Spring Meltdown Gaming Recap

Last weekend was all travel and bustle for me. Saturday, I made it out to Lyndonville for the Green Mountain Gamers’ Spring Meltdown. It was a full, full day of gaming for a lot of people. I got in more than I expected, to be honest. My enjoyment of board games has been on the wane for the last six months or so. Still, I found myself sucked into the enthusiasm and wound up trying three games new to me.

We recorded an extrasode of Carnagecast on the ride home. Check out A Dark and Stormy Night – which it was — to hear what people thought about games like Power Grid: The First Sparks, the utterable elements of a Fiasco game using The Ice playset, the inevitable bouts of Battlestar Galactica and Prêt-à-Porter.

Additionally, here are some more recent thoughts on the new games I played during Spring Meltdown. I’ve had a little more time to consider things since the ride home, so the opinions are a little riper, though still based on those initial plays.

• Nefarious is a game by Donald Vaccarino about mad scientists crafting inventions. It’s about choosing among actions to design things, generate cash and realize the inventions, thus earning victory points. There’s a whole speculation element I didn’t really get that involves placing minions on action types, which earns money based on the actions in a turn that one’s neighbors choose. I got how it works, but I didn’t see how it tied into the mad scientist theme; minions go spy on rival inventors, maybe?
• Lords of Waterdeep was probably the break-out hit of the day, as it has been everywhere it appears, going by the chatter in the social media spheres. I didn’t expect to like a worker placement game at all, but somehow this one worked for me. It has a satisfactory level of complexity among the different parts — meaning it’s pretty light in others’ view, probably — and I enjoyed the high fantasy adventure theme. The mechanics have very, very little to do with Waterdeep or the Forgotten Realms, but adding the theme prompted me to give the game a shot.
• Tobago I’d sort of played in the past — or been taught how to play, at least. After narrowing down the location of treasures by playing cards that specify where on an tropical island they might be — “next to the biggest forest,” “not in a river valley,” and so on — then tear around to claim the treasure before anyone else. It wasn’t an unpleasant way to spend the end of the night while waiting for my ride to wrap up her game of Prêt-à-Porter.

Spring Meltdown is This Saturday

Spring Meltdown is mere days away. It feels like it’s been forever since our last tabletop game-stravaganza in Barre, but really it’s only been four and a bit months.

What can you expect at a Spring Meltdown? Let’s go down the list:

1. Friendly people. We game-playing Vermonters are quite lucky to have such a great community of fellow hobbyists. We’re friendly and we’ve all got a great pastime in common to share and talk about.
2. A heap of games. I guarantee you that right now as you read this post, someone is thinking to themselves, “Which games should I bring to the next Green Mountain Gamers day?” There’s always an embarrassing richness of choice when it comes to games at these things. If you pick something up from the table, someone’s going to be able to tell you about it, and maybe even play it with you.
3. Twelve hours of gaming. Yes, Spring Meltdown goes from 10:00am to 10:00pm. Some people are there for the whole day for maximum fun. Others come for the part of the day that works for them.

Spring Meltdown 2012 happens April 21st at the grange hall on York Street in Lyndonville, Vermont. From 10:00am to 10:00pm, it’s open tabletop gaming. Dark Tower Gaming will run a pair of Magic: the Gathering tournaments. They and Triple Play will be vending, should someone have a gaming-related shopping need.

PAX East 2012

Bird's eye view of tabletop gaming at PAX East 2012.

So PAX East happened. That was a thing. After spending the whole weekend in 2011, I decided to be more targeted in 2012 and only spend Saturday there. Plus, the convention fell on Easter weekend and the Easter Sunday dinner is a big tradition in my family.

PAX East grew, unsurprisingly. The exhibitor hall increased in size, as did the tabletop area. The exhibitor hall list was down in terms of things that interested me, namely tabletop-related stuff. Geek Chic was there, of course, and Mayfair Games, but that was about it. It turns out that was because a number of tabletop-centric booths were located in the tabletop area of the convention center.

