Strategicon: Gateway 2012, Day 1

This year at Strategicon I actually went alone as none of my family went (their interest in games has waned) nor any of my students. I was excited for this one as not only were there specific tournaments I wanted to enter, but the guest game designer was Antoine Bauza from France and I own many of his games.


Geekdom at its finest

I arrived when the convention first opened so I could participate in a playtest of one of Antoine's new designs in development, SINBAD. Sinbad is a cooperative game with a variety of scenarios of varying difficulty on a map representing sinbad's adventures. Each character has different abilities that they contribute to the overall missin and various encounters as you journey to your destination in essence to confront a "Boss". Each player has his own deck of cards with ability symbols that are drawn to add for each challenge. We played a pretty easy scenario, with fairly easy challenges and our group defeated the games quite handily. An interesting cooperative game with no traitor element, but not too exciting.

























One of the best was meeting Antoine who taught us the game of course and had to translate some elements (as they were in French), and I was also able to have him sign my editions of his games that I brought: Seven Wonders, Bakong & Mystery Express. He also gave us a limited promo card for 7 Wonders that actually has a picture of his newly born baby on it.



Designer Antoine Bauza and myself

Next was actually more exciting, I got to playtest my game NISSE on the mainfloor and it was scheduled in the main catalog. I had a good group of four who signed up and were willing to playytest, and gave good feedback at the end. There was a Danish couple who signed up, but arrived late and were still excited just to watch the playtest as they understood the background and legend of Nisse from Denmark. In essence Nisse are the gnomes in scandinavian lore who helped a farmer with the duties on a farm as long as he received his bowl of porridge in the barn.

My visitors from Denmark

The legend grew to them bringing presents for the children, and this is the root for many stories of Santa Claus and Christmas. The game Nisse is an economic strategy game as you are the gnomes competing for tasks, porridge and special abilities to gain the farmer's favor to bring the most presents on Christmas morning. You compete each round in selecting tasks current for the season and placing tokens to gain the most return. For this playtest I was trying out a new tracking system for earned tokens. The playtest went well, and many other people came by to observe and check it out.




I was then able to play in a few tournaments in games I have never played before but wanted to. The first was the game FINCA, a former game of the year finalist. In the game you are collecting fruit from a windmill you move on, where your movement and what fruit you collect is dependant upon your location in a mancala-type rotation. Timing is paramount, and once you get the fruit you must then deliver to specific towns to fulfill orders that help you collect symbols. Ultimately the winner is determined by leading in various categories of symbols with victory points. It is actually very simple and fun to play (I got 3rd place). I want this game!

I then played a hit from this past year called HAWAII. It is bit heavier, but not necessarily longer game. It has your typical euro-mechanics of resource collection, tile selection and buying of victory points, but it has a variable set-up and your personal village is built on a grid that determines both up and down what scores in the end. I caught on pretty quick and ended up winning 1st place in the tournament as only one of two newbies to the game. Another must have game for me.

This was an absolutely great day in game-playing, the funnest first day I have had at any Strategicon.