Dexcon and tea

I'm enjoying dipping my toes back into blog-reading.  I like the slower, more thoughtful feel to blog posts.  FB feels like going to a loud, bustling marketplace, with vendors shouting about their wares, folks sharing recipes and gossip on the street corner with half their attention on the crowd going by, paperboys shouting the headlines, and preachers and reformers up on their soapboxes, working hard to rile up their listeners.  I wouldn't want to cut myself off from it completely, but it's not somewhere I can spend more than a few minutes without feeling jangly and aggravated and disconnected.

Blogs feel more like being invited to sit on a friend's front porch, rocking and knitting and sipping tea or lemonade, taking the time to share a little more of our lives.  It's more my speed right now.

We just got back from our annual summer vacation to Dexcon, a gaming convention in Morristown.  Every year we triangulate a little closer to...  I don't want to say the *perfect* plan for the weekend, but to a really good, satisfying, resilient plan.  We schedule a nice number of games that we're all playing together, and a little time when we've all got down time together, and then Sarah and I schedule a retreat in the middle of one of the center days of the weekend (it's a 4 1/2 day con, starting Wednesday night and finishing up Sunday of the weekend of July 4th) because playing a new game with a bunch of strangers every 2 hours gets exhausting after a coupla days.  We try to pack enough food for the weekend but it's tricky with such a tiny fridge, so the last two years I've run home on Friday or Saturday afternoon to grab some additional supplies.  Next year I'm hoping not to have to do that.

The games I played this year were:
DC Comics Deck Building game
(This was my very first experience with a deck-building game.  Even so, it was fairly easy to learn -- by halfway through my first game I felt as if I had a handle on the general strategy.  You start by choosing a hero to play (there was only one female hero, as far as I could tell) and work to build your powers and collection of equipment in order to defeat villains and score points.  Fun, a little challenging (at least for someone new to deck building), recommended)

Love Letter
(Lighthearted, easy to learn, quick to play, good for an icebreaker and gateway drug for folks who don't think of themselves as gamers.  A little strategy, a little deception, a lot of luck.  Recommended.)

Tsuro
(We own this and enjoy it.  A tile-laying game.   You're attempting to create a path that will keep you from running off the board or into other players before the final tile, the Dragon, gets played.  I love that its subtitle is "The Game of the Path".   There is a very meditative and almost fatalistic quality to its play -- at any one time you have at most 3 tiles to choose from (each tile can be laid down in 4 different ways) and you have no control over whether the other players will head toward you or what tiles they will play if they do.  You can only put one foot in front of the other and hope that the other players find themselves going off the edge of the board before you do.  Easy to learn, a little strategy, a little luck.  Recommended.)

Gothic Doctor
(We played this for the first time at last year's Dexcon, and liked it so much that we backed the kickstarter and now have a Gothic Doctor game of our own.  You're a doctor aiming to cure characters from Gothic literature -- competing with other doctors to make the most money in one night.  It's a set-collecting game and the theme, art, and mechanics combine really nicely.  You gain money by successfully treating vampires, werewolves, the insane, demons, etc, and you can also gain money by specializing (curing 4 or more of a particular type) or generalizing (curing one of each type).  A lot of fun, and easy to learn.  Highly recommended.)

Elementalists
(this game is still in development - it's an absorbing game and a lot of fun -- but he won't be doing a kickstarter, he's shopping it around to board game companies, so it's got no online presence that I've been able to find.  You roll dice and manage tokens to buy abilities, hoping to master more elements than any other player.  A little luck, a moderate amount of strategy.  Highly recommended.)

Legends and Lies
(Complicated to describe, easy to play, lots of fun.  You're cryptozoologists looking to prove the existence of a variety of weird and wacky creatures before the tabloids get the scoop.  A set-building game.   Recommended (note: it's the only game we bought, this weekend).)

Dungeon Dwellers
(A co-operative-ish dungeon crawl. You work together to defeat monsters, and if any of you bite the dust in the process you all lose, but if you succeed then the one with the most gold is the super duper winner.  You each choose a classic fantasy character to play (I had a lot of fun as the barbarian, who comes as an expansion set) and do a little deck building before setting out to explore the dungeon, fight the monsters, and take their treasure.  I really enjoyed seeing how each player could make their character their own and each character could explore their own strengths.  A little luck, a little strategy, a lot of fun.  Highly recommended.)

Legendary Encounters
(A co-operative deck building game set in the world of the Alien movies.  The art work was a little too creepy for Sarah, so she opted out of the game, which turned out to be a good choice because with the particular option our game-runner went with (I don't recall if it was an expansion or just an option within the original game) the first person killed by a facehugger gets turned into an alien and starts working against the rest of the players which made the game much more fraught and frustrating than we were expecting.    Each turn you're recruiting new talent to your team and/or attacking aliens and it's got the same sort of slow build that most deck building games do, but with one of our party turning into an alien on the second round we never stood a chance.  I was the last one standing, but eventually we all succumbed to the aliens.  I wouldn't mind trying it again without the optional turncoat, but it was a little stressful for me.)

Sentinels of the Multiverse
(A co-operative card game set in a kitschy comic book universe.  You choose a hero to play, and you all work together using your powers and equipment to fight both a villain and the environment.  The different characters are, I think, half the fun.  I played the Chrono Ranger and it took me approximately 80% of the way through the game to figure out how on earth I was supposed to be playing him (the bounty cards don't seem particularly useful on their own, but if you have enough of them in play there are other cards that give quite a few bonuses in connection with the bounty cards).  But I think it's a mark of what a fun game this is that even having very little useful to do with my own character, I really enjoyed the game anyway.  Highly recommended.)

Joe and Sarah also played a game that sounded so appealing I've got them on my wishlist sight unseen:
Hanabi

And this week's episode of Tabletop happened to be on Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game, which has identical mechanics to Legendary Encounters, but is much more lighthearted, and is definitely going on the wishlist!