I admit I was pretty knackered by day 3 and was a bit of a zombie. I have some thoughts about what I will do differently next year to keep myself motivated better, but for now let’s have a look at what I got up to on my final day.
Grublin Games – Being a massive fan of heist films, Perfect Crime absolutely speaks to me. I didn’t manage to get a demo but I listened in as a few folks were talked through the basics and asked a few questions. This is a one against many game with one player taking on the Bank and the others a bunch of criminals. It supports both coop and competitive modes, has a good deal of modularity and is out very soon. Definitely one to consider for the collection.
Big Potato – As I’ve mentioned before, I had been a bit dimsissive of this outfit in the past but I am now a fan of their design aesthetic and quite a few of their games. I was given the chance to have a look at Chameleon their latest game which is a hybrid of social deduction and word games. Each player is given a card with a grid on it, whilst one of the players receives the chameleon card which has no grid. This grid matches up to a grid of words in the middle of the table. A word is chosen at random on the grid and each player then says a word they associate with that thing. Of course the Chameleon player had no idea and has to guess what word to use. Everyone the tries to guess who the Chameleon is. Simple, fun, fast and a neat idea with great presentation as always.
Braincrack – I stopped by the Braincrack booth after having recently reviewed Farsight, which I really liked. Lewis was as personable in real life as he had been over the interwebs and I took the opportunity to try Downsize as well. This is a very quick playing, set discarding style game where you are trying to get rid of all your employees before everyone else. The combinations you discard in affect other players and I found the art style fitted the theme very nicely.
Triple Ace – This outfit have been around for a good while producing loads of excellent roleplaying games and supplements and more recently a selection of games. I chatted with Shane who I knew from previous cons and he gave us a quick game of Cadaver, which was a light, filler game of raising zombies from the dead with a set collection style mechanic going on.
Lander – I had sorted out a time to go along to the Lander stall for a demo game and in my zombie state had totally forgotten to check my schedule for the day. Humblest apologies to the team who sent me a very nice email in the afternoon asking if I would still like to pop by. This outfit has an interesting colonisation game coming out seeing players competing to make the best of a life on a new planet. They are still a fair way off launching their Kickstarter but their prototyping was looking very slick and I will definitely see about checking the game out closer to launch.
City of Kings – This funded really well on Kickstarter recently and the folks on the stall were doing great business throughout the whole con. I grabbed a quiet moment to introduce myself and have the lead designer take me through the game. This is a full on fantasy adventure game, with some worker placement mechanics and a quite insane amount of variety in terms of encounters, monsters and how you can level up the very extensive character sheets.
I do have some nice pics of this, but they will have to wait until I have downloaded everything off the camera. The large version of the game was a sight to behold.
So that was me over 3 days. I didn’t quite get through everything on my list, partly due to being distracted by other shiniest and partly due to closer inspection of those games made them out to not be for me. I have a lot of thoughts post con about Kickstarter, how I will tackle press duties differently next time and demo length at cons.
Thanks very much to all the companies that gave me their time, sorry to those I didn’t get round and a massive thank you to everyone who went into making my weekend awesome from fellow players to the event staff and organisers. It’s just emerged today that Expo is now the third largest con in the world, and I can only imagine it will grow again next year.