WizarDru
Adventurer
It's that time again!
You can read the first installment on LJright here.
AND NOW: SOUTHERN EXPOSURE 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO!!!
Hey, you have to make that joke. Don't blame me...it's the LAW.
Anyhow, it's time for that long overdue post-Con wrap-up report, after the cut, anyways.
Those who've read my previous con reports would know that this marks my fifth Shorecon, iirc. Although technically, it's really my second Southern Exposure, I still tend to think of it that way. This is probably an unfair comparison, however, as Shorecon (except for it's final year, 2003) was always much bigger than Southern Exposure is. My first Shorecon was in 2000, and I remember how big it was....easily five to six times the size it is, now. It's a much smaller gathering, now...maybe 1000 people, tops. That this year seemed to contract, instead of expand, was not a thrilling site.
That said, it is possible that I'm not seeing it in the right perspective. When I noticed how few events there were, particularly in the RPG arena, someone commented that last year, many of the RPGA tournaments were cancelled due to having too few players. Perhaps this year was an admission that the con was smaller, and planning resources accordingly. Or rather, that's what I'd like to believe....some events put that faith the test, as I'll discuss.
DAY ONE: At the last minute, Valanthe and I decided (since we were dropping the kids off anyhow) to spend Thursday night at the hotel. This meant that we drove up to Quakertown, then down to Cherry Hill by way of Philadelphia. More of a drive than I would have preferred, but there it is. It turned out to be worth it. This saved us having to register when it was busier, and gave us virtual dibbs on choosing any event we wanted. We arrived by 9:30 or so, registered in a couple of minutes after getting our room and then sat down and reviewed the schedule. SE tapes printed out sign up sheets on the windows facing the pool area in the center of the hotel (which is essentially a large square with ballrooms at two ends). I had to help Valanthe with some sign-ups, as her vertigo was still giving her trouble from her recent hospital visit earlier in the week.
There were some events running that night, but I don't recall us getting into any of them, although the boardgame room was the busiest room at that hour, with a Poker Tournament, 6-man game of Puerto Rico and a game of Munchkin all running. Most of the other rooms were still being setup, so we got the lay of the land, and then went back to the room to play some on our DSs.
DAY TWO: FRIDAY: First stop? The hot buffet for some eggs, bacon and coffee (well, for me, anyhow). This would also mark our first encounter with 'video game as babysitter boy'. More on him later. Properly fueled, it was off to the first event of the day: MEMOIR '44! Since this is a two-player game, we did teams. Myself and a fellow name Steve versus a fellow named Bart and his brother. They were veterans of Battlecry, and wanted to see if M-44 (which was from the same designer) played the same. Short answer: Yes, with some differences.
IT WAS OUR FINEST QUARTER-HOUR!!! Seriously, we had a card called 'Their Finest Hour', and that's about what it did. We had our best round of the game with it, taking out an infantry unit and capturing a bunker with our British Commandos in the Sword Beach scenario. We still lost, however, but it was a good game. I liked M-44's mechanic of using cards to move units in one of three flanks, which made movement and action much different than say, Axis and Allies Minis (see below). Had the dice not been our enemies, we might have pulled a victory, but we were up against two solid tacticians with experience in the system, and we humbly surrendered to "Jerry" at the end.
Here we see the victors, in quiet contemplation. There was no trash-talking...at least, not until Kingdoms, which we played next. I had originally planned on playing Keythedral, but no one showed up for it....this happened more often than I was happy with. On Friday, many of the people slated to run games didn't show, resulting in many games being cancelled, either due to not enough demand or worse (and more frequent) not enough people there to run/teach the games. However, staff members like Eileen and June went above and beyond the call of duty (and certainly sacrificed a lot of sleep) to do their best. At the tail end of Memoir-'44, [info]gm_scorch showed up.