The tabletop area looked like it doubled in width compared to 2011 — the length being constant in the hangar-like main space of the Boston convention center. It was filled mostly with tables for scheduled tournaments and free play. Where the forest of tables didn’t extend, there were booths for publishers, designers and retailers. Companies like Foam Brain Games and Fantasy Flight Games smartly moved into the tabletop area this year. Not only did that put them in better sight of their target audience, but they could stay in business longer. The exhibitor hall closed at 6:00pm each night, while the tabletop area kept rocking til much later.

The trade-off to that decision might be that they lost out on ensnaring people who were brand new to tabletop games. One of the key sights I remember from last year was the glut of people wandering the floor or clearing table space to tear into their new copy of Mansions of Madness. How much of that was the game’s newness versus drawing in interested video games, I couldn’t say. I wish I could peek at the sales numbers of 2011 and 2012 to compare.

The tabletop game area kept busy all day long. Last year, you could track the day by the activity level in the area as people came and went. This year, it seemed most tables were occupied and gaming underway all Saturday long.

While I got to try to plenty of board game demos — find out more on the carcast we recorded going home — I didn’t break into any role-playing. Wizards of the Coast had their marshaling area/holding pen, which didn’t really appeal. Games on Demand were present, but that required me to pull together a group of players on my own. Pandemonium Books & Games had an actual schedule of board and role-playing games to be run throughout the weekend, but those times never jived with my own. So it goes, right?

All in all, PAX East was really a spectacle for me. I saw a lot of cool things, but I didn’t get to do as many of them as I might have liked. But it was a pretty good day and a pretty good weekend trip to Boston. Except for one thing. Having covered the positive, PAX-related aspects of the trip, I’m going to get into the huge stinker of a problem that set an absolute low for the weekend.

The hotel, on the other hand, got off to an awful start. We had a room at the Westin Waterfront, which is right next to the BCEC. Check-in time was 3:00pm on Friday. When we arrived at that time, we were told there was a backlog of rooms turning over as people checked out, so ours wasn’t ready. The desk person took my number and said they’d call when it was ready.

After an hour, I checked back. The room still wasn’t ready. After another hour and a half, for a total of two and a half hours, the person then at the desk discovered that why yes, that room was ready. No one had bothered to notify us. And there was no concern expressed on the staff’s part about the time we lost or inconveniences experienced.

The Westin really fell down on this one. They didn’t make their commitment of the check-in time and then didn’t follow through on notifying us when the room was ready. As a result, we lost two and a half hours thinking “just a little bit longer” would be something approximating an actual little bit.

While I get that as many people who filled the Westin and BCEC can be daunting and I have nothing but sympathy for the people on the ground in housekeeping and front office of the hotel, who were doubtless overwhelmed, I am hugely disappointed by the overall experience. Aside from this not being the first time PAX came to the Westin and BCEC, it cannot be the Westin’s first rodeo at all. They were seemingly unprepared for the volume of people passing through the hotel, even though it sold out months before. That lack of preparation and contingencies for travelers coming from out of town with nowhere to go was an outright failure on their part.

Thanks to Twitter, I had an interesting conversation with some employees of the chain. You can find the public portion of the conversation begin here with @WestinWatrFront, then @StarwoodBuzz — Starwood is the hotel group to which the Westin brand belongs — picks up the baton. That exchange went on sporadically through the weekend as I walked in and out of wireless availability. It culminated in an emailed apology from an employee of the Westin Waterfront, saying they were sorry and “We did have some challenges with this particular convention but our staff did everything possible to accommodate everyone.”

Yes, guests without a room to check in and not offering anything to help with luggage or making the wait more pleasant is certainly a challenging situation. And who can blame them? PAX East is a guaranteed sell-out. The Westin can do pretty much as they please and never run short of customers for that weekend. I don’t doubt they’ll go far with that tactic.

