At Gencon, Did you learn or try anything new?

[Varianor Abroad]

Wish I could have tried Mouse Guard. Several friends have mentioned it!

I did try

1) Hollow Earth Expedition: rules lite, easy, fun. I liked it a lot and bought the sourcebook.

2) Risk 2210: Neat stuff. It has a limited time (five years), lots of new mechanics that add not take away, and the Moon as territories.

3) The Looney Bin: A board and card game from Numbskull Games (great name) with cool art. Easy to play and teach with interesting mechanics. Details here.

 

[blindrage]

Played the sci fi/anime board game from FF as well as the Mark of Chaos. Darn fun games. Did some card games and tried to demo some Privatter Games but the lines were long on Saturday and I had stick with a group on Sunday (I had their stuff in the car).

 

[Marshall]

I learned that GenCons Real vs Generic ticket set-up is a chaotic mess that needs to be shot and fed to the goth zombies.

But I knew that.

For Gods sake, switch to all generics on first come first serve basis.

Or at least note that "This ticket expires, five minutes after printed start time" So people with generics dont have to wait 20-30 minutes into a slot to find out if they can play.

 

[mac1504]

I got to try out a variety of FFG's board games (Conan, Descent, Tides of Iron) and I tried to play Aces & Eights, but we had a sudden schedule conflict and we only got as far as generating characters. On that topic, if you are running a fairly new game system, please don't make us roll up brand new characters. I'd rather get into the "meat" of the system and start shootin' (or swinging, or casting, etc.) instead of having to balance out stats, pick flaws, and try to buy what I think is going to be the right equipment for the game. You can always explain character generation while running the game.

I spoke with someone at the Burning Wheel booth, and was very interested in trying it out, but I just never found the time. Oh well, always next year...

 

[Piratecat]

Played in PirateCat's Skullduggery with Mark (and others) and had a lot of fun. It's odd but Mark and I discussed the same thing as Sir Brennen. That is, I don't know that I could run a campaign with it, but that might just be the one-shot setup meant to push the action and engage everyone. And for that, it was awesome.

To be fair, it's specifically not designed as a campaign game. I think you could, given the right campaign (a Lies of Locke Lamora-style setting would be perfect), but my GenCon game wasn't designed for continuing play.

 

[Kaladhan]

I played 2 new games this year :

Dread : That was fun! I bought the game. I plan on doing a few one shots with it.

Skulduggery : There's a lot of good things in this system. For example, the rebuffs adds a lot in-game. I'm not sure that I would enjoy it for more than a one-shot.

Edit : Oups, PirateCat beat me to the punch.

 

[Feanor Liberius]

Absolutely, Piratecat. I did not mean to suggest that it didn't do something it was designed to do. On the drive back home, Mark and I talked a bit about it and my guess was that it wouldn't be used for lengthy campaigns, that's all.

But after thinking about it in response to this thread, I think I could actually see how to use it for campaigns. I'll have to think about it, get Mark's input. It would be an interesting experiment.

Either way, I loved the game on Thursday, and I think the rules did a great job of getting across the very thing it sets out to do. As I've said - Great. Game.

 

[Inferno!]

4.) Savage Worlds - Heard alot about this system, so thought I'd try it out. GM was a no-show. Bleh.

That's too bad. I know there was some room confusion on at least one Weird War II game on Friday. Three of us were waiting in one room, and Shane was two rooms over waiting for players. That said, Pinnacle's demo-duo of Evil Mike and Chaos Steve were available all weekend for demos (I got in on three of them). In the future, I'd suggest checking the pick-up board in the Pinnacle booth. Unfortunately, this year is wasn't too easy to find even when specifically looking for it. Don't give up on Savage Worlds just yet.

 

[thedungeondelver]

I learned that ad-hoc modification of local power buses and voltage controls near a pizzeria stand in an attempt to turn a heat lamp into a coherent meson ray using this century's technology is at best a poor id -

haha...but I've said too much already.


Delphar 7 to control, Delphar 7 to control, they've found me out, blow up their planet, I repeat, blow up their planet!

 

[SteveC]

I always like to try new games at Gen Con, so my trusty group of two friends and I tried...

Eclipse Phase: interesting premise, poor rules. Takes a percentage system and makes it needlessly complicated. None of us particularly enjoyed this one.

Fantasycraft: we had played a Crafty event a couple of years ago and weren't impressed. This time, whoa! We had a fantastic time, thanks to a great GM and a really good rules set. While Pathfinder seems to get all the press from the Con, for my money Fantasycraft was the real star of the show.

Starblazer Adventures: another big win, thanks in no small part to the GM. We had a LOT of fun with this game: Cubical 7 picked a great guy to run the game in Mark. We'll be back next year.

Pathfinder: ugh. I really wanted to like the final product, and the Paizo guys are top-notch. The game was a horrible mess of bad organization and a ho-hum adventure. And we kept comparing the results to our previous Fantasycraft game. Not for us.

Burning Wheel: I own everything from the Burning Wheel line, and like to talk it up quite a bit. We stopped in to do a demo, and everyone was impressed. I don't think we'll end up switching our D&D game over to Burning Wheel, but everyone said they'd like to play it again.

4E: Even though I play a lot of 4E, one of my friends had never played it. We played in two Forgotten Realms games, and he had a great time. The scenarios were good, but the GMs had the ability to improvise and ran us a bit off the beaten path. A very good time was had, and 4E likely has another convert.

Those were my experiences...a lot of them had to do with the GMs we had for the games...I hope that gaming companies realize how important the folks they pick for those demos are!