June convinced us to join a game of Kingdoms. Designed by Reiner Knizia, this one was released in the US with a medieval fantasy feel (instead of just a medieval marketplace). It's pretty, but the cards being monsters instead of whatever they used to be is irrelevant...the game is basically to place numerical modifier tiles and your castle on the board, trying to get positive results for you and negative results for other players. This is when the trash talking came out in earnest. Our GM was suprised at the smack-talk, but another GM came by and indicated that most Kingdoms games ended up going that route. It was all in good fun, though, and while I came in last, I had a blast.
Valanthe, meanwhile, was grabbed by Eileen to help fill out the slot for Bootleggers. It looked a little ugly and awfully full of little fiddly-bits, to me, but she enjoyed it enough to play a second time, later. The goal of the game is to supply speak-easys about the city and fight rival crimelords and the police. Graft and violence are your tools, and cooperation with rivals is sometimes necessary.
I am told that Steve there does a mean Don Corleone.
By this time, we were ready for lunch and then a quick tour of the rest of the 'con, which was up and running by that point. We toured the dealer's room, wargame room and the LAN/Video Game room. More detail on some of these later, of course. The LAN/Video Game Room consisted of a small network of some eight PCs with a small selection of network capable games, including Unreal Tournament 2004, StarCraft, Tron 2.0 and a host of mods for UT2004. I availed myself of them more than once to try Tron 2.0, which I found to my liking...moreso than I expected, in fact. This would be our first full encounter with 'video-game-as-babysitter-boy'...let's call him vgabb for short, shall we? Before I had kids, I might have made allowances for this sort of thing...but I have two kids now, and this boy (who was 9, iirc) was a problem. His father had come to play in the wargaming/miniatures room...but apparently didn't want to watch his son...so he parked him in the video game room. It was clear from the boy's desperate acting out that it was not the first time. While there, the boy screamed and yelled in such a fashion as to make Jack Thompson's every wet dream come true, with his utterances of "Yeah! KILL THEM! DIE YOU STUPID-HEADS!! HA HA!" He was a poster child for obnoxious, poorly raised children....but I don't blame him, I blame the father. He walked in once to check on the boy, and then promptly abandoned him there. He remained there, to my knowledge, at least 12 hours....as he was always there whenever I swung by. A real shame, IMHO.
As for the video game setup, a Gamecube and Xbox were hooked up at the front of the room and hooked to a large projection system that would be used for both video games and the traditional Weird Al and Red Dwarf video parties on Friday and Saturday nights, respectively. They were also connected to a TV in the lobby, where some of the smaller game vendors had set up shop for demos. A regular video room was also running on the other side of the convention, called the Cherry Hill Experiment, where various campy and embarassing movies were showing for their irony and mockery value...this year's new addition was Catwoman. 'Nuff Said.
We then returned to the board game room, where Valanthe played Mystery of the Abbey, which we've had for a couple of years.
It's a fun guessing/elimination game, of course, and everyone enjoyed it a great deal. Unlike Scorch and I, who had less fun playing Gloom. Gloom is a great idea with a funny execution, but the game itslef and it's core mechanic are, IMHO, flawed. The cards, being transparent, suffer from being visible from the other side in normal light, making random draws something of a problem. The other problem is that there's too many "this is the rule, until a special card breaks the rule" cards, which I found seemed to indicate a lack of faith in the core mechanic...as well as a rule that was in the game specifically to restrict another mechanic (a limitation on playing cards that result in scoring) and patch a rules problem. This was all compounded by our encounter with the person I've dubbed the "Whiny Little Man-Bitch". The WLMB cried crocodile tears during the game that everyone was targeting him when he was in last place. That he was never more than one card from first place seemed lost on him. That he continually brought it up EVERY TURN nearly made me quit the game. He finished in second, of course. Then he proceeded to go over to the Mystery game that [info]komochiko was still playing, and pulled the guilty card out to look at it...while the game was in progress! Suffice it to say I didn't play in any games with him for the remainder of the weekend.
Meanwhile, in the Wargaming Room: Setup began for the Playmobil Capture the Gem game. That's right, gang...someone has created a set of rules to use Playmobil figures and playsets for miniatures gaming. And it looked pretty darned fun, but we never got to see it in action.