The ironic part is the night before, we had a completely trouble-free stay at the Boston Sheraton, also part of the Starwood group. The Sheraton was in the throes of Anime Boston plus early PAX East arrivals and they did just great by us. I hope those two compare notes sometime in the next year.

For more thoughts on the weekend, check out the Carnagecast extrasode Escape from PAX East, recorded with my friend Sarah during the drive home from Boston to Vermont. We talk about the games we played: Castellan, Chupacabra, Ice Dice, Star Trek Deck Building Game, Ticket to Ride India and Asia.

On the Road to PAX East 2012

I have a write-up of my trip to PAX East 2012 in the works. In the meantime, enjoy this prelude to the weekend, a Carnagecast extrasode recorded with my friend Sarah and I on our way down to Boston the night before the convention.

We talk about what we hope to do during the trip and whether an audiologist can distinguish modern sculpture from giant stompy robots.

Ave Talisman Movement Variant

During last week’s Talisman session, I was reminded of a thread I’d recently read on Boardgamegeek.com proposing a movement variant for the game where each player has a stack of cards numbered one through six. Each turn for their movement, a player chooses one of those cards, moves that many spaces and discards the card. Once they’ve exhausted their supply of cards, they pick up the discards and shuffle up to draw again. It’s essentially how I recall the movement in Ave Caesar working.

Being able to strategically ration and utilize movement values instead of moving at the mercy of the die means players could gun for each other much more easily. And as Aswin Agastya points out in the thread, the level of control over movement provided by even the limited choice of “this number or that number” reduces the opportunity for the fun of a character stuck between two impossible choices.

Then during the game, Hunter mentioned an initiative variant for Dungeons & Dragons where players draw playing cards for their place in the turn order — which rather reminded me of Savage Worlds‘ own initiative system. Then I thought, “Playing cards would work, but there are only four suits, so that’s kind of a bummer, since no one could have their own suit.” That put me onto the idea of alternate suits of playing cards.

And lo, there is at least one deck with eight suits cards, the additional four being clovers, droplets, moons and stars. $16 is pricy for a single-use game component like that, but if I can come up with more uses for that many suits of cards, maybe I’ll snag a deck.

Carnage Noir Accepting Game Submissions

I would be remiss in passing on the word that the game convention near and dear to my heart, Carnage, has opened up their event submissions to GMs eager to run games. The game submission form is right there on the Carnage website.

As for my own endeavors, I haven’t quite decided what to run this year. I know I’ll do a Ghostbusters game. And after the test run of my GURPS Cabal mini-setting of Martense College, I’d like to go back there, but with a better idea of what to do and how — less “step and fetch it,” more dizzying possibilities and lunatic history.

We’ll see. Five months is an admittedly long time to think and plan. And I have until the end of July before they get serious about cutting off material to fit in the convention book.

Spring Meltdown 2012

Spring Meltdown, a tabletop game day, comes to Lyndonville, Vermont on April 21st. From 10:00am to 10:00pm at the grange, game enthusiasts gather for some tabletop action. It’s a free-for-all of open gaming, so bring something to share or come eager to try something new among the myriad games other participants make available.

Hosted by Green Mountain Gamers, a group of which I’m a part, Spring Meltdown is one in a series of quarterly game days traveling around the state of Vermont. We’ve had a lot of success with the traveling model, meeting gamers from all over the state who we might not have otherwise met. And now we’re headed back to the Northeast Kingdom!

FlashCon on March 25th in West Lebanon

The second FlashCon is already on the horizon for March 25th at the Kilton Public Library in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. Like the name implies, FlashCons are spry and nimble, appearing almost unexpectedly wherever there are tables and chairs for gaming hobbyists to enact their pastimes.

This FlashCon follows the manner of the first with a two hour block for shorter games or teaching sessions, then a longer second block in the later afternoon for the full-on tabletop experience.

