole.  Be satisfied." 

Overall it was a fantastic weekend.  I'm not so much wistful of the games that didn't get played but wistful that I can't get together with my friends to play these games more often.  I do see the appeal of going to big organized gaming conventions but, for me, the games are just a pretense for hanging out with and competing against friends.  I'd much rather go to KingCon or RepliCon.