Con of the North 2025. This is the third year Aeryn and I have been to this board gaming convention. Given I missed most of Gameholecon in Madison, WI, this year due to my wife's heart attack, this was a welcome three days of gaming. Lots of gaming. Noon to ten, ten to ten, ten to six. Roughly 30 hours with a single session gap after I realized, unlike almost every other game at the con, one game I signed up for required intimate knowledge of the game. In case you think that's an oversight on my part, my table before and after both thought that was a mighty unusual move on the part of the host. Generated a lot of discussion.
We did most of our eating before and after the day. Although I managed to sneak in some food from the concession stand [think hangry avoiding sustenance only], but more commonly found a beer at the bar to tide me over. Fortunately on that second 10 p.m. day there was a Perkin's in close proximity for some late night pancakes.
We have a habit of hitting The Original Pancake House our first day. The counter as usual, because the Eden Prairie OPH is a nightmare for getting a booth. I like their logo because from afar it looks like an Eagle Scout badge. Given the number of pancakes I cooked in Scouts, it always amuses me.
My first game of the con was one I hosted,
Roam, a Ryan Laukat, Red Raven, game. I've hosted it before. It's a light game that has a tetris vibe because the placement of your tiles is based on your orientation to the land cards. When you claim a card, it becomes a character in your tableau that has a different tile placement configuration. Add in some magic items that allow you to spin, claim a coin, bump another player's tile or move a tile, and there's a lot of thinking for such a simple premise. Particularly when you realize your move might result in a fresh card full of coin options for the next player, or your claimed card makes you that much further from ever using your favorite cards [cycle time increases].
We were supposed to have a table of four, but only two showed up [it was snowy]. So I played a third spot. My angle was the tough one because with a long table instead of a card table, one player has to sort of tilt their perspective to play their angle. Usually the first game is learning and the second is strategy, but they both picked up the strategy immediately. One player played when I hosted last year. The other, Val, was sitting at a table next to me and my wife at a local music/brunch for Leslie Vincent at the Icehouse and talking about games with her husband when we started chatting and realized her first game of the con would be with me. Minneapolis can be tiny.
Game two, day one.
El Grande. Despite being a bit of a classic, I'd never played it before. There's a wooden piece [yes, that looks like a wooden marital aide] that represents the king. Wherever the king is is locked down tight. The players big on their turn order which leverages meeple placement against order. Priority order gives a better choice of cards that trigger actions/scoring. So you're trying to get your meeples into as many first/second/third positions in the highest scoring areas as possible. That blue castle in the jail and you can dump meeples in there [count announced] and every three turns they spill out of the jail into a single province. If you pay attention, you know what's coming your way. If you don't, it's difficult to adjust for the influx.
Creature Caravan, another Ryan Laukat game, which I own but hadn't played yet. I liked this one a lot, although the simultaneous nature of play makes it INCREDIBLY difficult to figure out what the other players are up to as they try to create combos / sets.
Example. I had no idea what was going on at that end of the table. You get points for camping. You get points for collecting treasure if there's treasure where you camp. You get cards, you get bread, you get purses, and then you play your card combinations to place your dice to trigger market events, movement events, zombie fighting events, and more. All of it leads to points. I made a HUGE mistake and thought the blank space next to a sword meant I got one extra pip to fight. Instead, it was all of the pips on the die and an extra. By the time I figured it out, the rest of the table had all fought high point value zombies that closed out before I changed tactics.
Last game of the first day,
Isle of Skye. Think
Carcassonne, but with a tile bidding mechanism and a solo tableau, more like
Alhambra. I did well at this game, but primarily because I was paying enough attention to be able to shut other players out of points.
Why yes. That's me and Nicholas Cage, pondering the next board game we're going to play.
Day two. I ended up playing my first game of the day with the same host that I had finished up playing with the night before at ten p.m. Different game though. This is
Bonsai. Someone at work asked me about "cozy" games. This is a cozy game. Collect flowers, wood, leaves, fruit, and build your bonsai using a combination of tools and master gardening techniques. Bonus points for leaning left, right, under, most flowers, most fruit, on certain sides. One tactic is to pass on points to score the higher scoring tiles. I simply used the strategy of taking all the lowest point tiles. It was a sound strategy.
Ponzi Scheme. I borrowed this from Ming so I could host it. I loved it the one time our group played and I wanted to see it go down with strangers. Amusingly, Ming signed up to play at my table. Two people had to bail, but that still left us three, even without me, so I could help coordinate [I prefer that to playing - makes for a more seamless experience for the players if someone is watching and correcting missteps].
This is brilliant little game in my opinion. Everyone knows someone or someones, maybe everyone at the table, is going to go broke. It's in the title. You're taking cards, collecting money, but taking on debt at various levels that end up on a wheel. As the turns progress, the wheel turns a sixth of a rotation, sometimes twice, and your debts come due. Then the cards STAY on the wheel, not earning you more money, but going back to the number on the wheel corresponding to their debt load and often stacking up / compounding.
Additionally, there's a set system of four sets, and the number of the tiles in your set is where you have to take a debt card from [low, medium, high] and the sets are the only thing that matter for winning [a few points for remaining cash], the more the better. But to get more than three in a set, you have to offer someone money for their matching tile. There's a nice little leather wallet. You slide your money in, as Ming is doing here and make an offer. The other player can take the offer and give you their tile. Or they can match your offer and take your tile. Given how tight trying not to crash your Ponzi scheme can be, those offers can be really tempting and a way to overextended someone.