I'm not really sure how it worked, but I was impressed with the sense of scale, and was curious how the game would play...but alas, my schedule never meshed so I had time to see it in play.
I won't pretend to know what this thing is, other than being used in Warhammer 40K. Apparently they were hoping for that weird Art Deco camoflauge the Brits experimented with on naval ships in WWII, I guess.
These fine fellows were right beside him. Later in the day, they would all be arrayed along a single burned-out battlefield. In the future, war is more colorful than modern technology currently allows. Color coordianting your military is the key to victory, however.
Which battlefield, you may ask? Why, THIS ONE, of course.
UP NEXT: The Dealer's Room, more games and the ENWorld Gathering!
You can read the first installment on LJright here.
AND NOW: SOUTHERN EXPOSURE 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO!!!
Hey, you have to make that joke. Don't blame me...it's the LAW.
Anyhow, it's time for that long overdue post-Con wrap-up report, after the cut, anyways.
Those who've read my previous con reports would know that this marks my fifth Shorecon, iirc. Although technically, it's really my second Southern Exposure, I still tend to think of it that way. This is probably an unfair comparison, however, as Shorecon (except for it's final year, 2003) was always much bigger than Southern Exposure is. My first Shorecon was in 2000, and I remember how big it was....easily five to six times the size it is, now. It's a much smaller gathering, now...maybe 1000 people, tops. That this year seemed to contract, instead of expand, was not a thrilling site.
That said, it is possible that I'm not seeing it in the right perspective. When I noticed how few events there were, particularly in the RPG arena, someone commented that last year, many of the RPGA tournaments were cancelled due to having too few players. Perhaps this year was an admission that the con was smaller, and planning resources accordingly. Or rather, that's what I'd like to believe....some events put that faith the test, as I'll discuss.
DAY ONE: At the last minute, Valanthe and I decided (since we were dropping the kids off anyhow) to spend Thursday night at the hotel. This meant that we drove up to Quakertown, then down to Cherry Hill by way of Philadelphia. More of a drive than I would have preferred, but there it is. It turned out to be worth it. This saved us having to register when it was busier, and gave us virtual dibbs on choosing any event we wanted. We arrived by 9:30 or so, registered in a couple of minutes after getting our room and then sat down and reviewed the schedule. SE tapes printed out sign up sheets on the windows facing the pool area in the center of the hotel (which is essentially a large square with ballrooms at two ends). I had to help Valanthe with some sign-ups, as her vertigo was still giving her trouble from her recent hospital visit earlier in the week.
There were some events running that night, but I don't recall us getting into any of them, although the boardgame room was the busiest room at that hour, with a Poker Tournament, 6-man game of Puerto Rico and a game of Munchkin all running. Most of the other rooms were still being setup, so we got the lay of the land, and then went back to the room to play some on our DSs.
DAY TWO: FRIDAY: First stop? The hot buffet for some eggs, bacon and coffee (well, for me, anyhow). This would also mark our first encounter with 'video game as babysitter boy'. More on him later. Properly fueled, it was off to the first event of the day: MEMOIR '44! Since this is a two-player game, we did teams. Myself and a fellow name Steve versus a fellow named Bart and his brother. They were veterans of Battlecry, and wanted to see if M-44 (which was from the same designer) played the same. Short answer: Yes, with some differences.
IT WAS OUR FINEST QUARTER-HOUR!!! Seriously, we had a card called 'Their Finest Hour', and that's about what it did. We had our best round of the game with it, taking out an infantry unit and capturing a bunker with our British Commandos in the Sword Beach scenario. We still lost, however, but it was a good game. I liked M-44's mechanic of using cards to move units in one of three flanks, which made movement and action much different than say, Axis and Allies Minis (see below). Had the dice not been our enemies, we might have pulled a victory, but we were up against two solid tacticians with experience in the system, and we humbly surrendered to "Jerry" at the end.
