PrezCon! I get excited just thinking about the name. My favorite convention. So convenient to northern Virginia, such a friendly and yet competitive gaming community.
I felt a little burnt out after five solid days of PrezCon last year, so this day I'm going for just four days; I'll arrive on Thursday and go through Sunday. My gaming friends Keith F., Brian G., and Tom S. will arrive a day ahead of me, on Wednesday. My buddy Grant plans to arrive in time for the first events on Monday evening and stay the entire seven days. Hard core, baby. I don't know how people do a solid week of intense boardgaming. People like that must pace themselves better than I do.
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Excerpt of my PrezCon
schedule ... for now ... |
Every year I go to the PrezCon website and agonize over the schedule. Every year I carefully prioritize my gaming preferences and put together a perfectly-crafted sequence of events that will take me from breakfast to midnight of solid gaming for the duration of my stay. And it seems that every year my plan flies out the window within two hours of arrival. I always seem to get re-directed to some new discovery and find myself playing something I never thought I'd try. I think that's the magic of a game convention - the impetuous spontaneity of pick-up games and demos and vendors and auctions. Grant said he's given up on even trying to make a plan. He just plays as the spirit moves him. All the world is his gaming table, and all of us merely opponents...
I've written this before, but I'm not afraid to repeat myself. The best advice I ever got when approaching PrezCon came from Convention Director Justin Thompson: "Learn at least one new game; buy at least one new game." I have three demos in mind for games that I want to learn this year:
- Acquire
- Small World
- Command and Colors: Napoleonics
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| 1976 3M Edition
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I'd actually seen a demo of
Acquire (designer
Sid Sackson, artist
Kurt Miller, publisher
Wizards of the Coast) once before, at my very first PrezCon, and bought a copy on
eBay shortly thereafter, but never got a chance to bring it to the table. But when
Little Metal Dog Show explained why
Acquire deserves the title of a "stone cold classic," he reminded me of how much I liked what I saw in that game years ago. So now I'm going to blow the dust off the box and get reacquainted with this Sid Sackson masterpiece.
Grant is running
Small World (designer
Philippe Keyaerts, artist
Miguel Coimbra, publisher
Days of Wonder) at PrezCon, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never actually sat down and played the game before. So I'm setting
SW as a specific "learning goal" for PrezCon this year.
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Cover Design by
Rodger B. MacGowan
Copyright ©2010
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I also want to get my hand back into wargaming. Now, the Richard Borg series of historical strategy games (
Battle Cry, Memoir '44, Command and Colors: Ancients, Battle Lore) aren't exactly the kind of hard core Avalon Hill / SPI wargames I grew up on, but they will scratch the itch for now. And I haven't done Napoleonics in a very long time, so
Command and Colors: Napoleonics (designer
Richard Borg, artist
Rodger MacGowan, publisher
GMT)
seems like a good new title to learn.
As for buying at least one new game, well, I'll bring my wishlist, but there's no telling what I'll come home with. Here's my top seven, in no particular order:
- Fairy Tale
- Le Havre
- Chicago Express
- Traders of Carthage
- Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War
- High Frontier
- Saint Petersburg
Finally, of course, I'll be demonstrating
Trains Planes and Automobiles three times at PrezCon. I've mentioned before that PrezCon has a special place in my heart as the place I sold
TPA two years ago, so it's nice to come back and show it off as a finished product. The family game format is a little off the conventional PrezCon path, but I'm hopeful that for a few people, it will be the new game they learned at PrezCon, and maybe one or two will even pick up a copy. I just want people to have fun playing it.
Acquire is one of my all-time favorites; I wish my friends liked economic games more than they do. If you've never played, here's my advice (for what it's worth): diversify your portfolio. Invest in companies that will merge during the game (that give liquid assets) and in companies that will give big payouts at the end.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to it! To add to your list of Richard Borg derived wargames, there's also "Battles of Westeros", which is marketed as "A Battlelore Game", although it's not really part of Battlelore. Battles set in the same world as the "Game of Thrones" board game. It's a step up in complexity from the other Richard Borg games. I've only gotten it to the table once, but it deserves to come out more.
ReplyDeleteFarmerLenny, yes, I wish I could get more financial/economic games to the table, too. I feel as though it's a whole subgenre that I never get to explore properly. I hope I get some decent Acquire time in this week.
ReplyDeleteKeith, I didn't realize that Battles of Westeros was in the same Richard Borg category. We definitely have to get that one in play sometime soon. I assume it's a two-player game, like the others.
Tot ludos, ita paulo tempus.