Once up, I donned my PJ pants and wandered in the direction of coffee - this con's lax dress code is a winner in my book! I then settled down to catch up on the latest gaming news, tuning into W. Eric Martin & the Board Game Geek crew on Livestream as they shared live interviews from some other convention going on in Indianapolis, or some such place. I haven't been to it, so clearly whatever this other con is, it's not that special. While watching the latest releases, I caught up with some fellow GenCant attendees on Twitter and made plans to meet up at one of the con's satellite locations for some gaming after lunch.
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| Tons of parking outside Hall GA |
More coffee and a quick lunch of delicious nachos later, it was time to put on real pants & make my way to the gaming. When I arrived at the satellite gaming area (a short drive), I was happy to see there was plenty of free parking close by. This meant I was first to arrive, and so I was able to grab another coffee and ponder the games for sale in this area. Once Daniel and Linus arrived, we settled down to teach Daniel Abluxxen. The scores stayed close during the 3 rounds, but in the end, Linus pulled off the win with scores 30-26(Daniel)-20(me). We then set up a 3-player game of Yspahan, got through the teaching, and started the first turn when James walked in. Luckily it took just a few min to shift the set-up for 4-players and get him up to speed so we could restart to include everyone.
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| Setting up Yspahan |
I've wanted to learn Yspahan for a long time and so I was really glad to get it checked off the list. I really liked the dice mechanic for determing available actions, and had fun figuring out the nuances of different strategies. Daniel destroyed us, but I felt like I performed relatively well and am determined to get another game of it in the near-ish future if at all possible to see if I can beat my score of 56 with more experience (& possibly better rolls). Next we pulled out Arboretum in which I failed to score much of anything but did manage to stop others scoring many of their high-potential paths, so at least that was something. This game is gorgeous, and the component quality was impressive - I'm just glad the gameplay seems to hold up to the promise of the bits,
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| Akrotiri mid-game |
By the time we finished Arboretum, Falcon and Eric had arrived so we split into two groups - the others started Viceroy while Daniel taught me Akrotiri. This 2-player game from Sen-Foong Lim and Jay Cornier was sooooo good. The randomness of the tile draws was frustrating but in a good way, as all of the water icon-containing tiles apparently ended up on the bottom of the stack, which made it super tricky to excavate temples in relation to those. Plus we had a ton of islands that were literally impossible to reach making it tough to find an open island on the map. I ended up buying a TON of maps in order to increase my chances of getting all my temples down, despite those issues and in the end I was able to pull out the win. This is one game I will almost certainly be adding to my collection at some point.
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| The final map - with my excavated temples & goal cards in front |
After grabbing some food, I joined in a 6-player game of Age of War which is actually the only game of the day that I'd actually played before. After that, I headed back to grab a cup of tea and watch some of the streams & videos from GenCon. All in all, not a bad first full day of GenCant, and I have plans in place for Forbidden Stars on Sunday so I know I'll be getting some more good gaming in this weekend. Hopefully there'll be more tomorrow but with a Beer, Bourbon & BBQ festival going on this Saturday in the area, I may have to take a break & check that out.
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