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It's been an odd weekend so far. Friday I got a call from Tom, my best friend from High School, who apparently has moved back from Colorado into the house down the street, and will be attending grad school. It was a bit strange to learn that he's been home for a week and this was the first I'd heard from him, but he's been rather busy. We arranged half-formed plans for him to come with me when I went to WPI Saturday night for my session of board game playtesting at Gaming Weekend. After I got off the phone with him, I headed off to another friend's house for some L5R, in order to prepare for the tournament on Saturday morning. I wanted to play something other than Mantis, even though I kind of felt it was the best of my decks. I was just getting tired of it, having played it at the last 2 or 3 tournaments. So I tried out some other stuff, played against my Crab deck a bit, and decided to run Crab for the tournament. We also finally tried the Spacefarers of Catan 2-person card game, which was pretty nifty.
( The L5R tournament )
As happy as I was to have done well, Murphy's Law was still poking its influence at me - those extra rounds that I played meant I got home a couple hours later than I planned, and was running incredibly late to head out to WPI. Tom did indeed decide to tag along, and even offered to drive, which was very welcome after two earlier trips to Worcester this week and driving back and forth between home and Nashua for the L5R tournament. We played a round of my board game while people occasionally stopped by and looked at it, but no one expressed any real interest. Once we finished, we decided to try one of the many unfamiliar games lying around. We selected Carcassonne, because it claimed to be playable by 2-5 people and take about 45 minutes to play. During that game, I actually had 3 people come by interested in trying out my game. Carcassonne went on hold, and I got to have some new people try out the 3-way version of the game.
Their game was a bit odd, in that no one really did much of anything with Air. There wasn't even a lot of damage flung around. Most of the attacks were small, and I think only 3 Territories were actually destroyed. Still, they seemed to have some fun with it, and had no serious complaints. Many of the changes they suggested were actually geared towards making the game longer which is not something I'm interested in. Besides, with some experience I think they could have longer games.
Afterwards, Tom and I returned to Carcassonne, which was kind of nifty, and is probably a very interesting game with 3-5 players. I can see many possibilities for people to score points for themselves and one or more other players simultaneously, leading to all kinds of interesting interactions between players. Also, with the tiles spread across more players, each player will have fewer turns, and will have to make their choices about what to do much more carefully.
Finally it got to be about 2:30, and we decided it was time to head home, no matter how desperately we wanted to live out our childhood fantasies of being 16th Century Italian merchants by playing Traders of Genoa. ...actually, this was just our running joke for the night: that we could think of few gaming premises less likely to be sought out by the average gamer. It's quite possible that the game is wonderfully fun and interesting, but the concept and game presentation did not win us over.
( The L5R tournament )
As happy as I was to have done well, Murphy's Law was still poking its influence at me - those extra rounds that I played meant I got home a couple hours later than I planned, and was running incredibly late to head out to WPI. Tom did indeed decide to tag along, and even offered to drive, which was very welcome after two earlier trips to Worcester this week and driving back and forth between home and Nashua for the L5R tournament. We played a round of my board game while people occasionally stopped by and looked at it, but no one expressed any real interest. Once we finished, we decided to try one of the many unfamiliar games lying around. We selected Carcassonne, because it claimed to be playable by 2-5 people and take about 45 minutes to play. During that game, I actually had 3 people come by interested in trying out my game. Carcassonne went on hold, and I got to have some new people try out the 3-way version of the game.
Their game was a bit odd, in that no one really did much of anything with Air. There wasn't even a lot of damage flung around. Most of the attacks were small, and I think only 3 Territories were actually destroyed. Still, they seemed to have some fun with it, and had no serious complaints. Many of the changes they suggested were actually geared towards making the game longer which is not something I'm interested in. Besides, with some experience I think they could have longer games.
Afterwards, Tom and I returned to Carcassonne, which was kind of nifty, and is probably a very interesting game with 3-5 players. I can see many possibilities for people to score points for themselves and one or more other players simultaneously, leading to all kinds of interesting interactions between players. Also, with the tiles spread across more players, each player will have fewer turns, and will have to make their choices about what to do much more carefully.
Finally it got to be about 2:30, and we decided it was time to head home, no matter how desperately we wanted to live out our childhood fantasies of being 16th Century Italian merchants by playing Traders of Genoa. ...actually, this was just our running joke for the night: that we could think of few gaming premises less likely to be sought out by the average gamer. It's quite possible that the game is wonderfully fun and interesting, but the concept and game presentation did not win us over.
