Gen Con 2024 games wrap-up, part 1

Sea Dragons

About: You play as a family of sea dragons trying to gain control over the seas.

How to play: Each player is given a number of dragon head and body pieces. You draw cards with Tetris-like shapes on them and use them to place your dragons on the board to collect coins or special cards, defeat pirates, and try to avoid whirlpools. The player with the most points at the end wins.

My thoughts: A pretty simple, cute, and fun game. The board setup is very well designed, I love the dragon meeples, and the game play was strategic but still pretty casual, and not particularly competitive. It may not stand out in its simplicity, but I enjoyed playing it.

My rating: Plays well, a little forgettable, +6 for dragon theme, -3 for manual translated from Portuguese to Spanish to English

Calico

About: It’s about quilts and cats. Do you really need anything else?

How to play: Players start with individual boards and tiles that state the patterns you want to match for the most points. Each turn, you draw a tile from three random choices of colour and pattern and select where best to place it. Streaks of colours give you buttons and streaks of patterns draw cats, both of which provide significant victory points.

My thoughts: I had been wanting to play this game for years—I must have first seen a Kickstarter edition in 2019, since it apparently released in 2020. I couldn’t get a ticket for my only available time slot in 2022 and when I finally got a ticket in 2023… well, life happened. So, I was quite happy to finally get the chance to play this.

That said, I didn’t brush up on my knowledge of the game beforehand, and it took a little bit for me to understand the mechanics and goals. However, the combination of strategizing so many elements per move and the randomness factor of the available tiles—which every player is drawing from—made for a much more intense experience than I would’ve expected from a game about enticing cats onto a quilt. It was every bit as charming yet far more thoughtful than I anticipated, and I was left immediately wanting to play it again, since I understood the rules much better at the end.

My rating: I NEED.