Gen Con 2019 games wrap-up part 3
[image error]
And now, two weeks later, we come to the end. It was a memorable Gen Con as always, and I ended the weekend with some more new (to me) games. Read on for Saturday.
Saturday 7:00-8:00 p.m. – Red Dragon Inn
[image error]Red Dragon Inn has become something of a staple among the board gaming community and I’ve heard plenty of good things about it, but I’d never actually sat down and played it until then.
A game of what the fantasy heroes do after their adventuring, this game revolves around spending cards trying to get characters drunk and trying to be the last one standing. Also gambling, which mainly involves playing “I have the best hand” or cheating cards. Players must keep their drunkenness slider above their health slider and can’t run out of money.
[image error]
Balancing humour with solid, fairly simple game play with a lot of back and forth between players, it was indeed a fun game. My biggest regret was that I didn’t have time to finish my game because I had to get to my next.
Saturday 8:00-10:00 p.m. – Bad Medicine
[image error]While it was probably described as such in the program, I didn’t realize this was a party game until I was learning the rules for it. I’m not sure Gen Con is the best atmosphere for a party game, especially when one is playing entirely with people one doesn’t know, but the group I ended up with played enough to figure out the rules, even if it wasn’t necessarily a full round of the game.
Played in the Cards Against Humanity style, players combine cards from their hand to come up with the name, mechanism, and side effects of a new medicine to treat a chosen malady. Players then each pitch their cure as though to a board of directors for a pharmacology company and then all vote on which cure they thought was the best.
[image error]
The game was definitely worth a few laughs when I played it, though again, it wasn’t played with the easy comfort of a known group of friends, and we didn’t really have enough players in our group to maximize the fun. Overall, while I enjoyed it well enough while there, the market is saturated with CAH-style party games at the moment, and there wasn’t enough that really made this one stand out enough from the competition.
However, there was one mechanic that gave it an interesting twist, and might make the game a lot more fun if played properly. When played with more people, players break up into teams of two, with one player choosing the cards and the other chosen to pitch, without seeing the cards they’re supposed to pitch beforehand. Our group of four, including the GM, gave it a try just to see how it played (even though we would need several more people than that to play it properly), and one of the players broke everyone at the table when he handed the GM this gem to pitch:
[image error]
To be fair, my biggest complaint with this game was that we didn’t need nearly two hours to play it—I’m pretty sure my group had gotten the gist of it within thirty minutes—which left me lots of time to kill and wish I could’ve finished playing Red Dragon Inn.
Saturday 10:00 p.m.-12:00 a.m. – Dungeon Raiders
[image error]The goal of Dungeon Raiders is pretty much what one would expect: the players, playing a group of adventurers, try to fight their way through a dungeon and end with the most gold without dying. Dungeon cards, which can be played face up or down, present heroes with monsters, traps, treasure, or vaults, and players simultaneously choose cards of priority 1-5 to attempt to defeat the monster or avoid the trap, claim the treasure or choose a reward from the vault. Various items can also give players an advantage.
This was another fairly simple but surprisingly strategic game, and while one has to work together with the other players to defeat monsters, it’s also very easy to force a trap to spring on a certain player or otherwise sabotage other players’ plans. You also have to keep track of your health, because whoever has the most damage at the end of the game dies and is out, and in both games I played, the player with the most amount of gold was also the one who died. It was a fun, quick game, and again, my biggest complaint is that there was way too much time allotted to it, as I’m pretty sure that after two games and a bit of chatting afterward, it wasn’t even one hour into our time slot. Still, being Saturday night and with a ten-hour drive ahead of us the following night, I didn’t mind getting off early.
[image error]
Special mention also goes to one of the other players, who invited me to a King of Tokyo tournament on the Sunday morning. Spoiler alert: I lost in the first round.
Thanks once again to all the game masters and volunteers who helped make it another fun weekend of gaming. Can’t wait to do it again next year.
