Victory and Defeat: Prezcon 2016 Day 2

From a game success perspective, my day started promising and ended in flames.  From a game fun experience, I was riding high through the day and into the night. 


In addition to the tournaments and open gaming that I described previously, Prezcon hosts a large number of demos.  Game masters and sometimes game designers teach demonstrate and teach the games.  People's abilities to teach games becomes very apparent in demos.  I appreciate someone who is organized and who begins with the game objectives.  I have actually walked out of demos when the demonstrator has focused on cool parts of the mechanics or jumps around different elements of the game (if you have been to Marscon, you may have heard me and Deb Fuller talk about the best methods of teaching games to others).


Acting on the advice of my friend Nathan Twigg, I attended The Game of Thrones demo.  The demonstrator, with a little prodding with directed questions from me and another player, did a pretty good job in teaching the game.  I could see elements of Diplomacy, Shogun/Samurai Swords, and some other area control games in this game.  It looked like fun, so I decided to take the plunge with seven other new players and enter the GoT tournament.


Gameplay Summary

• Settlers of Catan:  I won this game and advanced to the quarterfinals scheduled for Sunday morning!  I set up with good sheep access (the board was strong with sheep) and then managed to build a settlement on the sheep port.   A decisive point in the game was when I played Monopoly to gather 14 or sheep
• History of the World:  I come to Prezcon specifically to play this game.  Where else
  
  can I gather five other people to play a five to six hour game?  I had a strong start after the first two epochs with a good point total and picking cards first, but as the game progressed I never caught any strong civilizations until the last epoch.  I ended up finishing a disappointing last
• The Game of Thrones:  This was the first time I played this game.  Of the six players at the table, three were first timers, two had played the game once before, and one person knew the game intimately.  I played House Baratheon and proposed an
  
  alliance to the one player familiar with the game who was House Martell.  This rewarded me in the first half of the game as we took it to the Tyrells and I was tied for first place.  It fell apart when House Tyrell and House Lannister allied and I learned some new things about the mechanics of the game.  I finished the game tied with the Starks...for last

If it wasn't for the need for food and rest, I could have also played another game of Castles of Burgundy.  I also bailed on playing Tzolk'in:  The Mayan Calendar early in the morning because of it potential to conflict with the Catan game I was planning to play later that morning.  There are so many choices for games, and the schedule only gets more congested from here!