June convinced us to join a game of Kingdoms. Designed by Reiner Knizia, this one was released in the US with a medieval fantasy feel (instead of just a medieval marketplace). It's pretty, but the cards being monsters instead of whatever they used to be is irrelevant...the game is basically to place numerical modifier tiles and your castle on the board, trying to get positive results for you and negative results for other players. This is when the trash talking came out in earnest. Our GM was suprised at the smack-talk, but another GM came by and indicated that most Kingdoms games ended up going that route. It was all in good fun, though, and while I came in last, I had a blast.
Valanthe, meanwhile, was grabbed by Eileen to help fill out the slot for Bootleggers. It looked a little ugly and awfully full of little fiddly-bits, to me, but she enjoyed it enough to play a second time, later. The goal of the game is to supply speak-easys about the city and fight rival crimelords and the police. Graft and violence are your tools, and cooperation with rivals is sometimes necessary.
By this time, we were ready for lunch and then a quick tour of the rest of the 'con, which was up and running by that point. We toured the dealer's room, wargame room and the LAN/Video Game room. More detail on some of these later, of course. The LAN/Video Game Room consisted of a small network of some eight PCs with a small selection of network capable games, including Unreal Tournament 2004, StarCraft, Tron 2.0 and a host of mods for UT2004. I availed myself of them more than once to try Tron 2.0, which I found to my liking...moreso than I expected, in fact. This would be our first full encounter with 'video-game-as-babysitter-boy'...let's call him vgabb for short, shall we? Before I had kids, I might have made allowances for this sort of thing...but I have two kids now, and this boy (who was 9, iirc) was a problem. His father had come to play in the wargaming/miniatures room...but apparently didn't want to watch his son...so he parked him in the video game room. It was clear from the boy's desperate acting out that it was not the first time. While there, the boy screamed and yelled in such a fashion as to make Jack Thompson's every wet dream come true, with his utterances of "Yeah! KILL THEM! DIE YOU STUPID-HEADS!! HA HA!" He was a poster child for obnoxious, poorly raised children....but I don't blame him, I blame the father. He walked in once to check on the boy, and then promptly abandoned him there. He remained there, to my knowledge, at least 12 hours....as he was always there whenever I swung by. A real shame, IMHO.
As for the video game setup, a Gamecube and Xbox were hooked up at the front of the room and hooked to a large projection system that would be used for both video games and the traditional Weird Al and Red Dwarf video parties on Friday and Saturday nights, respectively. They were also connected to a TV in the lobby, where some of the smaller game vendors had set up shop for demos. A regular video room was also running on the other side of the convention, called the Cherry Hill Experiment, where various campy and embarassing movies were showing for their irony and mockery value...this year's new addition was Catwoman. 'Nuff Said.
It's a fun guessing/elimination game, of course, and everyone enjoyed it a great deal. Unlike Scorch and I, who had less fun playing Gloom. Gloom is a great idea with a funny execution, but the game itslef and it's core mechanic are, IMHO, flawed. The cards, being transparent, suffer from being visible from the other side in normal light, making random draws something of a problem. The other problem is that there's too many "this is the rule, until a special card breaks the rule" cards, which I found seemed to indicate a lack of faith in the core mechanic...as well as a rule that was in the game specifically to restrict another mechanic (a limitation on playing cards that result in scoring) and patch a rules problem. This was all compounded by our encounter with the person I've dubbed the "Whiny Little Man-Bitch". The WLMB cried crocodile tears during the game that everyone was targeting him when he was in last place. That he was never more than one card from first place seemed lost on him. That he continually brought it up EVERY TURN nearly made me quit the game. He finished in second, of course. Then he proceeded to go over to the Mystery game that [info]komochiko was still playing, and pulled the guilty card out to look at it...while the game was in progress! Suffice it to say I didn't play in any games with him for the remainder of the weekend.
Meanwhile, in the Wargaming Room: Setup began for the Playmobil Capture the Gem game. That's right, gang...someone has created a set of rules to use Playmobil figures and playsets for miniatures gaming. And it looked pretty darned fun, but we never got to see it in action.
UP NEXT: The Dealer's Room, more games and the ENWorld Gathering!
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It's recreated right here, so you don't need to go there, though. 
