It's a bit colder up in Utah, but the gaming action was HOT! I came up to attend the SaltCON boardgame convention because I had a game design in the finals for the ION award. Last year my design for the game INFECTED came in 2nd place in the strategy category, and this year I did not fare better as my design for the game ACCESSION dropped a notch and took 3rd place in the strategy category. It's a small abstract placement game for 2-6 players with variable set-up and changing conditions. From the intro: "The King is dead! Accession is a game where you, as a candidate, must send out your Barons to the regions of the land and influence the different factions to support you in your accession to the throne. A single faction will not be enough! You must have broad support from different factions to complete your accession to the throne."
But the competition wasn't the only thing, as my brother Jason & I got to play a bunch of games, here are some highlight notes:
TROYES - a really nice strategy game from last year with interesting decisions and mechanics. One of a current wave of games that are bringing back the use of dice for strategic decisions and not randomness. It looks complex at first with all the iconography, but plays very intuitively. I think I need to get this game.
POSEIDON'S KINGDOM - It looks like a kid's game with pieces taken straight out of the bath tub, but it plays surprisingly strategic and even has a moveable wave that crashes dice onto the board and a shark that roams. It was a blast to play and the pieces are incredible in size and detail. It is not yet available in the US, and may never be published here, at least not with the costly pieces. Thanks to Ryan from BoardGameGuy for introducing this one to me.
ECLIPSE - This is the biggest and newest thing around, and big is no exaggeration. This is a detailed space exploration, building and combat games, and excels at all three. It has a massive amount of components, and in teaching 4 newbies in a 5 player game, it took us all night to play (literally - it was dawn when we ended). The length of it was daunting, but time actually flew, it was fun and it was a great experience.
CORE WORLDS - This is the newest card-driven space game, but in my opinion is better than either Race for the Galaxy or Eminent Domain. It has very clean play, but is sometimes a slave to the randomness of opportunity. Turn order also had great bearing, but it was fun none the less. The guy from BoardGame Revolution did a great job of teaching this one to us, so I bought it from him.
PIZZA THEORY - This game from the Power's brothers is what beat out my design from the competition in the ION award last year, and one year later it is published and introduced at the convention! Jason and I played this in the 2-player variant and got our trash kicked by the neutral 3rd player!
WAR OF THE ROSES - This is a newer game that Ryan again taught to us. It has great components, a massive board, and depicts the conflict between the houses of York & Lancaster in England. It plays by use of hidden movement and action behind shields, then revealing your movement, army actions, bribes and influence in each region. Jason got out to a quick lead in our 4 player game, and I trailed by a huge margin, and could never recover from my turn order placement. As you can guess, Jason enjoyed it more than I did, but I did get to overtake one of his castles on the last turn that cost him the win and gave it to Ryan. And though I came in last, my team of the house of York did win for some solace.
POWER GRID: FACTORY MANAGER - The only game we didn't get to finish due to the closing of the convention (we stay to the bitter end, no walking out of Dodger stadium in the 7th inning), I thought it played well as we got into the flow of managing our factory machines, products, storage, workers and power needs to earn profit. I would definitely give it another play to finish it out.
I also got to play the prototype HISTORIAN from Steve Poelzig, who got 2nd place this time in the ION award competition. I also traded some of my games at the Game Swap to bring home some other titles to play.
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