Great weekend for gaming at SaltCON
This past weekend I spent a lot of time playing games. And it was a lot of fun!
It was the annual board game convention in our area – SaltCON – and I was once again asked to be a judge in the new family game design competition.
And I just have to say that it was pretty cool to take a day off of work to go play games.
Now SaltCON isn’t a huge gaming convention but it has been growing over the past few years and this year moved locations to accommodate an expected 500 attendees. It all started Friday at 10am and went through Saturday night at midnight. And throughout most of that time, the game tables were filled with people playing games of all sorts.
While a number of people brought their own games, SaltCON has a good sized board game library where you can check out a game, pick a table, and sit down and play. They also have signs that you can take to the table with you – signs like “Players Wanted” or “Teacher Wanted”.
And the great thing is that everyone is super nice. It makes pulling up a chair and playing a game with strangers very comfortable. And in the end, I walked away having met a ton of new, friendly people.
Great Time to Try New Games
In addition to the games I played as part of the new board game design competition, I played a number of other games that were recently published or that have been on my wish list for a while. SaltCON was a great chance to try them out to determine if they’d stay on my board game wish list.
So what are the games that stayed on the list?
New Family / Party Game
While I couldn’t spend all day Friday and Saturday at SaltCON, I did get to play for a great chunk of time. On Friday most of my time was spent playing games as part of the ION competition judging the 4 game finalists for the Family/Party Game category. And while a number of the games had good elements to them, there was one clear winner. When you pull a group of mostly strangers together and within a couple minutes have everyone laughing – you know you’ve got a great game.
And that’s how it happened for this year’s winner – Rigamaroles by Shane Larsen. We only played for about 20 minutes, but it was hard to stop talking about it afterward. Since Shane may soon be in discussions with a publisher to take the game to market, I won’t give too many details here. But suffice it to say that it’s definitely a game that I’d love to pull out at our parties. We’ll keep our eyes out for this one.
Kingdom Builder topped my list of games that I wanted to play at SaltCON. It was just published last fall and made a big splash at Spiel Essen. The designer is Donald X. Vaccarino who is the designer behind the incredibly addicting game Dominion. Dominion has taken the game world by storm and is topping best seller lists everywhere. So like many others, I was anxious to see what Kingdom Builder had to offer.
And after playing it this weekend, it moved into the top spots of my wish list. It’s definitely a game that I’ll be getting – probably within the next few months. The game is very simple to play and has a great balance of luck and strategy. It’s also going to be great for families to play together.
One of the elements that makes Dominion such a hit is the variability of the game. Every game you get a different mix of cards and abilities to use and work with to achieve victory. And Kingdom Builder has similar elements. Each game requires 4 boards to link together to set up the terrain. With more than 4 boards in the game, every time you set the game up the world will be different. There are also 10 cards that dictate what the conditions are for scoring points. But you’ll only play with 3 of those cards each game. So again, every game will differ.
Knowing how many expansions have been made by Donald X. Vaccarino for Dominion, one of my first thoughts when I heard about Kingdom Builder was if it would spawn any expansions. And wouldn’t you know it – there’s already one planned to release this year called Kingdom Builder: Nomads.
But who’s going to worry about being tempted by an expansion when the original game of Kingdom Builder will offer a ton of replayability already. We love variability in our games and I can see Kingdom Builder being played a lot with our family.
Pizza Theory
Pizza Theory was actually removed from my wish list at SaltCON. It wasn’t because it’s not a good game but rather because I bought a copy while I was there. So now it’s on my “owned” list.
Pizza Theory was the winner of the new game design competition at SaltCON last year and was published recently by Gryphon Games. It’s a pretty simple 3-player game that’s great for families. It’s all about placing your pizza toppings on the pizza and cutting the pizza in such a way that you’re toppings constitute the majority of toppings on the slices. If your toppings are in the majority, you can change your opponent toppings to yours. The first person to place all their toppings on the pizza wins.
While the game play is rather simple, there isn’t anything simple about winning the game. After getting it home, I played a couple games with Trevor and Caleb and Caleb (our 8 yr. old) won both times. You can plan all you want, but your opponents will mess up your plans every time. It all comes down to how the pizza gets sliced.
Every turn the pizza rotates and you get to secretly choose one cut. But your opponents also get one cut from their side of the pizza and when you simultaneously reveal your cuts you’ll find out how the pizza slices end up. So just when you think you’ve got it figured out and you know you’ll have a majority of toppings in a slice, your opponent will cut it somewhere else and you don’t get the slices you hoped for.
It’s a very cool game. And it doesn’t take too long to play Pizza Theory so it’s easy to call out “rematch” and go at it again.
Masters of Commerce
Another game I headed home from SaltCON with is Masters of Commerce. However, I didn’t pick this game up for our family game time. Masters of Commerce is going to be a better fit for my group of adult friends. I’ll be pulling it out at our next “Boys Book Club”.
In Masters of Commerce players take on the roles of landlords and merchants. The goal is to earn more money than any other landlord (if you are a landlord) or more money than any other merchant (if you are a merchant) by the end of the fifth round. So in the end there will actually be 2 winners.
The essence of the game is about bidding and wheeling and dealing. Landlords bid on adding land to their growing industries and vie for merchants renting the land for their dealings. Merchants try to find the best deals on renting property while maintaining their hold on locations that may gain big rewards. But with a fluctuating market price, they’ll be taking risks on how much they pay in rents each round.
Of course, when I described the game at home, the sour look on my wife’s face told me exactly what she thought of the game – absolutely no interest whatsoever. But like we’ve written about before – when getting games, you must have a clear picture in mind of who you’re going to play the game with. And from the outset, I didn’t have her in mind when I picked up a copy of Masters of Commerce.
But with my game buddies, I can totally see them wheeling and dealing, shouting out prices, and locking people out of markets to see who can reign as the Master of Commerce.
Note about Boys Book Club: Since most of our wives participate in a monthly Book Club, we figured we could get a monthly night of our own. Of course, the books we read for our monthly meeting will just be rule books.
More Gaming at Home
SaltCON was a lot of fun. But what I looked forward to most was actually getting back home and playing games with my family.
And Sunday afternoon was perfect for that.
A great finish to a fun weekend of gaming goodness.