It's a great game for being able to talk and have fun while playing because you can see the looming, impending, doom of a huge payout in advance for other players. You just can't see the money they're hiding.
Here to Slay. My LEAST favorite game of the con. Despite enjoying
Bunny Kingdom, I have a love/hate relationship with bunny themed games, if you leave out the word love. It did not help that the table host didn't seem to know the rules. I looked up a PDF quick so that someone at the table knew the details, but I think that only made me a target because it because obvious I was threat because I'd read the rules. There were a number of times I was a target when I was obviously the least powerful bunny tableau at the table. Additionally, we were at a big table, so you couldn't see what almost anyone else was playing. There's a challenge mechanism and you HAVE to know what they're playing to decide whether to challenge. I asked them to tell me what they'd played a few times. I tried to be a good model by announcing the details of my cards as I played them. But no one else would really announce anything before moving on to attacks, and I think I again became a target because my cards were the only ones being announced.
Lot of luck involved in my opinion.
Amun Re. I really enjoyed this one after I figured out the strategies. You're claiming territories on the Nile and every three turns it restarts except for the pyramids So you're trying to leverage a mixture of pyramids, mines, farmers, event cards for various stages, and winning favor so you get bonuses, additional placements. All of it driven by money cards and purchases that follow the usual gaming set mechanics [as in the second item is more expensive, the third more than that, etc]. Pretty game as well.
I tend to find one four hour game to play during each con. That's a lot of potential unhappiness if you get a bad game or bad group. Fortunately neither was true and everyone was even cheerful at 6-10 p.m.
Gaia Project is a lot like
Terra Mystica, and there are a bunch of ways to eek out points. Tech, planets, types of planets, specialty tiles, number of sectors, federations of buildings, et al. You need range, which requires tech or a special token. You require money. Ore. Mental power. Terraformers. All of it gives potential ways to score a few winning points.
I was the bird race. It was a good choice because it leaned heavily into cash so toward the end I was able to just buy every gap I had in tech or buildings or range, and even spent half of the allowable balance of money to grab 12 victory points as a cash exchange. Those were the 12 points that scored me second place [the host crushed us, but we still had fun].
Verdant. I've played games like this before. It definitely fits the cozy vibe. You're alternating rooms and plants, and certain plants need certain amounts of light, and the sides of room cards have differing amounts of light. Throw in some tools and a token set system [kitties, vases, furniture] to decorate your house and encourage your plants to grow, and you're trying to make the best scoring 3x5 grid possible. I won Verdant, focusing on making sure almost all my plant[s were potted.
I've talked about this one on the blog before.
Leviathan Wilds. It's a 2024 coop game where you're not trying to defeat the leviathans/kaiju, you're trying to clean the nasty crystals off them so they're healthy. But it's not safe, and they roar and ooze and don't realize you're trying to help. So you climb and jump and glide removing regular and toxic crystals and trying to work together by exchanging health and special actions for character/role pairs [think healer/support, sprinter, heavy muscle]. The leviathans get harder [this one is number two] and have special rules, and certain characters and roles can be more or less complex.
Originally, I got there early enough to set it up for the two people registered and then another appeared. And another. I knew which characters/roles to give players for a two player game as I'd preplayed it a bunch with multiple roles, but figuring out two more players was a bit tricky for a second [we went with the easier combos, but I don't think they used their specials as much for those easier characters, which was my experience as well]. Regardless, they all had a great time and pretty much cut it to the last moment as a player crossed health and toxins taking out the last blue die and the rest finished up within the last turn allowed after a player had to retire [they don't die].
Battle Masters. 1992. This one is old school. I gave Kyle my copy and I think he has one more. This is three sets end to end so six people could play at once. Super simple game. Flip a shared deck of cards and the image on the card determines which characters move. Mounted characters will see more cards. There's a mighty ogre who gets three moves and three attacks, but randomized, so it might not move at all. And there's a mighty cannon that can take out any other unit in one hit if the tiles fall right. Or itself, if the tiles fall wrong. Which is what I did, but only after I shot the mighty ogre.
I hear they're re-released it, or are planning to, but smaller scale. The big scale makes it really enjoyable.
My crossbowmen backing up my knights. Or hiding behind them. Take your pick. This game gives me flashbacks to my college years on University Avenue drinking with Kyle and Justinian [and by 1992 I'd met my wife and was living with her, so she has good memories of Battle Masters as well. Or maybe just memories of being young].
Last game of the Con,
Lagoon: Land of Druids. This was hosted by the same person I played my last game with last year, a tech manager from St. Louis who ran
Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig [Verdant reminded me of a lighter version of that game]. This was a kickstarter, and he hadn't played it in a while, and never with a live group. There were just the three of us and, at first, we didn't understand why you could take certain actions [like moving land tiles or even removing them]. But as we played, it became very obvious moving land tiles meant they couldn't be removed if it would isolate them, and removing them meant the balance of power shifted toward a particular mana type which drove the end score. At that point it became a lot more interesting and you could see all of us jockeying for our particular strategy. Solid game to end on and a fun group.
All in all, a definite success. Aeryn had a good time and some good stories and hosted a number of games as well, including
Wingspan and
Flamme Rouge. I've recently backed two other cycling-related games. It might be fun next year to host all bicycling-themed games.