Organizer Gordon Spaeth is looking for people share and teach games, so if you’ve got a favorite board game or a role-playing adventure in your pocket, get in touch with him through the Facebook page or via Green Mountain Gamers. If you come from the other end of the spectrum and are curious about all this tabletop hoo-hah, FlashCon is an ideal opportunity to dip your toe in.

The Kickstarter Compulsion

I’m starting to think of Kickstarter projects as addictive little rushes. I’ve done two now — I can’t remember if crowdfunding the original edition of Wild Talents was actual Kickstarter or something Kickstarter-esque — for Conspiracy X books. There’s more than a bit of frisson, repeatedly checking in on the total, wondering if the project will reach its goal in time.

Most recently, with The Paranormal Sourcebook, Eden Studios threw in some additional enticement. First they offered Zener cards for pledges of a certain level, then created a secondary fundraising goal, on attainment of which the pledged get GM screens for the game. The project reached that secondary goal today, so I’m feeling pretty jazzed, like I accomplished something good and right for the world. That’s probably a gross overestimation of a role-playing game supplement’s impact on the destiny of billions, but it’s possible the book may not have seen the life of day if I hadn’t pledged and done my portion of sharing links and so forth.

And that’s maybe one of the cleverer parts of Kickstarter: the projects are set up that the pledged are motivated to promote. They want the thing being promised, so it’s in their direct self-interest to make it happen by telling friends and interested parties. It’s a built-in marketing effort. And at the end of it, one gets to feel good for contributing to the creation of something that likely otherwise would not have existed.

Of course, I’m crowing before the game’s over. I haven’t actually gotten any of this stuff for which I’ve pledged. The Extraterrestrial Sourcebook has reportedly gone to the printer by now. I wasn’t happy that the two fundraisers overlapped such that I wouldn’t be able to receive and gauge the first book before the pledge deadline for the second passed, but I took a gamble. The play’s still underway, so we’ll see how it goes.

[Arkham Horror] The Kingsport Variations

Since I cracked open Miskatonic Horror last week and spent some time ogling all the cards, one thought in particular has recurred to me: how could the Kingsport board be made more appealing? As it stands, visiting Kingsport is seen as a chore: investigators have encounters at locations in order to shut down rifts or prevent them from opening. It can get repetitive without a lot of tangible reward; “there’s no dimensional rift spewing creatures into the streets” fails to satisfy in the way racking up a pile of monster corpses can, or sealing a gate.

So I’ve been brainstorming some house rules to make Kingsport not only a little more appealing, but less of the time sink trap that it usually works out to be. This is an untested list of wild ideas at the moment, and I wouldn’t recommend using them all at once.

• When adding a token to a rift track, place a clue token at the pictured location.
• When a rift track fills, randomly select one of the four tokens used to fill the track. That location is now replaced by a gate to an Other World, which behaves like all other gates for the purposes of investigating and closing or sealing. The matching rift token is turned over and any duplicates replaced by new, non-duplicate tokens from the supply.
• At the start of the game, randomly draw three markers from the rubble token pile from Dunwich Horror and three rift tokens. Place one of the rubble markers on each of the Kingsport locations. Thanks to the dimensional instabilities that plague Kingsport, those locations are now colocational with the Arkham locations pictured on the rubble tokens. When moving into either the Kingsport or Arkham space, investigators may choose which they stop in. Investigators in these spaces may trade items and use other abilities as if they were in the same space.

Another, more involved project I kind of want to attempt is to completely rework the Kingsport board. Ideally that would make visiting the Strange High House less of a trap, rework rifts or repurpose the materials for some other interesting challenge and otherwise spicing up the town. It would not mean making locations unstable, because that spins out into redoing or adding a stack of mythos cards to trigger gates opening in those locations — unless maybe unstable locations in Kingsport replace counterparts in Arkham. That’s kind of interesting. Hmm.