In my Gothcon convention reports last year I wrote “If gaming was a religion, conventions would be our churches”. Religions are not simple of course. They split, they argue about the tenants of their fiath, and split into different denominations. In a way you can see conventions in this light as well. There are 2 main denominations: the buying focused convention and the play focused convention. Conventions can blur the lines between these two, as with any relgiion things are never entirely black and white. Airecon falls distinctly into the play category.
This is the 10th Anniversary of Airecon. It’s an event that has grown from organiser Mark Cooke’s house into one of the premier gaming events on the UK tabletop gaming calendar, spawning mulitple spin off events along the way. I made the pilgrimage once more putting my faith in the British train network, which actually turned out alright this time!
One of the really nice features of Airecon is that it is slap bang in the middle of Harrogate, giving you lots of options for food outside of the convention centre. I stopped by the very pleasent Coldbath Brewery for a pint and some RPG reading to kill an hour or two before opening. The usual queues greeted me as the convention opened its doors and I wandered the halls to get the lay of the land a bit. One change that might cause some issues this year is that the food hall is quite a trek from the gaming areas and there are fewer choices than last year. It seems the convention centre itself is putting on more of the food choices. Anyway as I said, lots of food options in the vicinty of the con.
As is the case if you are a regular convention goer you get to recognise faces and make friends along the way. The first folk I saw were Sam and Douglas from last year who I played loads of games with in 2024. I saw them again later at the trick taking meetup, Tim Clare was the first person I knew that I sat down with at the con and we of course got into the game playing straight away.
Tim showed me The Cousins’ War from Surprised Stare Games. He pitched as a Twilight Struggle in a tiny footprint and he was not wrong with that comparison. The game sees you fighting the War of the Roses by playing cards that can either be used for their event or the action pips on them to manipulate the board. Sometimes the other player gets to do something based on the card you played. Very Twilight Struggle.
You are trying to control the three areas of the board, over 5 turns and you only play 4 cards in a turn. It makes every decision feel very tight and this is exasperated, in a good way, by the battles. Each turn there will be a battle which is a sperate card where some of your cubes can go. At the end of the round you then roll dice against each other to determine the flow of the battle and who comes out on top. The secret sauce here is that the battle involves a sort of liar’s dice style bluffing. It is absolutley agonising. I really want to play it some more.
Tim is a big trick taking fan and a meetup had been arranged to delve into this mechanic of the moment at the back of hall A. One of my principles at play focused conventions is to say yes to almost any game. I think it is good for my critical faculties to experience a wide range of games. I am helped in this effort by enthuiastic friends like Tim who want to show me the games they are passionate about.
Tim and I started off with the two player co-operative game Sail. This sees you co-piloting a ship through dangerous waters, avoiding krakens and storms to get to the end. We played the tutorial scenario and were initially overwhelmed by how brutally hard it seemed. You are playing tricks trying to get combinations of symbols to move the ship in the correct direction, shoot the kraken, and maybe make use of your asymmetric pirate powers.
The board for the game lies between you and whoever wins a trick when the ship moves, moves it towards them. This means you are constantly recalculating as to what you can do and how you can do it. Oh and the high seas means you can’t communicate when playing a round.
It is a very hard game, but Tim and I got into the rhythm of it and has some high five, literally, moments where we just got the play right and managed to make it all the way to the end. Looking at the bigger scenarios I have no idea how you manage them, but I would definitely be willing to give it a go.
Not done with being confused at sea, the next trick taker I played was Seas of Strife. This was a much simpler propostion being a more traditional trick taker. It was a ‘don’t win’ style game where the object was to take as few tricks as possible. The twist was that the deck had only one of each number in it, and that if you couldn’t follow the lead suit you could play another that then became a suit for everyone else to follow. The majority suit becomes the lead suit and if there is a draw it is determined by the highest number. This set of parameters gives you a lot of room for manueuver and manipulation. I quite enjoyed it once we got into the flow of it and just missed out on coming first.
Next up was Golem It which I would classify as a sort of climbing game, a trick taking adjacent genre. You play sequences or sets of cards and use tokens in the middle of the table to manipulate the values on the cards. The aim is to get rid of all your tokens and cards. Whenever you use tokens to change the value of your cards you take them into your pool. If you have to pass you can get rid of some of them. This means that you are constantly managing not only your hand, but the speed at which you can get rid of the tokens you need to be able to play your cards. It is a fine balancing act.
Finally we rounded up the evening by playing Seers Catalog. This was probably the strangest game I played over the course of the day. It saw you climbing like in Golem It, but you had power cards that manipulated the game and a wild you could throw in to get you in the correct direction. When someone is out of cards you score with the winner getting 0 and everyone else getting the lowest card in their hand, minus the number of cards in their hand in points. I won with zero points to give you an idea of how this works out. It is interesting that winning the round, doesn’t always turn out well for you in this one.
Trick takers are everywhere at the moment and the mechanism has made its way into other genres, like Arcs from last year. I commented to Sam that anyone watching a trick taker feels like trying to read hieroglyphs with no knowledge of what they are. You can recognise familiar things, numbers, suits etc. but the way they are being used and played makes it seem strange and unusual. This is the appeal of them. They take the familiar and bend and warp it in front of our very eyes, making us understand the new language of old letters.
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