Gen Con 2019 games wrap-up part 1
[image error]
Ah, Gen Con. Where friends are made, games are played, and lack of sleep is inevitable. And after five days, my cat is actually happy to see me.
After two successful years of scheduling my evenings full prior to the con, I’m starting to get the hang of it, and found more games I wanted to play than I had time for this year. What did I play? Click the tag and let’s go back to last Wednesday.
Wednesday 8:00-9:00 p.m. – TRAP
When I read in the event catalogue that in this game, players try to navigate a maze filled with traps blindfolded, I wondered how that was handled. Turns out, they meant it quite literally.
[image error]
Each player starts with six trap tokens. The active player puts on a blindfold while the others arrange their traps across the board, and then the active player, still blindfolded, takes the player piece and attempts to navigate from one corner of the board to the opposite without hitting any of the traps. It gets easier as you go, as the traps also double as player lives, so that each time a player fails, a trap goes away. The last one standing wins.
[image error]Anytime a game involves cute/funny animal sleep masks, I’m listening. It also turned out to be a pretty simple but quite fun game. And I’m not just saying that because I won. Though that helps. We played a prototype of the game that may or may not be fully developed later, but I hope it will be.
Wednesday 9:00-10:00 p.m. – Usurp the King
In this card game, players use their influence to try to sway members of the king’s court to their side. In the second phase of the game, players use various items/characters to attempt to thwart other players’ intentions. The winner can vary greatly, as a series of victory conditions based on circumstances can change the outcome (is the king dead, is his heir disgruntled and refuses the crown, etc.).
[image error]
I’ll admit, on immediate play, I wasn’t enthralled with this game, but on reflection after the fact, I think that was mostly due to my carefully laid plans all being dismantled in the second phase. Yet, in the end, due to victory conditions bringing us to the “kingmaker” phase, I nearly came back and won.
Thematically, the game was very appropriate, and while my attempts to describe the game play made it sound clunky, I’d be willing to give this game another shot.
