Airecon 2025 – Day 3
After playing an absolute load of games over the course of Friday, Saturday was a bit more of a slow burn with a witchy crescendo towards the end of the day.
I started off the day helping Tim carry stock up to his talk. If you ever get the chance to hear Tim talk I thoroughly recommend it. He is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable presenter and I have always enjoyed hearing him extole the virtues and history of the hobby. This talk was on the history of dice, and I had attended it before at Dragonmeet 2024. I intended to head back down to the halls for some games but a bit of serendipity changed my plans.
The RPG rooms are nearby to the seminars and as I was walking past I heard Graham, he was in charge of getting folks to their games, telling a group that my friend Guy Milner had pulled out due to being hit by a pretty bad cold. They had been due to play Slugblaster. I happened to have a 2 hour one shot in my bag and volunteered to run a game. We had a blast. The players brought the YA drama and gonzo tricks to the game, and I had a great time running it. Thanks very much to Zoe, Ian and the two Steves for playing. It was a real highlight of the convention for me, and my first convention RPG that I’ve run in a long time.
Buzzing after the session, which we wrapped up in about 2 hours, I headed back down to the halls. Tim, Sam, and Doug had been joined by the wonderful Ava Foxfort and it was great to see all of them. They were just setting up a game of the Pirate’s Cove, a very early Days of Wonder game and I jumped into the 5th slot. We had a great time pirating around the various islands and proving how infamous we are. The core of it was an action slection disc that you chose secretly before revealing. If you ended up in the same place as someone else you had a fight. An element of bluff, a large amount of player interaction, and a compelling efficiency element makes for a pretty fun pirate adventure.
After a bit of a wander Ava introduced Tim and I to Pick A Pepper, otherwise known as Sauscharf. This was a strange little game of two halfs. Much like football. In the first half you used you hand of cards depicting different peppers and their values, to bid on more peppers. This created an ingredient deck for you. In the second half you then used that deck to not continue buying peppers but also make pepper sauces that actually get you points. It required you to build up your engine then dismantle it as quickly as possible.
We followed this with a Saashi and Saashi game called Bus & Stop. Despite the two actions you can take in the game not actually being called Bus & Stop, making it almost unplayable, I really enjoyed this lighter game in their catalogue. You are picking up passengers of one coloured background or stopping to drop them off where they want to go. It’s a charming little efficiency puzzle were you can also play off what other people are doing to an extent. Oh and don’t ask what happens to the OAPs on the bus. You don’t want to know.
I wandered away from the group for a bit and found myself headed to dinner with Richard and Luke from We’re Not Wizards. We had a lovely curry at one of the local places and then headed back for an evening of games. Richard and I kicked off by trying out Compile,
On our way through the hall in the morning I had made my first purchase of the convention. Compile is a two player game which is effectively a lane battler about competing AIs. The graphic design and production is top notch and we really enjoyed our first play of it. One of those games where the core mechanisms are decepetively simple, with the complication and nuance coming from the many abilities of the cards.
After a quick game of Castle Combo Richard and I sought a larger player group and found the Staying In podcast guys nearby. I had spoken to Pete the night before at the ‘party’ and had a lovely chat about the state of RPG criticism and the games he has been playing and running. It was great to meet Kris, Sam, and Dan from the cast as well.
They were setting up a game called Things in Rings which looked like Venn Diagram the game, and turned out to be basically that. The rings represented details about a word and an attribute. One player knows the details of those two rings. The word might be something like ‘ends in a vowel’ while attribute could be ‘you can see through it’. Players have 5 cards that represent objects and words and place them in one circle or another, in the middle or outside of everything. The person who knows what is happening can say it’s correct, giving the player placing another go. Or it isn’t and they pass, drawing a new card. It was a really interesting game of deduction, laughter, and some good natured arguments.
The team introduced me to Bohnanza which is one of those classic gaps in my knowledge. In a similar manner to Pick-a-Pepper, you are using beans to bid on the beans you need and also plant them in one of two fields. When you have enough of a bean planted you can trade it in for points. Rarer beans need less cards to score points, but are likely to have more of a bidding war over them. Simple, interesting, quick to play. You can see why it is a classic small box game.
I headed back through to see what Tim and others were up to and Sam pulled out his copy of Broom Service. This was one of the highlughts of last year’s Airecon and I jumped at the chance to play it again. It really is a great Spiel des Jahres winner and it’s lack of an English version is perplexing.
Running a convention game off the cuff was a great experience and will likely be my highlight of the convention. It has given me the confidence to do more of that at furture conventions, and started to fulfill my ambition to run for more players this year. Every time I do, I’ll get better at running RPGs in general which can only benefit everyone I play with on the regular. I am planning to do a bit more of the exhibitor hall this morning and then I’ll be heading off around midday. If you see me around, do say hi!
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